My Greatest Insecurity

My Greatest Insecurity and How a 1950s Drugstore Got Me Over It

This past summer, I made a job change, and as is common in my industry, I was required to take a 90-day “garden leave,” which is in essence a “non-compete” period during which time I remained an employee of my former company while waiting to join the new company.?Some consider this to be a perk of working in financial services, while others consider it a nuisance.?For me, after 15 years of doing virtually the same thing for the same types of companies, and especially after a year-plus of grinding it out at home, the three-month long paid vacation was a welcome opportunity to hit “reset” and start the new role at the new place with a new energy.

But I had this nagging worry, a deep-seated insecurity about what I was doing: changing jobs…again.?In the last 22 years of working in the wealth industry, I have worked for five different companies, and with this latest change, I’ve now started at a sixth.?That’s the same number of employers that my parents had for their combined careers starting in the late 1960s and ending just 10 years ago with their retirement.?So, I keep asking myself, “What’s wrong with me?”

To add some context: my dad was a teacher and my mom was a pharmacist.?They both grew up in very small towns in the Carolinas where the Depression Era lasted well into the 1940s, the decade of their birth.?Both, for different reasons, were raised by single mothers; my mom managed to leave high school early and attend her state’s college at 17 years old.?My dad was the first person in his family to go to college, also at his state’s public university, and all of this is to say: their success was never guaranteed.?They were raised by circumstance to be very fiscally conservative, and to say they are risk adverse is a gigantic understatement.?Both are loath to make any change for fear of the uncertainty that may follow.?My dad taught for only two schools over the course of his entire career.?My mom, on the other hand, made four changes: from a public hospital, to a private hospital, to a chain drugstore, to a privately-owned pharmacy within a doctor’s office—a veritable boutique compared to her previous posts.?Yet, four changes over a 50-year career seems far more consistent than five changes over just a couple of decades—right?

Of course it does, and that’s why I embarked on my new job almost apologetically, concerned that clients might be upset and that referral sources may question my commitment and motivations.?To be clear about the latter: money has not once been the chief motivator for a job change.?Sure, fifteen years ago, I had a one-year old daughter, my wife was a high school English teacher, and seeing nearly her entire after-tax income going to childcare…well, heck yeah, I was absolutely worried about money at the time.?But what I wanted to do was more important: I wanted to advise.

But why then did I make those other changes??Have I no workplace endurance??Let’s go back to my mom for a moment.

When my mom began her career as a pharmacist in the 1960s, pharmaceuticals—and hospitals—were not yet “big business.”?In the 1970s, during my elementary school years, I recall my mom working long hours, but nothing out of the ordinary for “hospital work.”?Then, in 1983, the “general hospital” was taken private and renamed a “medical center.”?My mom’s hours grew enormously.?She routinely worked double shifts, starting at 7:00 AM and getting off at 11:00 PM (I remember my dad didn’t want her walking to her car that late, so he and I would drive over to the hospital, sit and wait in the parking lot and watch Mom walk to the car to make sure she was safe).?We all shared those late hours to some extent.

Mom was also on-call every other weekend, and the hospital administration seemed constantly to be stretching the staff in favor of, what I now know, were better margins.?Eventually, my mom left that scene to join a newly built hospital in the city just north of us as its Director of Pharmacy.?Already a storm on the horizon, by the mid- to late-80s the dominance of managed healthcare was making every pharmacist’s life a nightmare.?Add to that a hospital that was building its business and demanding that my mom run the pharmacy on shoestring resources—it was the “margin game” all over again—it was no surprise my mom chose to leave in a few years.

At that point of her career, my mom chose to go part-time and work for a large drugstore chain.?Our town and the towns north of us had all blended into a sprawling suburban landscape of strip malls, movie theaters, big box stores and planned neighborhoods of homogeneous track homes.?My mom’s “part-time” of 30 hours a week became more like 40-hours-plus as the regional store manager asked her to work one shift on one side of the city and then another shift on the other side of the city, often with 30 – 45 minutes of traffic between stores.?On one occasion, I remember my mom admitting to me how frustrated she was with the pace of the drugstore work—and frankly how scared she was that she might make a mistake while filling a script.?I also remember specifically her saying that she found it difficult to direct customers to aisles with greeting cards or office supplies while also trying to dispense controlled substances.?It seemed maddening to me and to her.?When a friend opened a small pharmacy within a doctor’s office building, she left to join it, and that’s where she finished out her career.

She still had to deal with the headaches of reconciling patients’ healthcare coverage with the drugs as prescribed, often recommending that patients seek a generic or other alternative if they couldn’t afford their doctor’s first choice.?As the area where we lived grew, she also had to take Spanish lessons, which the pharmacy provided to her at their cost, but she found that newness invigorating, along with learning the new systems and applications in pharmacy management, which did streamline what for decades had been largely manual systems.?She also got to know the patients who routinely visited the doctor’s offices.?My mom ended her career on a high note—she weathered an industry that evolved away from patient-care and into profit-margin, and as needed, she made changes in her career in order to stay true to herself: a medical professional, a caregiver, a person of deeply-held ethical standards.

During my garden leave this past summer, while agonizing over my greatest insecurity, the parallel here between my career and my mom’s began to take shape.?The history, however, goes back further: my mom’s father, my grandfather, was Alvin DeWitt “Doc” Rogers.?He owned and operated Rogers Drug Store on Main Street in the town where my mom grew up, and where many years later I grew up.?He was the town’s only pharmacist, and he dispensed medicine from the pharmacy counter and life lessons from the soda counter.?Doc also leased out office space in the rear of his store to several of the town’s doctors, and then he died suddenly when my mom was 10 years old. ?My mom, a brilliant student, could have studied anything in college, but she chose to become a pharmacist, and I’m sure it was out of reverence for her late father and the impact she knew he had upon his customers and the town.?She wanted to make a similar contribution to her community. [Photo at left: Mom on her dad's, Doc's, lap with her mother, my Nana, c. 1944]

Most of us start with the best intentions—I have first-hand experience seeing this in teachers and medical professionals and personally as an advisor—and then the swamps of our industries begin to drag us down.?We get pulled away from the “why” of our careers as the “what” of our careers changes: what we’re doing day-to-day; what kind of company we’re working for; what are the metrics by which we’re evaluated.?In order to renew the original “what,” we have to, like Mom, find a way back to the “why” of our careers.?

The financial services industry, and in particular wealth advisory, has changed more in the last 20 years than anyone working in it could have predicted.?I was never attracted to this industry for its trappings or its bravado—there are other sectors I could have chosen that are more lucrative, or even more dynamic, than mine.?What drew me into wealth advisory was how I envisioned myself when I first had the title of “advisor: duh…I thought I was an advisor.?Of course, I pretty quickly learned that “advisor” is nearly always a euphemism for “salesperson.”?Sure, there have been moments of advisory—of true advice giving—over the years, but those moments became fewer and farther between in an industry of constant regulatory changes, a vapid focus on revenue and a widening chasm between the title of my job and the reality of what I am asked to do.

And so I think of Doc’s drugstore in the early 1950s—it represented my mom’s “why:” a respected person in the community, providing a needed service and going beyond just the duties of the “job” in order to have a lasting impact on customers and families.?It took my mom over the halfway mark of her career to get back to that “why,” and I realize now that I am on that same journey of getting back to my “why: listening, understanding, counseling, providing direction and ideas and feedback—being the true definition of “advisor.”