Career Curveballs: Where's the Village?

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share how they turned setbacks into success. Read all their stories here.

When I was a 30-year old waitress earning just $400 a month, I was blessed and cursed with an act of extreme grace.

Patrons of the café I worked at banded together to give me the seed money for a business. As amazing as the money was, it was the intention behind the entirely surprising gift that continues to humble me to this day: Kindness. Support. Belief.

The curse? I assumed that those attributes were something I would encounter throughout my professional life. But when my career took off in the late '90s, and to this day, I am taken aback at the lack of kindness and support exhibited toward me personally, and most importantly toward the people I am helping to build a more financially secure life.

As I became known to a national audience through my books, appearances on Oprah, the Today Show and and then my own CNBC show, I got a cold lesson in the tear-down industry. Far from supporting my effort to help Americans achieve financial security, what I encountered was a lot of blowback. If it were solely based on a difference of opinion about the financial advice I was sharing, that would have been fine. But it more often was about me personally. I was not, and am not, na?ve. This is not about being liked. It is about respect, and decency. The more successful I became, the less I encountered the grace that was abundant in that small café back in Berkeley.

And let’s be clear, gender is not the issue. As encouraging as I find the "Lean In" conversation of late, my experience is that women are just as culpable here. Throughout my career I have been helped by men more than women. Not because there weren’t any women sitting across from me at the conference table, but rather because many of the women I encountered (who were in a position to help me) chose not to. Not all. But many.

As startling as those curveballs were, they were instructive as well. I realized that if I wanted more out of my career, I would need to be as self-reliant as possible. Have there been people along the way who have helped? Oh god yes! But they are not the norm. Understanding that dynamic helped me push my career forward.

The bigger, more disturbing curveball has been realizing the extent to which the financial services industry is focused on maximizing profit at the expense of the consumer. I am not condemning capitalism and its pursuit of profit. But the lack of proportion is stunning.

The issue is not the charging of fees — for bank overdrafts, for 401(k) management, as just two examples — but rather the ridiculously high levels of those fees. The massive pushback against the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in the wake of the financial crisis is damning evidence of how dependent the financial services industry is on maximizing profits on the backs of consumers.

Helping Americans handle the endless stream of costly curveballs thrown by the financial services industry is what motivates me. The fact that I have learned to not expect help along the way — and cherish it when it does appear — is a minor inconvenience.

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Photo: Suze Orman