Your Mental Detective Work

The first thing that anyone beginning this process needs to confront is where his or her story is breaking down. Thus, the first goal of the Awareness Stage is to help you clarify which of your family's ideas about success you have internalized. Each of us nurtures a dream of our professional prospects — and the scope of this dream is often dictated by our history.

Many people would agree that having a great career is one of the most important aspects of their lives. What's more, many confess that when their professional progress seems blocked, they often spend endless hours strategizing and worrying about how to improve the situation. However, regardless of the amount of time they have spent pondering their progress, many people who begin coaching are surprised to learn how fuzzy their thought process has been about why they are doing what they are doing professionally.

My first meeting with Stanley illustrates this point. Stanley is a young man who has been working in banking for the past two years. I began by asking what prompted him to seek coaching at this point in his career. Stanley responded with a succession of the kind of war stories that have become all too familiar to me.

"I don't trust my boss, and I don't respect him," Stanley began angrily. "I have my annual review next week (a typical first-session cliff-hanger), and my top priority with you today is to figure out how to make the most of this meeting and keep from getting fired. I'm sure he's reviewed me poorly because I can barely get through a day without him asking me a bunch of demeaning questions about how many meetings I have scheduled for the week and how early I am getting in each morning. It's demoralizing to be scrutinized like this. I'm a vice president, not a truant schoolchild — how dare he!"

Obviously, Stanley was experiencing extreme frustration because his relationship with his boss was not supporting his story. Our work in the initial part of the Awareness Stage was designed to provide Stanley with a deeper understanding in two key areas. First, he needed to be as clear as possible about what his long-term professional aspirations were (many people who begin coaching are amazed to discover that these are far more vague than they had thought). Second, he needed a more objective view of the cycle of behavioral interaction that was going on between him and his boss and how this cycle was feeding the growing tension between them.

"How does your current job fit into your long-term strategy for building the right career for you?" I asked him.

He was thoughtful for a moment. Obviously, this was not the type of question he had stopped to ponder before our session. "I'm not sure," he started cautiously, as if it were a trick question or a test he could fail in some way. "I've always wanted to be in finance ... I mean, it pays a decent salary, and I work with lots of smart people."

"Well, why banking?" I pressed gently. "I mean, there are lots of ways to make a living in financial services. What makes this position particularly appealing to you?"

Nothing is a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived lives of the parents. — Carl Jung

"Well ... it's just the first company I joined after graduating. I took a job as an incoming associate, and I went where they put me. Now I'm in a department where I have at least some experience, so if I want to get ahead I figure I'd better put my head down and make this job work."

"Are there any other jobs at your firm that you think you might enjoy more?" I continued. "I mean, you must interface with other departments in the course of getting information for your clients."

"Well, sometimes," he ventured, "but it's not even practical to discuss this. There is no way that my firm is going to let me change jobs just because I think I'd prefer working in another department. That's ridiculous!"

"Why is that ridiculous?" I asked.

"Because they don't care about me and my career," he responded angrily. "All they care about is money!"

"Not even if your understanding of a certain aspect of the business means that your efforts there could be profitable to them?" I queried.

"Not even then," he countered defensively.

"So, let me be sure I understand what you are telling me. You are saying that you are working at a job that you aren't sure you like, for a boss you are pretty convinced you don't like, at a firm that you are confident doesn't care about you. Am I understanding your position clearly?" I asked him.

Stories are medicine.... They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything — we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés

"Well, it sounds pretty grim when you put it all together that way," he said thoughtfully, "but to be honest with you, I think you've pretty much got the picture."

"Why are you doing this?" I asked him. "It certainly doesn't sound like much fun."

"It's not," he responded sadly. "But I'm determined to make enough money so that my wife can retire and stay home with our kids in a couple of years if she wants to. It's also important to me to be part of a respected organization so that I feel like a professional. It may sound silly, but I've worked so hard getting through school and into a firm like this that I'll feel like a failure if I can't make it work."

"You mentioned that being part of a respected organization makes you feel like a professional. What does this mean to you specifically?"

"Well, it means working with a group that I feel proud to associate myself with and making enough money to support a family. The fact of the matter is that I haven't thought much about that, specifically, and while I guess that's sort of lame, I don't think many of the people I work with have thought about this stuff either. I just want to earn a nice salary and get ahead. Is that so bad?" he asked.

"Not at all," I reassured him. "Just as long as you have some definition of getting ahead that's meaningful for you."

"I guess I'm a little stumped on that one," he replied.

"Then that's where we'll begin."

Most people who come to me are in the process of starting to explore their real potential. Many of us have been so busy...