Now What? Revised Edition: 90 Days to a New Life Direction - Softcover

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Laura Berman Fortgang is a nationally renowned speaker, life coach, and career strategist, helping individuals, small businesses, and corporations forge new directions and weather change. Laura is a recent Huffington Post blogger and a media perennial appearing on Oprah, various morning shows, CNN, MSNBC, and in many print publications. She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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Introduction

nowwhatcoaching.com/welcome-to-now-what

Welcome

It’s not what you do that brings career satisfaction. It’s who you get to be while you’re doing it.

—LAURA BERMAN FORTGANG

Being given the opportunity to revise this book after more than a decade since it was written is a great gift. It’s also bittersweet. On the one hand, it’s wonderful to confirm that the material is still relevant. On the other hand, it’s sad that the material is still relevant. In fact, it’s not only relevant; it’s needed more than ever.

It was originally written as a result of eighteen months of work starting four days after September 11, 2001. I had told my agent that I was not interested in writing any more books. I felt my two previous ones were enough proof that I deserved to have been plucked out of obscurity to be the first American coach featured prominently in the media and awarded a book contract without a proposal. I had settled back into coaching clients in the relative quiet of suburban life with two infants and a toddler. However, 9/11 changed everything. Suddenly, my phone was ringing off the hook with people who felt panicked that life was short and anything could happen so they better take those dreams off the back burner and get moving. For the next year and a half, my coaching clients reflected one specialty: supporting people to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. And that has not stopped. I’ve written two books since this one, and I speak to corporations on a variety of success topics, but when the phone rings with a coaching request, it’s for career transition, and that has only intensified since the Great Recession.

This book is for you if you’ve been wondering if you’re losing your marbles because you are considering a career change when most people think you have it good. Maybe everyone around you just thinks you’re nuts for complaining or thinking of shifting gears. My motto is: “If everyone is saying you’re crazy, you’re on the right track.”

Now, please understand, I am not talking about true mental illness. I am talking about the very scary and unpleasant feeling of considering walking away from a good paycheck or years of experience in one area to do something else. You wonder if you’re losing a grip on reality because our society (and likely our partners, spouses, and friends) are reflecting back on you how illogical your rumblings are. And again, that’s good. That’s very, very good. Logic is a left-brain function, and as a population (first world, likely two or three generations away from our immigrant ancestors), the notion that having a job or an income of any kind should be happiness enough has become outdated. You know your life is good by the standards that society measures it, but you are not happy and can’t seem to justify it or name why it is so. You may not be sure how else to go about things or what else you should do with your life.

If you’re unemployed, don’t think I’ve forgotten you. This book is for you, too, especially if your industry is shrinking or gone altogether. So many people are finding themselves “old,” “overqualified,” or “shut out” of opportunities and industries due to the quickly changing landscape. Complete reinvention is required.

You’re being asked to send your résumé out into cyberspace with barely the courtesy of an acknowledgment that anyone’s read it and no way to follow up with anyone. It’s pretty easy to feel hopeless. New tactics are a must. Social media and who you know matter. One big problem is that we’ve been trained to believe that if we do our résumé right, network, and interview well, a job is a given. Not in today’s world. It’s not about doing all the “right” things better. It’s doing something entirely different.

As you’ll see in the upcoming chapters in this book, your résumé will not come into play for an indication of where new momentum might come from. Your life story (Chapter Four) will show you what needs to come back from the past or what needs to be pursued to get the ball rolling in your life again. After a decade of experience with this program, it’s almost become formulaic: Something from the past rolled into the skill set of today equals your new direction, or at least the key to having luck return to your side. It’s OK if you are doubtful, but proceed anyway. I need you to trust this process.

Since launching the hardcover of this book in 2004 and the paperback in 2005, almost five hundred career coaches in the United States and abroad have trained with me to use this material with their clients. I have continued to coach people one-on-one myself and I have spoken publicly to tens of thousands of people, sharing the insights and exercises herein. Learning from all these outlets that the material really works time and time again surprises me. I wrote the original first draft in ninety days with four beta-testing groups standing by to work the program week by week. It was based on everything I did intuitively, shooting from the hip with my clients after twelve years of experience and the intense post-9/11 experience. But it’s been the decade since that has shown me hundreds, if not thousands of times over that this program works and that the trend toward stepping away from soul-deadening jobs is only growing with no sign of stopping.

The New Economy or Human Evolution?

Many people in America, and other countries that have had an immigrant culture, are the descendants of a work ethic that has taken its toll. The immigrant work ethic was that of hard work and sacrifice to provide for one’s family. The next generation or two followed the rules as they were outlined for us. Those rules have changed, along with our desire to follow them. What we are left with is feeling like we are in foreign territory. It’s like being asked to change our internal operating system, and it feels as unnatural as it would to a PC user trying to become a Mac user.

Today’s professionals who have reached some level of success are longing for right-brain freedom. They want to create, innovate, and express themselves through work. Their intuition or inner promptings are pestering them, but we were not usually raised to respect those. Those musings have been traditionally labeled “frivolous,” “selfish,” and substandard to the American ideal of “making it.”

Where it would make sense that people today would just be grateful to be employed when so many others were losing their jobs, I’ve seen more people instead ready to do something else with their life. The shape that work takes in our lives and the place that it holds in them has become as varied as the individual. People are experimenting with finding what is going to make them happy and, in many instances, money is no longer the main criterion for staying or going.

My own Polish immigrant grandfather would have no basis for understanding that I work with people to find work they really love. In his day, feeding your family through the work you did was reason enough to be happy!

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin says: “Now we live in a world where all the joy and profit has been squeezed out of following the rules . . . The working middle class is suffering. Wages are stagnant; job security is, for many people, a fading memory; and stress is skyrocketing.”

Is it any wonder that so many people are longing to make a change?

Godin goes on to say that this presents us with an opportunity to become “highly...