my people

We need our own to walk us home. – Tama Kieves

I love the feeling of walking into a room and wanting to throw your hands up, Evita-style, to shout “My people!” – in fact, I think a lot of my life choices have been about chasing that feeling of at-home-ness. And now I may be home. Pretty much everyone at ThoughtWorks wants to change the world through software development; some folk are even thrilled to talk about it all the time. That’s my kind of nerd.

There will no doubt be frustrations, but I hope when there are, I can come read this and think of how true that Tama Kieves quote is. We do need people who match us to help us get where we’re supposed to be.

what do you want now?

What does it mean to look for a job in a way that makes the looking itself compelling? I suspect there’s a core set of values that everyone wants to honor in their process.

• learning (you develop new skills or have new experiences, you discover things about yourself or others)
• enjoyment (the search is fun)
• safety (your self-image is not at risk from rejection, you’re not in financial or physical danger)
• balance or integration (the job search complements your current life, or at least doesn’t overload you)
• presence (you feel like you’re really participating in the effort and experiencing the highs and lows)

Then each of us adds our own values. It’s important for me, for instance, to be open-hearted and rely on my emotion and intuition in this process right now. Presence for me is all about feeling, and connection with other people. Balance is all about feeling like the search itself is creative and leaves space for my artistic life.

Why think this much about what kind of job search experience you want to have? You could just start sending resumes out, or call your old manager who thought you were awesome. That whole process turns you and your next work into a bundle of keywords, skills and benefits. Great, if you want a job based on those things. If you want real fulfillment, though, you spend a fair amount of time deciding what job you want to do, where, in what sort of place and with what sort of people.

I say don’t wait for that new wonderful job to have what you want, where you want with the people you want. Have it now.

So, that’s part 2: decide what kind of experience you want to have while you look for your next great work. It may be a lot like what you want from the work itself. Or not. In either case, it will help you decide where to go on the map to your new destination.

open heartedness looks for a job

I’ve made a commitment to myself to find a job in a way that is itself lifechanging. Yesterday my coach introduced me to co-active coaching’s version of SMART goals. It’s like corporate SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely – don’t those words sound so efficient?) goals, but not soul-killing. Co-active SMARTs are specific, measurable, accountable, resonant and thrilling. Thrilling over timely! Resonant over realistic! I love it.

So. I’m also developing a guidebook for looking for a job with an open heart. Which means what? A map, I think.

Part 1 is this: decide what you want to do (in a way that is resonant and thrilling more than anything else).

Coaching is fantastically effective at helping to visualize this. Talk to your heart. Ask it. What is wonderful and shiny and good about you? How would you express that through work? What does an amazing work day look and feel like?

Be a kid about this. Remember when you were 5, or 10, or 18… or last week. A time when you dreamed big.

Do not, under any circumstances, take a skills assessment, sorting test, blah blah blah. It will be tempting, but don’t even think “how?” yet. Imagine and be thrilled. [Hey, self? This would be a totally rocking place to refer to all that "how to see possibilities" stuff in the book. Genius.] You’ll figure out how, find the union of practical and wow, in a bit. Get excited first. It’ll help your heart (or intuition, or gut, whatever you want to call your deeply feeling bits) talk to you.

I want to make the world more metaphorically sunlit by helping teams figure out how to build stuff together. And I want to do it in a place where people are excited about moving obstacles. I am superexcited about the idea of working at innovative tech companies. I actually like corporations even – I just want them to be places that think and move fast, fun and human.

There’s part 1, then.

what’s next?

I haven’t written my list of things I won’t do without. I’m not sure what goes on that list.

There is music playing outside that sounds like a mix of gansta rap and Jethro Tull ca 1977. What a mashup! There are thoughts in my head about work. I tried on a different form of coaching last week, and it fit perfectly some ways but horribly in others: I may be a vehicle for insight, but insight is uncomfortable and sometimes sucky. For others and for me. I had a couple of unsettling experiences that took me from ‘hey, this is a thing I could do’ to ‘oh, $DEITY, I can’t even be near this feeling’.

And bizarrely enough, everyone I know is not calling me to ask me to coach them. Clearly this will be a failure!

That is more or less a voice of ridiculousness. I know that. I’m creating doubt for myself.

The lesson? I expect a good path to come without resistance, though every fantastic destination I’ve ever reached came with tons of discomfort, even kicking and screaming. So what will I do about it?