You Lost Your Job? Fantastic!
Posted on January 26, 2010 by Hadley Earabino, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
When someone is fired from a job, or decides to leave one, they are often waging an inner battle between the social self and the true self.
When I was studying for my certification in massage therapy, I took a course in Chinese Medicine. I learned, among other things, that in Chinese the symbol for “crisis” is also the symbol for “opportunity.”
Finding yourself without a job, or without a job you enjoy, is both a crisis and an opportunity. In Martha Beck’s book, “Finding Your Own North Star,” she teaches us about the concept of the “social self” and the “essential self.” I use these concepts a lot when coaching.
I have found that when someone is fired from a job, or decides to leave one, they are often waging an inner battle between these two selves. Beck says that our social selves are concerned with the way things look on the outside—how we are perceived by other people. When we make decisions based on what we think we “should” do—study the subjects in college our father wants us to study, get the job we were expected to get—we are acting out of our social selves.
Our essential selves, however, are not concerned with what “everybody” thinks. In fact, Beck tells us that “everybody” is usually only made up of about five people. We may think that “everybody” would think we were crazy if we decided to become an aerialist with the circus. But what we really mean by “everybody” is, in fact, only a handful of people. It is usually people like 1. our mother, 2. our best friend, 3. our husband, 4. the next door neighbor and 5. our Great Aunt Betty. These five people may indeed think we are crazy for wanting to swing around in sequined hot pants, but there may be a whole troupe of other circus performers who wouldn’t think we were loopy at all.
Finding your essential self is kind of a mystical experience. It makes your soul happy. I know this to be true. Using Beck’s methods, I have been able to create a career that involves a lot of what I like and am good at, and not a lot of what I don’t like and am not good at. I have also been able to put away the parts of my life that were making me miserable.
It turns out, I didn’t really like standing in front of PTA moms acting like I had everything together, that my kids were ambitious and pious and that I ironed my husband’s boxer shorts. Turns out I wanted to spend almost all day writing, then I wanted to be with my kids the rest of the day, and I wanted to travel once a month or so to exciting new places. And that is exactly how I am spending my life right now.
It has been several years since I described my essential-self desires, since I used the tools to imagine exactly what my best life would look like. And now I am actually living it. I learned how to identify the activities that gave me power surges, the subjects that were easy for me to remember, the tasks that made me lose track of time. I put them all together, and discovered my essential self, or what Beck calls “My North Star.”
Once we start the process of uncovering your true self, I’ve found that the false selves just kind of fall away. We don’t have time to stand around with people we don’t like pretending to be happy, because we’re too busy somewhere else actually being happy.
So while the task of finding a new career might seem like a crisis—if you squint your eyes a little bit, and maybe even believe in your essential self, it will start to look a whole lot like an opportunity.
