"Take a deep breath, have a cup of coffee, shed some tears, and say good-bye to the past."
That's essentially what my executive coach told me last night. Just as in the recession, darkness could fall quickly, in the recovery, good things could happen in our careers just as quickly. In the previous week I had landed a job. After I blogged about it, the producers at ABC called to interview me. Here is that interview. Also, instead of struggling with two ghostwriting assignments I had to wrap up before I took the new job, I worked with confidence. Yeah, I was The Woman right out of Leaning In.
The problem was that, although the my outside world had changed, the inside one was resisting. The Me of the Recession was stuck in a low baseline for achievement. That, I realized in talking with my coach, included having underachievers, the negative, and the compulsively jealous on my network.
One way out of that kind of being stuck is to meditate on the wisdom of Henry Cloud's book "Necessary Endings." The chapters present the urgent reasons why we have to cut loose assumptions, people, rituals, and nostalgia (GE recommends that we nuke nostalgia), why the process of "necessary endings" is so difficult, and how to accomplish those developmental tasks despite the emotional cost.
For many of us in this recovery, exiting who we had been will be Job 1.
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