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

by SUE SHELLENBARGER

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

The Future Might be Risky, But So Is the Past

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3807

by Peter Rollins
posted 12/7/12

Our futures stretch out in front of us much like a path engulfed by fog. While decisions we make here and now can help us to guess what may lie down the road, we can never know for sure what we’ll find there. There will be births and deaths, the finding of meaning and the loss of it, illnesses will come and go and economic changes will impact our lives in ways that we may not even realise.

In the face of such uncertainty we might say to ourselves that at least the past isn’t risky. It is over. Done. Finished. And yet, for good or for bad, the reality is a little different.

We tend to think that cause is used up in effect. In other words, cause and effect work in a linear way with the cause coming first and the effect coming after. And yet in the world of subjective experience things are a little different. This can be seen most clearly in language itself. At its most simple, the last words in a sentence can radically change the meaning that we had ascribed to the previous words. Here, what comes after, can effect how we interpret what came before. In this way what comes later retroactively impacts what came previously.

One of the ways that we see this play out is when talking about a breakup. Sometimes we can talk in such a way that it would appear that there was nothing good about the person we had lived with. Of course the relationship might have been fraught with difficulties from the outset, however we often find that it is the subsequent actions that have transformed the way that we understand what took place previously, thus fundamentally changing our interpretation of the past.

Is this not what we see in the French film 5×2 directed by François Ozon? By employing an inverted chronological structure the film begins at the troubled end of a relationship and then moves backwards. Ending with the couples chance meeting at a beach resort. In this way the viewer is invited to interpret what went before in light of what happened at the end, thus exposing how later events impact how we read previous ones.

While the idea of the future being able to rob the past can be scary it can also be a liberating reality. For many of us have had lives full of pain. There might be years, even decades, that we feel were wasted. It can feel as if the past is past and that regret is all we will ever feel. Yet the past can be changed. Something can happen today that causes us to radically reinterpret it. Perhaps, in light of the new reality, we start to view it like a prophecy pointing to toward the present, or a period of waiting or preparing. The point is that there is no way of nailing a single meaning to historical situations. To live is to risk. To risk the past as much as the future.

Fog, by R.E. Slater - http://reslater.blogspot.com/2011/10/re-slater-fog.html

Not Letting Go of Your Vision When Failure Comes and Bitterness Fills Our Hearts

As always Pete hits the subject dead-on. The only answer is to accept defeat. Learn from failure. Reject bitterness. Accept reality. And trust God to bless the works of our hands, the prayers of our lips, the pureness of our heart's devotion to serving Jesus each and every day whether at home, work, ministry or the world-at-large. All things are of God. We are but clay in the Potter's hands. Vessels to be used in the ministration of God's grace. Whether ornate or banged up the vessel does not matter. It is God's Spirit that we pour out. And it is this self-same Spirit that will minister to us at the end of the day when dreams and hopes are shattered and we cease to dream or hope any longer.

R.E. Slater

December 28, 2011

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The Revolutionary Potential of the Actually Existing Church

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3426

by Pete Rollins

posted December 9, 2011

I was recently reading Slavoj Zizek’s excellent essay “The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link” and was struck by his reflection on how symptoms can represent forgotten failures to act. I would like to reflect upon this in relation to what we see in so much of the actually existing church today.

In order to approach this subject let us begin by taking the example of a man who drinks to excess, neglects his children and mistreats his partner. What do these symptoms betray? All too often they are the direct manifestation of a previous (forgotten) failure to act. Let us flesh the example out by imagining that this individual once, as a young man, had dreams of being an artist, that he married a woman he deeply loved hoping that together they would travel the world and that he longed to create a culturally rich environment within which a child could grow. In this fictional example let us imagine that the first year of their marriage was difficult. That they had a child before they were ready, lacked resources to travel and had to get jobs they detested in order to make ends meet. At different times decisions could have been made, risks taken etc. that might have taken their lives in a better, more emancipatory, direction. But these were missed and now an unhealthy relationship exists, one full of pain, suffering, self-abuse and the abuse of others. The symptoms then testify to something missed, to past failures that now make themselves know in oppressive material actions.

The revolutionary move here involves the courage to bring to mind the failures to act that lie behind the present symptoms and repeat history: attempting to relive those moments, but this time without the failures to act. Of course, it may well be impossible (just as it may have been impossible in the first place; the point is that we often have to fail many times before we stand any chance of actually succeeding).

In the same way the violence and destructive behaviour that one sees in so much of the actually existing contemporary church should not be so quickly dismissed as evidence of a poison at the heart of Christianity itself, but rather can be approached as the sign of a revolutionary potential at the heart of Christianity which has been missed.

Often the people who engage in the most destructive and reprehensible behaviour are the ones who began with the biggest dreams of transformation. Behind the drunk at the local bar, or the cynical money-maker who would step over anyone to get ahead, there is often a story of some idealistic youth who believed that the broken world could be rendered wonderful with a little work. In such situations it is the failure to enact such a world, to be a part of its birth, that leads people to the darkest of places (while those without such Utopian ideas just potter along without the highs of success or the lows of failure).

When we see the church institution engaged in the most horrible of abuses we should rightly be sickened and want to see it implode. However some of us also see, in the very abuse itself, the hint of a failure to act, a failure to embrace some elusive liberating potential.

It is this that lies at the heart of the ‘pyro-theology’ I explore in Insurrection. There is no doubt that the book is critical of the actually existing church in its dominant form, but the wager is that the symptoms we see played out are not evidence of a rotten core at the heart of the Christ event, but rather hint at the failure to live into the radical, emancipatory space it opens up.

The underlying argument then is that we must repeat the church so that we might repeat the moment of where the failure to act happened and then act. The danger, and it is a danger of the most extreme form, is that we will simply repeat the failure to act and become as destructive and reactive as the Institution we attempt to overthrow (at best we achieve a little more than before and fail to act elsewhere – which can be seen to be taking place in the various moments of historical reformation). But I for one am still willing to take the risk. And if we fail? Well let us hope that those who come after us, our children, our students, our disciples, will not.

Post a Comment

1. Daisha says:

   December 9, 2011 at 11:28 am

   Excellent post. Thank you! Looking forward to the book.
   Dx

   Reply
2. Ryan says:

   December 9, 2011 at 11:35 am

   Reply
3. Monicalyn says:

   December 9, 2011 at 12:18 pm

   Thanks for this important reminder. Too often, those of us who’ve been hurt by the church forget that others who are broken and hurting stumble towards that building and find love and hope inside.

   Reply
4. Mark Farmer says:

   December 9, 2011 at 12:23 pm

   Very interesting. To what extent is it necessary to plumb the past for missed opportunities and necessities to act? My guess is that being aware of the possibility of the need to repair the past is a place to start, but that the main focus needs to be awareness of how we need to act today. A congregation can find the courage to act in a crisis, and it will be redemptive and life-giving. But yesterday’s courageous act brings us to today with its own challenge that calls us to a new act of courage.

   Reply
5. Lyle Taffs says:

   December 9, 2011 at 5:03 pm

   G’day Pete. We’ve all made bad choices mate. the amazing thing is that even in a dysfunctional church (and world) grace still works to break the cycle and helping us to avoid the’repetition compulsion’. Otherwise, in an existentialist sense, why bother to be a Christian? Idealism is often a polite word for ‘perfectionism’ which is well known as a pathology and as such eventually produces fruit after its kind. Hey! How do we “repeat church”? I also hope you don’t fail!! so find some worthy mentors to keep your feet on the ground mate. Great blog again Pete but what about a thoughtful dialogue with Peter Bannister? Cheers from ‘down under’.

   Reply
6. Jordan says:

   December 9, 2011 at 5:22 pm

   Try again, fail again, fail better.

   Reply
7. David Steenberg says:

   December 9, 2011 at 9:29 pm

   This reminds me of what I’ve heard you say about our self-fictions, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are despite the more authentic story written in our actions. The self-fictions become a way to gloss over the past failure(s) to act, a bridge, if you will, spanning the gap between what we could have been had we acted, and who we are because we didn’t. In that sense, the symptoms of the failure to act become the counter-melody to our self-fiction, and in that way can drive the movement of our life towards authenticity.

   Reply
8. James says:

   December 10, 2011 at 4:44 pm

   You have more hope than I, but keep doing what you’re doing.

   Reply
9. Margaret says:

   December 13, 2011 at 6:04 am

   This and your next post I think are linked. On the one hand the church can get so bogged down in the everyday it doesn’t see the opportunity or act, sometimes people confuse Jesus with Father Christmas and expect the church to be there for them and them only, but also there are those who enter church looking for the “Thing” too. There are many who catch the fire of Jesus and come in looking for a world to conquer and rid of evil in his name, but either burn out because no one shares their view, or they gradually get sucked into the everyday and lose the vision they had. Their happiness is stolen too, and disillusion makes them happy/sad to see the church fail, but when it does succeed, their response can be skeptical/cautiously optimistic. Any opportunity to act is seen, but previous experience has left them cynical and unwilling to be bitten again, and always there is this love/hate attitude.
   “Pyro-theology” as I understand it is valuable in that it recognises weaknesses in the church, but also talks of constant renewing, changing and starting over when the junk has been burnt off. I dare say it, and other initiatives like it, will have something to do with the church limping its way further on into the 21st century. Let’s hope so.

On Idols, Happiness and Personal Meaning

Who Stole My Happiness?

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3435

by Peter Rollins

posted 12/12/11

One of the first problems that we are confronted with concerning the “Thing” which we imagine will bring us fulfilment (money, fame, health, relationship etc.) is, of course, that we can’t seem to ever get our hands on it. If we do reach out and grasp we open our hands and find out that it isn’t actually the “Thing” after all (because it has not satisfied in the way we fantasised). This is not to say that a form of happiness and satisfaction is beyond us, just that the imagined fulfilment of desire is an impossible dream (that would turn out to be a nightmare were it ever possible). The belief in something that can fulfil us (in theological terms “the idol”) is then oppressive because it always seems out of reach, robbing our current situation of meaning.

This is, of course, a rather mundane and well-documented phenomenon. However what is reflected on less is the way that we imagine others having the “Thing” and how this affects the way we relate to them.

Take the example of a minister standing in front of his congregation preaching against the sexual sins of the world. Let us imagine him working himself into a sweat about the orgies, sex parties and deviant behaviour going on just beyond the walls of the church. One of the striking things about this is the way that all of his pent up emotion and moral indignation often seems like nothing more than a thin veil hiding the truth that he is jealous of all the fun they are having. They are having so much pleasure while he is not, they have the “Thing” that he doesn’t.

To approach this from a different angle I recently talked with a woman who broke up with someone and subsequently felt bad because she knew that he was very unhappy as a result of the split. She told me of how, a couple of months later, she found out from a friend that he was much better and in a new relationship. When she heard the news she expressed joy to her friend. However she admitted to me, and herself, that the initial “sorrow” she felt at him being unhappy actually contained a form of hidden pleasure while the “pleasure” she had at thinking he was happy veiled a sorrow.

Her feelings had nothing to do with her disliking the man or not wanting him to prosper; it was rather connected to her (implicit) belief in the "Thing."

This is also seen to play out when someone breaks up with us. It is not uncommon to imagine that the other person is out partying all the time, meeting new people and generally having a ball. All the while we are unhappy, unstable and unable to leave the house. They appear to have the pleasure that we lack and we resent them for it, even wishing them harm. More than this we are willing to hurt ourselves in order to rob them of their pleasure (the most extreme form being suicide – where we will end our own life to rob them of the "Thing").

The point of these brief comments is to draw out how our belief that there is something which can satisfy our desire and render us whole, [which] is not only oppressive because (i) we can never seem to grasp it, but also is oppressive because (ii) of the way that we think others have. When we are truly able to see the other as being just as riven with desire and lack as we are then reconciliation becomes more possible.*

This is a subject that I go into in much more depth in my next book (due out October 2012).

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*If I might attempt to complete Peter's thought, we might imagine ourselves no less fulfilled or happy than another person similarly plague by personal thoughts of unfulfillment and unhappiness. Each of us have our own personal "idols and meaning" issues. Each of us are just as torn as the other. But in different ways. This is a sin issue. Rather than being content with life's many little perfections of beauty around us we always want more from God. Our pride and ego would drive us to lust and discontent. These are different than dreams and passions which would drive us to God's re-purposing of our lives. One is an idol. The other is worship.

R.E. Slater

December 15, 2011

Opening Up the Impossible of Faith's Belief

Invading the Other’s World: “What Are You Thinking?”

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3407

by Peter Rollins

November 28, 2011

Discovering Ourselves
through God's Love

There is a question that often comes up in relationships. Indeed even when it does not it is often because the people have had to make an effort not to say it. While it might be asked at any time it is often sprung when two people are sitting quietly together on a given evening. It is, very simply, “What are you thinking?”

There are various possible feelings related to this question, both for the one asking it and the one being asked it. Depending on the dynamic between the two people the question might communicate love, suspicion, frustration or concern. It might feel like a welcome expression of desire or an unwelcome invasion into ones inner world. Indeed it might make one feel deeply frustrated: “how do I know what I am really thinking, I am as in the dark about that as you are!”

One of the things that such a question renders visible however is the way in which the other we are with is also separate from us… other to us. By asking this question we express an explicit desire to bring the others inner world into the room, to render it manifest (although this explicit desire is often a manifestation of an implicit desire – don’t tell me what you are really thinking, tell me something I would like to hear).

Such a question carries with it a certain level of anxiety. For there is always the possibility that what one hears will be something we don’t want to hear,

        “What are you thinking dear?”

        “Oh I was just thinking that I wish you would die horribly and

          leave all your money to me. Would you like a cup of tea honey?”

The anxiety might be minimal (for example if you share a deep connection with your partner), but no matter how deep the relationship the others inner world is no more yours than it is theirs and so you are always in danger of finding something you would find difficult to hear (just as they are). The others inner world is a pulsating, untamed universe that we should only approach with great caution.

This means that we rarely actually answer the question truthfully,

        “What are you thinking dear?”

        “Oh I was just thinking that I wish you would know how much I love you.

          Would you like a cup of tea honey?”

The point, which I have touched on elsewhere, is not that we lie to the other, more fundamentally we often lie to ourselves. Covering over our real desires with things we find more acceptable.

Risking the Impossible Waters of Faith's Reveal

So then “What are you thinking” is a dangerous question, very dangerous. To really ask it, or to actually attempt to answer it, both have the potential of throwing us off course, breaking current patterns and opening up new and scary trajectories.

In a Derridian sense it has the potential of opening us up to the impossible. The possible here being the direction we can predict, the well-lit road we are currently treading, the safe path that is lined with the familiar. The impossible being that which throws a spanner in the works, casting us adrift once more and placing us again onto a narrow, unlit path.

Talk in Belfast: The Apocalypse Isn’t Coming; Its Already Happened

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3024

by Peter Rollins

posted August 23, 2011

The Apocalypse Ins't Coming; It's Already Happened

MONDAY 5TH SEPTEMBER | BLACK BOX CAFE | 7:30PM

I have just arranged to give a seminar in my home city of Belfast. The venue is quite small so please come a little early if you want to guarantee getting a spot. If you plan to attend let me know via the comment box, or on facebook, so that I have an idea of how many people to expect! Also, there will be a request for donations. Thanks.

Here is a brief description of what I will be exploring:

Fundamentalist Christianity has long expressed a view of apocalypse as some future event that will consume the present world and replace it with a new one. Yet while this is a bloody and destructive vision I will argue that it is inherently conservative in nature and nowhere near violent enough to warrant the name “apocalypse”. For those who hold to such a vision are willing to imagine absolutely everything around them changing so that their present values and beliefs can remain utterly unchanged. In contrast I will argue that a Christian apocalypse describes something much more radical, namely an event that fundamentally ruptures and re-configures our longings, hopes and desires rather than simply positing a future world where they will be fulfilled.

This talk will outline an alternative theological vision that transcends the usual distinctions between theist and atheist, sacred and secular, belief and doubt. A vision that turns away from the actually existing church and outlines a faith that is not concerned with the question of life after death but rather with the possibility of life before death.