Career Transformation: A Body-Mind Oriented Approach
As a coach who assists with career and livelihood issues, I spend part of my time helping clients with creating powerful resumes and practicing interviewing skills. Yet, the vast majority of the time, clients seek me out for assistance with navigating career transitions.
In listening to and observing my clients, I have come to recognize that the changes that clients want to make are about moving – figuratively and literally. For, when our body is stuck, so are we. When we can find our inner flow and movement, we find the energy to move. Ironically, however, navigating transitions is not about willing our bodies or minds to change. It is about listening, creating the internal awareness by attending to our sensations. When we listen to our body’s wisdom, we tap into the inner guidance that will steer us toward what feels really right to us, rather than to what our parents, spouses, friends, managers, colleagues, customers, or society suggest to us.
Many times, clients present me with a situation and ask, “So, what do you recommend I do?” While I acknowledge it can be tempting to share my advice, my own personal journey has shown me the value of learning to listen within. So, my reply is more apt to be, “What are you feeling about the situation right now?” I encourage clients to tell me about the heart of their sensations and emotions. When I start to hear things about myopic managers, baffling bureaucracies, and paltry paychecks, I generally probe beneath the surface. By understanding how these situations makes a client feel, I can help him to recognize what he values and desires in the world.
More often, however, clients may not even recognize that they are engaged in a transition. This article outlines my observations about the phases of transition – what I prefer to call “transformation” because we are really changing our form – our body. We may find a smile returning to our face, a new beat in our step, or a sense of reaching out. In the transformation I am describing, we come sense our bodies and learn what our minds are telling us. I hope that this progression helps you to recognize where you may be in your own career transformation and guides to the next step. Please note that different people experience these phases differently -- some spend time moving back and forth between stages, or skipping stages entirely.
Stage I: From Unconscious to Aware A few months ago, a software engineer (who we’ll call Brenda) came to see me. A friend had suggested that she try out my coaching services. Brenda was not entirely sure why she had sought me out. She shrugged her shoulders and told me, “Oh, mostly everything at work is just fine. I’m just kind of bored.” I asked Brenda how she experienced the boredom. She explained that she found herself surfing the Internet more frequently, taking long walks at lunchtime, and doodling during meetings. Following her description, I asked her how she felt in the moment just after sharing her observations. She became aware of her posture – she was sitting crooked, collapsed over to one side. She was then quiet for a few minutes and said in a whisper, “Well, I guess I need to change this.”
So, how do you become conscious of initiating a transformation process? Look for emotional and physical signs, such as:
Emotional: Becoming angry or impatient with co-workers; crying at work when you feel you have been wronged or slighted; feeling bored. These are typically signs of ‘burning out’ of what you are doing.
Physical: Getting sick and missing work; experiencing physical ailments such as back, neck or shoulder pain, upset stomach, difficulty breathing or blurry vision. You may experience other symptoms. Look for signs that something has stopped moving (like a back that feels jammed up) or is moving in uncomfortable ways (such as digestion).
Stage II: From Aware to Dissatisfied
When Brenda shared her need to change, I helped her listen to her own rhythm, rather than feeling she needed to quickly ‘fix’ the work situation, as we are often prone to do in our culture. I invited her to stay connected to her emotions. A few tears came. Her tone of voice initially seemed resistant, “No, that’s OK, I can make things better.” I encouraged her to listen inwardly, before rushing in to mentally tackle what she perceived to be a problem. Brenda now recognized a work situation she wanted to change, but she also ran the risk of trying to change it without listening into her body’s wisdom, increasing the likelihood that she would repeat this pattern of boredom without learning new skills for navigating future transformations.
With my encouragement, Brenda allowed herself to feel her sadness. As she felt the tears on her face and noticed her breathing becoming shallower, she had a flashback. She remembered that doing repetitive tasks made her feel unimportant, much as she had felt as a child in a large family where she often did the same chores over and over again with little appreciation from her family. This new knowledge opened up the possibility of asking for more variety in her assignments. This ultimately helped her to find joy again.
Paying Attention: When you attune to your feelings and sensations, you can ask yourself, “Right now, am I satisfied or not? How do I know? What emotions or sensations give me that information?” Over time, you can begin to notice patterns of dissatisfaction, and, as you tune into your body and emotions, you may also begin to pick up clues about what needs to shift.
Stage III: From Dissatisfied to Confused
Upon discovering or admitting to their dissatisfaction, not all clients know immediately what to do next, as Brenda did when she asked for more variety at work. In fact, most clients move from dissatisfaction to confusion before knowing what they want to do next. Knowing that this confusion, or disorientation, is normal helps many clients. The uncertainty can leave clients feeling like “the rug’s been pulled out” from under them or that they are “just floating around” without a clear sense of what is next. This is quite often the time to literally feel one’s feet on the ground, to sense the energy of the earth supporting them.
When another client -- who we’ll call Thomas -- came to see me, he expressed his confidence about leaving the legal profession. While he enjoyed his initial years as an attorney, over time, he recognized that he did not like his colleagues nor the adversarial nature of his work. Switching law firms proved to give him only a temporary reprieve from the frustration, and as soon as he outgrew the newness of his colleagues and the office, he was again angry and frustrated at the case load, the impersonal interactions, and the lack of meaning in his work.
Although he had bought books on alternative careers for attorneys and had even attended a workshop on career change for attorneys, he was resistant to change. He was anxious to make a change, but felt stuck. Friends and family warned him to stay in the profession until he found another job, but that felt disheartening, since he was so miserable in his current one.
Rather than focusing on what the future held, I invited Thomas to just feel what he felt -- particularly attuning to his body sensations – in the moment. He started in a seated position, and as he felt his body in each moment, I asked him what he ‘organically’ wanted to do. If I heard him start to tell a story, I gently invited him back into his body.
Over a few weeks of me coaching him, Thomas would sometimes move to the ground and roll or wiggle or allow sounds to arise from his belly. Soon, he began to recognize and name his sensations and emotions without my prompting. He became more and more adept at listening to himself. He began to get in touch with some of the hobbies and subjects that captivated his attention. He became more and more certain that he needed to leave the law, even though he did not have a next job lined up. A combination of his inner bodily wisdom –his ‘gut’ thinking – and some simple calculations showed him that he had enough savings to take a little more than a year off to explore. He felt inner confidence.
Thomas had gained a skill that will last him a lifetime: The ability to listen to himself. He asked for and received a six-month sabbatical from work, and will be taking writing classes and seeking out venues for the stories he writes. Through his own inside-out listening, paying attention to himself, he has created his own next steps that feel right for him.
Exploration: When you find yourself not knowing, in your mind, what to do next, see what sensations are most prominent in your body. It might be a twitch, a warmth, a prickly feeling, a tightness, a bubbling….whatever it is, put your attention on it, even if your brain seems to tell you, “Oh, it shouldn’t be that way” or “I’ve got to change this.” Instead, you can ask: “What is this telling me?”
It’s like receiving an unmarked envelope. If you ignore it, you’ll never know what’s inside. Yes, it’s full of the unknown and it might have something scary in it. But if you allow yourself to experience it, you are more likely to find that something shifts and you get the next piece of information. If you choose to ignore the feeling, it is likely to come back later, and perhaps with louder symptoms – maybe a cough, maybe a recurrent pain, maybe a serious ailment. When we lose the ability to tune into our bodily messages, we lose a connection with mental and physical well-being. Listening within gives us a way to nurture and heal ourselves, so invite your own body listening.
Stage IV: From Confused to Directed
Sometimes, clients have been doing some exploration of career possibilities, yet they feel that no shining star has arisen to say, “that’s it!” In many cases, it’s our conditioning that leads us to believe we have to know what’s next, and have to have everything neatly mapped out. Our culture mostly lacks the ceremonies, vision quests, or rites of passage that help us to mark the uncertainty and re-birth that is so much a part of transformation.
Recently, a client sent me a picture he’d created of his map for the next ten years. He walked me through a very elaborate picture complete with marriage, children, promotions, and schooling all detailed, year-by-year. Yet I noticed a lack of enthusiasm in his voice, so I asked, “I’m curious…what passion is leading this vision?” He stopped and realized that he was looking backwards to create his picture. He knew what he had enjoyed many previous career successes, yet he lacked a sense of what he might really like to explore next. When we explored the energies behind some of his successes, I asked him to feel those in his body, and to visualize those moments. Once he got a visceral sense of those, he could describe what passion really felt like. That helped him to connect other experiences that gave him the joy, connection, self-expression, and peace that is his unique way of feeling his own aliveness. From that, he was able to choose activities that would help him to feel more of that juicy energy, and patiently he began carving out his own future, step by step working towards a new career as an event planner.
Exploration: Think of a time when you felt pure joy and got lost in the moment…completely immersed in an activity. Bring the picture to your mind’s eye, as though you are watching it on a theatre screen. Spend a few minutes really savoring the images, and imagine you are actually back in that moment. Now, bring your awareness to your body. How does your body feel? What sensations do you notice? What emotions do you feel? Now that you have identified those sensations, write them someplace safe.
You have now created a haven that you can return to whenever you need to be immersed in positive, self-generated feelings. Not that you need to change how you are feeling in a given moment. In fact, that is counter to what I am advocating! Instead, when you are feeling any emotion or sensation, just go deeper into it and see what it has to tell you. And, should your racing mind tell you that you’ll be forever stuck in a negative rut, come back to your joyful moment, seeing the pictures in your mind and experiencing the sensations in our body. Logically, you will know that you can come back to that feeling again. And, the more you train your body to feel the positive sensations of joy, the better attuned it will be to create that state of being over and over again.
May you fully be in joy in your career and every aspect of your life! Please do let me know how this article has touched you. Contact me at SBernstein@workfromwithin.com
“Just simply noticing frequent thoughts and feelings of dissatisfaction will not necessarily result in primary healing. The noticing of dissatisfaction or discomfort is sufficient, however, to move us to search for more information, more instruction, if we are willing to take action.” (from Awareness as Healing, Robert K. Hall, M.D. and Thomas Pope in the book Holistic Medicine: Harmony of Body, Mind, & Spirit) |
