Our Teachable Moments

Forks and power outlets. Asking the prettiest girl to dance in front of friends. Not looking before jumping. Kids learn the truth of things through hard-won experience; even now in the days of cell phones and game consoles young folks can be found stretching for things that are just out of reach and leaning back too far on their chairs to see if they can balance.

As adults, we spend far too much time balancing on the back legs of chairs, in our jobs, our marriages, and other relationships. Our teachable moments as adults sometimes come sneaking up behind us to kick the legs of those chairs, and over we go. I had one of those moments just the other day. The company I was working for, one I really liked and was working hard for, fired my boss while I was away on vacation. I understood the company was going through a difficult transition in service delivery philosophy and methodology, and on top of that had just been acquired by a huge multi-national corporation, so some change was to be expected. I'd been through corporate acquisition before, and learned that characteristics like loyalty, and a strong desire to adapt to circumstance, are often superfluous to requirements when business decisions need to be made. So off he went, and our team tried very hard to adapt to our new leadership. In these situations we often want to believe so much that the status quo can be preserved that we look past our life lessons in the vain hope that what we know to be likely as an outcome will not come to pass...but last Friday it came to pass. Myself and several of my coworkers were made available to industry by the new VP, and I learned yet another life lesson. Sometimes growth involves pruning.

When one gets pruned, one takes a close look at the tree one was hanging from. I looked closely at how I got there - that specific place - what I had built, and what I was taking away from the experiences I had while with the company. These are hard questions to ask yourself, and often carry backwards to the patterns of behavior that put us in our jobs before that, or our path in school, or even how we are operating our life. Big freaking questions come up, and let me tell you, the often hysterical response to sudden unemployment is not in any way conducive to constructive self-examination. So I took a step back. I tried to think of the people who know me best, not the me that is represented by a resume, or a project I've developed for a client, or the innumerable professional folks I've deployed within huge, impressive enterprise corporations. The real people. My wife. My kids. They know me best.

When my kids got home from school that day, I asked them a favor. I'd hung a whiteboard up on the wall by my home office computer, one that I'd used to diagram plays for the soccer team I coach and now would be using to diagram my new attack on employment. I asked my son, 13, and daughter, 11, to write down the kinds of jobs that they thought Dad would like, be good at, and would make him a better Dad to be around every day. The list they came up with is Dad's New Job Board. I'm not sure all of them are exact fits, or that my "resume" lines me up as a competitive candidate for any of them. But what they are are a simple reflection of who I am to them, and will hopefully be the breadcrumb path I will follow to universal vocational enlightenment, or some such. My kids think I should be, in no specific order:

Those last two on the list are likely to ensure a continuation of their comfortable lifestyle and not reflective of any particular capability I have with teeth or bodies, but the rest are close enough for me to incorporate into my next steps. And that is all we really need from our teachable moments, isn't it? We need to listen to them closely. We need next steps - an honest realignment or recalibration towards what we are at our centers. Jung says that there are five keys to happiness:

1. Good Physical and Mental Health
2. Good Relationships
3. The Ability to Perceive Beauty in Art and Nature
4. Believe in Something; a Philosophy or Religion
5. A Fulfilling Job

I'm going to work on all of these things in this precious time for self-reflection that I've been so unceremoniously granted, and # 5 is a big one for me under the circumstances. We need to acknowledge that we aren't always in control of whether we are in the right job for us, at the right time or for the right reasons. But if we pay close attention to our teachable moments, and stay true to a clear-eyed view of how our goals are lined up with who we are and what we aspire to, I think we have a pretty good shot at landing close to the vocational target. Nothing especially transformative in these observations I suppose, and nothing one couldn't find in the pages of a Steven Covey book, but it helps me to write things down so that I can remember my teachable moments. Hope you take a look at the tree from which you currently hang, and that you like where you are. Me? I'll see you on your next scheduled solid waste pickup day.