Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Overcoming Career Disappointment while Making the Most of Your Skills



April 22, 2014 8:33 PM

When Your Dream Job Disappoints, How to Find Plan B
Key Tasks: Overcome Disappointment, Make the Most of Your Skills


After years of planning, preparing and perhaps paying for an extra degree, you finally land your dream job—and discover you don't like it.

It's a surprisingly common dilemma. The idea of a "dream job" is drilled into job seekers these days. Increasingly, people expect to find jobs that provide not only a living but also stimulation, emotional fulfillment and a sense of purpose. The image of a career as a source of passion is promoted by career advisers, self-help books and even the glamorous characters in TV dramas. But fantasies about a job can blind job-seekers to workaday realities and to consideration of the best fit.

Caroline Kelso Winegeart of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., thought advertising
was her  dream career, but found the pace and deadlines so stressful that
she switched to a job as an operations manager for a maketing firm.
Photo: Jason Surfrapp

Told she had creative talent, Caroline Kelso Winegeart targeted advertising in college, heading the advertising club at her university and landing an internship at a big New York ad agency. "This was going to be my foot in the door, to get this glamorous ad-executive job I thought I wanted," she says.

Her first job after college in 2010, as an assistant media planner at McKinney in Durham, N.C., "felt like my dream job," she says. She liked the people and was thrilled to join an agency with national brands and a hip, creative image.

But she hadn't anticipated the complexity of managing a large budget for two accounts, while being bombarded by phone calls from media reps with ad space to sell. A heavier work load and more time pressure than she had expected left her feeling "stressed and so overwhelmed all the time." She had been naïve, she says, to think that "the place I was working was more important than my actual role."

Turning a dashed dream job into a win requires overcoming disappointment, looking hard at where you went wrong and making the most of the skills you have picked up. A good strategy is to ask yourself, "Where can I go from here, to avoid making a complete U-turn?" says Helene Lollis, president of Pathbuilders, an Atlanta leadership-development consultant. That may mean using your current job to develop skills and contacts that might serve as stepping stones to something else.

Ms. Winegeart liked using social media, so she made building skills in that area a focal point of her work. That helped her land a new job building a social-media department at a smaller agency. The skills she gained equipped her in 2011 to leave advertising and take a position for two years as operations manager for IWearYourShirt.com, a marketing business run by her boyfriend Jason Surfrapp. Ms. Winegeart, 25, has since started her own branding and Web-design business, MadeVibrant.com.

Unexpected failures can be beneficial if they jolt people into new ways of thinking, according to a 2011 study in the journal Social Psychology. People who stop and think deeply about what they might have done differently tend to be more creative about reaching goals in the future, the study says.

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All the plans Ashley Stahl made through adolescence, college and grad school were to prepare for her fantasy career in national security, she says. She got a master's degree in international relations, learned Arabic, and networked intensively for six weeks in Washington, D.C., attending 90 different events. At age 23, she landed a job with a defense contractor to run a program for the Pentagon. "I was excited and anxious about this huge opportunity," she says. "I was living my dream."

The work, however—preparing senior officials for deployment to Afghanistan—had drawbacks that she hadn't foreseen. She felt isolated in the male-dominated, intensely competitive culture of military bases and the Pentagon. The hours were so long that "my job took over my life," she says. She also realized she had underestimated her aversion to violence. When her employer asked her to consider traveling to war-torn areas overseas, she quit after eight months on the job. "By that time, I'd seen too much raw footage of the worst-case scenarios in the world," she says.

Working with a career coach, Ms. Stahl realized she had been ignoring feedback about her real skills from friends and acquaintances, who told her she was good at helping them open up, talk about their careers and learn to network, find jobs and win promotions. She worked briefly at two other jobs, in crisis-communication and political-risk consulting, Then Ms. Stahl, who is now 26, quit to work full-time as a Beverly Hills, Calif.- based speaker and career coach to teens and young adults.

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How long should you stay in a dream job gone bad? Quick departures are more common in some industries, such as high-tech work, than in others. It can be fine for skilled employees who find a new job quickly to leave within a few weeks, says Kathryn Minshew, founder and chief executive of TheMuse.com, a career-planning website.

But don't flee unexpected challenges too fast. It is usually better to stay 12 to 18 months to show stability. Also, some people need time to recover emotionally after a career dream goes up in smoke, says Adele Scheele, Los Angeles, author of "Skills for Success." She adds, "If Job A isn't satisfying to you and that's your dream job, you can't just flee to Job B. You may carry your depression with you."

It's important to be aware of why you are drawn to certain jobs. A common mistake is to pick a career without weighing related factors, "such as culture, management style or the work-life arrangement," says Pamela Slim, a Mesa, Ariz., author of "Body of Work," a book about managing changing career paths. "You can be passionate about being a trial attorney without realizing you have to work 20 hours a day," she says.

Some people target dream jobs for unconscious reasons. People who enter sports psychology training programs are sometimes former athletes who failed to achieve their goals. They may dream of basking in reflected glory, according to a study last year in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. This makes the work—listening to athletes' problems and helping them figure out strategies to improve—harder, because the psychologists can't keep a healthy distance from clients' negative emotions and problems, says the six-month study of diaries and in-depth interviews with seven students.

Cheryl Heisler, president of Lawternatives, a career consulting service in Chicago for lawyers and professionals, recommends making a pro-and-con list of all the job characteristics that will affect your happiness. It may be important to you to have the latest job tools, or to avoid offices with a party culture, for example, she says. "Any jobs get held up against that pro-and-con list, and that keeps you honest," she says. Talking with people who are already working in the job you want can uncover potential surprises or red flags.

Ms. Heisler advises recasting your broken dream as an asset in job interviews. Stress what you gained, such as new skills or insight into another industry, sending the message: "I got to learn something new. I'm a different person than I was before."

Write to Sue Shellenbarger atSue.Shellenbarger@wsj.com



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