Want Well-Being? Fix These Two Aspects of Your Career

One of my former students recently stopped by for a chat. An intelligent, eager woman in her mid-20s, she's moved beyond the wide-eyed optimism typically worn by new graduates. Too far beyond it.

"How's your job?" I asked.

"It's work," she said. "You know. It pays the bills. I mean, what more can you expect? Besides, it doesn't really matter. It's just work."

My cringe of the century followed.

JUST work?

Not only would I beg to differ on my least feisty day, she crossed my path days after I learned of large-scale, representative research showing how wrong she is.

Poor girl.

I'll spare you that long-winded, hand-flailing, eye-bulging version here. In fact, I'll boil my point down to just four sentences:

Work matters to your overall well-being. Big time. More than anything else in your life.

And your "work health" can be summed up with the answers to just two questions.

Now for Pete's sake read on because this concision thing is killing me!

The Two All-Important Questions

We'll start by unveiling the two questions that not only predict your Career Well-being, but your well-being overall.

(Is it just me or does this feel as tense as a Jerry Springer "is he the daddy?" moment.)

The two all-important questions are:

• Do you like what you do each day?

AND

• At work, are you able to do what you're best at each day?

Notice there's nothing about your boss or your co-workers or your physical office or your hours. According to Brandon Busteed at Gallup, it all comes down to liking what you do and using your strengths. Period.

So if you can "strongly agree" with both of these questions, you're in great stead. Grab some Pirate Booty and get back to work.

If, on the other hand, you only "agree" or are "neutral" or are - duh dum - in the "disagree" camp, it's time to take a good look at your career. Afterall, work is the most important factor affecting your overall well-being.

Career Disproportionately Affects Our Well-Being

Not ready to believe me about the importance of career health to our overall well-being? Can't say I blame you; I am a bit biased.

We'll turn to the good people at Gallup to back me up:

"Gallup finds that Career Well-Being is the most important predictor of well-being across the board. Though not a guarantee, it is likely that someone with high Career Well-Being also has high Social, Financial, Physical, and Community Well-Being. Across every country Gallup surveyed, people said that a good job trumps everything, including health and happiness." - Brandon Busteed of Gallup

These are strong words:  Regardless of nation, career matters. More than health or relationships or money!

In fact, "people with high Career Wellbeing are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their lives overall," according to Tom Harter and Jim Rath in their book summarizing the Gallup research, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.

In other words, all my blabbering on about the importance of meaningful work is well-founded. By research!

Amazingly enough, prior to last week, I didn't even know it.

(If you imagine that I was doing back flips when I heard Busteed announce this at a recent conference, your imagination simply isn't wild enough.)

Why Career Well-being Matters So Much

Work affects our well-being for a variety of reasons:

1.  We spend a whole lot of time working. About one-third of our lives, in fact.

2.  Work spills over into our entire lives:

"Imagine that you have great social relationships, financial security, and good physical health - but you don't like what you do every day. Chances are, much of your social time is spent worrying or complaining about your lousy job. And this causes stress, taking a toll on your physical health. If your Career Wellbeing is low, it's easy to see how it can cause deterioration in other areas over time." - Harter & Rath, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Element

3.  Work shapes our identity. So much so that...

"Our wellbeing actually recovers more rapidly from the death of a spouse than it does from a sustained period of unemployment." - Harter & Rath    (Graphical evidence of this phenomenon is on Gallup's site)

If You Can't 'Strongly Agree,' You're Not Alone

Now that you know how important Career Well-being is, you may be fretting over your initial answers.

Don't worry:  if misery loves company, you're all set.

Of the 10,000+ people around the world to whom Gallup posed these questions, only 20% "strongly agreed."

Only 20%!

Considering that Career Well-being is the singlemost important factor in our overall well-being and only 1 in 5 people has Career Well-being, no wonder we're a people obsessed with pursuits of happiness and get-pleasure-fast schemes.

We should stop chasing happiness and start working. Happily.

"Sort Of" Doesn't Count

By the way, if your answers were something like "well, I kind of agree" or "some days I feel like that"? <BZZZZZ> Sorry, no Career Well-being for you.

According to Busteed, a person has to "strongly agree" with those questions EVERY DAY for their overall well-being to be positively impacted. Less frequent simply doesn't cut it.

Does this seem like a ridiculously high standard?

Perhaps, but it's attainable, too.

How to Use These Findings Positively

How do we know it's attainable?

Because if we turn the 20% figure around, it can serve as a guiding beacon for us all:

1 in 5 people has found work that they like and that uses their strengths EVERY DAY.

Think about it:   You know, what, about 600 people? (Sorry, your legions of Facebook peeps don't count.) This means you know approximately 120 people doing the sort of work that would make a huge difference in your overall well-being.

There are 120 people you could go out and informational interview.

There are 120 people you could shadow at work.

There are 120 people you could simply spend time around, soaking in their work-fulfilled energy and gaining courage to seek it out for yourself.

In other words, when you get thinking that meaningful, fulfilling work is impossible to find, you're simply not talking to the right people.

We're out there. It just might be hard to catch us.

We're too busy working.

4 Steps to Surviving Your First Autumn After College

This guest post by Avery Johnson of Some Blissful Thinking is part of our Millennial Perspectives Series. Check out the guidelines if you'd like to add your voice to the series! My vision of life after college was a fairytale of cheerful coffee mornings and power meetings followed by clinking glasses with my coworkers during happy hour. After graduating last May and starting a full-time job, occasional days somewhat resembled my dream. More often, though, reality found me eating marshmallow fluff straight from the can as I watched Pride and Prejudice for the millionth time, freaking out over having no idea what I want to do with my life.

Besides the occasional break down, the summer months felt somewhat like any other summer. Between working, going to the beach on the weekends, and meeting my family for vacation, it seemed like nothing had really changed. Then September rolled around.

I felt myself growing increasingly anxious around mid-August. It felt as though something was coming up or an important date was fast approaching, but nothing was. I was consumed by a deep-seated need to prepare for something and found myself cleaning out my closet, throwing away old magazines, and rearranging my drawers, anything to make this feeling go away.

It didn’t.

Something was off.

During Labor Day weekend, my Instagram feed flooded with “First weekend back at school!” photos from my friends in college and grad school. I felt like I was missing out.

Everyone is doing something with their lives, I thought. What about me?

It all came together in that moment: my life until this point revolved around learning. It started on a Monday in late August, took a month off around Christmas, then powered back through until June. This was always how it was.

After extensive debate, I came to the conclusion that signing up for the GRE and applying to graduate programs was not going to quench my nostalgic thirst to walk to school with orange leaves crunching underfoot and a backpack of brand new notebooks and pens behind me.

I learned I had to make this fresh-start feeling for myself.

Here are my “Avery-tested” tips on how to transition into your first autumn after college.

1. Establish a Routine

During school, my daily schedules would be packed and all over the place, but I had a weekly routine that kept me sane. I knew what to expect. Getting settled into a daily and weekly schedule helps me feel more established and motivated. Going into each week, I plan meals so I can grocery shop, decide where to fit in runs or trips to the gym, see when projects are due and mark down what meetings are when. To further that fresh start feeling, I buy a new planner with a September start date and a fresh set of felt-tip pens for color-coding to keep me on track.

2. Join a club or a team

One of the things I miss most from college are the extracurricular activities. I found leadership opportunities, fun events, and my best friends and future roommates in my sorority. Being a part of something bigger and sharing space with like-minded individuals is an opportunity to grow in community. That doesn’t have to end after college. Join a book club, a meetup group, running club, or even a kickball team. Meeting new friends and engaging with your passions on a weekly basis will keep you learning outside of a classroom.

3. Plan something to look forward to

Working the 9-5 grind Monday through Friday can get quite mundane. Planning something to look forward to in the future helps to stir up the excitement in the midst of a bad day. This plan could be something as big as saving up for a weekend trip to visit a friend, or as small as simply making a plan to try a new restaurant or local hike during the weekend. Call up a friend, make a date, and mark it on your calendar.

4. Quit the constant comparisons

I wrote to challenge the view on what it means to be happy a couple of weeks ago and was overwhelmed by the response: everyone could relate to just going around with their happy face on all the time. We get on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and see these picture-perfect lives of our friends and former classmates and think to ourselves, What am I doing wrong? How can I become successful/happy/so-dang-put-together? The reality is nobody is perfectly happy all the time. And if they think they have it all figured out at the ripe old age of 22, chances are they are lying.

I will be the first to admit that I for sure do not have it all together. My car keeps dying because I didn’t get its battery replaced when I was supposed to. I shrank my favorite shirt and managed to permanently stain another. I still call my mom to ask how to cook chicken, I want to write a novel but I don’t have a storyline, and my last batch of banana bread was actually really gross. But when I get online, in an effort to stay positive, I never post any of those realities. Social media allows us the freedom to edit our lives down to display only the best parts. So next time you’re having a bad day, call home, call a friend, go for a walk, or read a good book. But whatever you do, don’t get online.

Why Self-Improvement Scares the Sh*t Out of Us

Think of the last time you considered self-improvement in your career, relationships or health. You probably did some reading on the topic. Might have talked it over with friends or family. Maybe even started to implement some changes.

Then, chances are, you backed away from it. Hella fast.

There's a good reason for that:  self-improvement feels awful.

We go into it thinking it'll make us happier and then - just our luck - we feel the complete opposite.

Even with rock-my-world, becoming-the-person-I-always-wanted-to-be sorts of self-improvement.

Today we'll discuss why this happens - and how you can break the cycle of "I want to make change but it feels crappy so I think I'll stay the same, thank you very much."

The Downside of Self-Improvement

"Growth isn't always fun." - Corey Keyes, Ph.D.

Last Thursday I attended the Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP) meeting in Washington, DC, at which keynote speaker Keyes, a sociologist at Emory, showed us just how bad self-improvement can make us feel.

Using data from a nationally representative sample of 3000 American adults, he noted that compared to people who had stayed the same over a 10-year-period, people who had improved their functioning had:

• Less self-acceptance
• More negative emotions
• More depressive symptoms
• Less positive emotions

In addition, the people who had made self-improvements were just as satisfied with their lives as people who hadn't changed at all.

YIKES!

I don't know about you, but this data doesn't exactly make me want to run to Oprah so I can start "living my best life."

Far from it.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people do so every day.

Why do we claim to want self-improvement if all it does is make us feel bad?

Why Self-Improvement Feels Bad

The answer lies in identity.

Take a moment to reflect on how you keep track of who you are as an individual. You probably see common themes running through your entire life, as far back as your earliest memories. There's a sense of continuity that you can cling to in order to understand yourself; a consistency that makes you you.

This stability is worth a lot to us:

"Self-consistency may sustain individuals’ beliefs that the world is coherent and controllable, and could provide confidence in one’s future." - Corey Keyes, Ph.D. (2000)

Now think about self-improvement. Since it focused on changing who and what we are, it violates our need for self-consistency.

Thus, "change doesn't always feel good," Keyes said at the BTtoP meeting.

The Upside to Self-Improvement

So why the heck do we bother attempting to improve our functioning?

Because there's a disconnect between what we feel and what we think.

Sure we feel crappier when we've changed than when we've stayed the same.

Yet we think of ourselves in a better light.

That's because in addition to self-consistency, our identity craves self-improvement. Thus when we manage to make change in our lives, we pat ourselves on the back. This results in well-being that's more cognitive than emotional:  increases in meaning, purpose, autonomy, connection, contributions, and growth - the eudaimonic aspects of well-being.

This brings us back to that meaning-happiness divide we discussed recently. Improving eudaimonic aspects of well-being comes at the cost of "feeling good." As Corey Keyes and his colleague Carol Ryff write (2000):

"Positive change is a mixed blessing: 'I may be different, but at least I'm a better person.'"

How to Make Self-Improvements Last - And Keep Seeking Them Out

The fact that emotions plummet when we improve ourselves, even though we also think of ourselves more highly, has huge ramifications on our willingness to make change. Keyes writes (2000):

"Individuals who feel like having grown personally and at the same time feeling depressed may be less likely to adhere to the positive lifestyle and health habits’ changes. In turn, such individuals may be less likely to seek positive changes in themselves and their lives after having felt depressed about past improvements."

It doesn't have to be this way.

Based on the research, there are three ways to maintain and continue to pursue self-improvements:

1.  Change Your Goals. If you believe the goal in life is to feel good, self-improvement isn't going to be your thing. The reality is that chasing pleasures is never-ending, placing us on a hedonic treadmill, while eudaimonic well-being is lasting (albeit not exactly "ooo, this feels nice.")

Consciously dedicate yourself to the pursuit of eudaimonia despite the pleasure trade-off.

2.  Focus on Your Thinking, Not Your Feelings. If you're willing to embrace a non-hedonic approach to life, you have to walk the walk by valuing your thoughts over your feelings. I'm a big believer in "gut feelings" (there's great data on the science of intuition), but that's not what we're talking about here. Here we mean emotional reactions to a situation - to your self-improvement. Be determined to not let your emotions seem more important than your cognitive assessment of your changes.

Focus on the meaning and significance of your self-improvements. You'll be less likely to be brought down by the emotional junk that accompanies them.

3.  Change Your Behavior, Not Your Self-Perception. Finally, throw your identity a bone. Recognize that when you make self-improvements, it threatens your sense of who you are. Stop saying things like, "I feel like a totally different person" - and do not utter "You're like a whole new you!" to anyone else!  The less we feel like ourselves, the more our emotions take a hit. The crappier we feel, the more likely we are to revert to old habits. The more we take on our old ways, the less likely we are to believe we can make lasting change in the future.

Focus solely on the behavioral changes you made, not on how you have changed. You'll be more likely to maintain the self-improvements for a good long while.

Now I want to hear from you:  Have you ever backed off from improvements in your life because they made you feel awful? If so, what did you do to counteract those feelings?

Sources:

• Keyes, Corey L. M. (2000.) “Subjective Change and its Consequences for Emotional Well-Being.” Motivation and Emotion, 24, 67-84.

• Keyes, Corey L. M. & Carol D. Ryff. (2000.) “Subjective Change and Mental Health: A Self-Concept Theory.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 63, 264 -279.

Embracing the Shipwrecks in Our Lives

We're obsessed with shipwrecks. The Titanic alone takes up more than its fair share of square footage in our minds, and it's been a century since that icy night.

Where does this obsession come from?

Here's one guess:  self-recognition.

The Metaphorical Shipwrecks

In her recent book Shipwrecked in L.A.:  Finding Hope and Purpose When Your Dreams Crash, Gettysburg College professor Christin Taylor uses shipwrecks as her central metaphor:

"Shipwreck is the metaphorical coming apart, the crash that rips through the very fabric of our identities. Everything we have thought about ourselves, our lives, our futures, even our faith, suddenly comes apart beneath us, and we are left scrambling, trying to put together any type of lifeboat to make it to shore. These shipwreck experiences can be large or small, and we can hit more than one shipwreck during college and beyond." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Although shipwreck experiences can occur at any point in our lives, they're especially common in the twenties when we first test out our dreams and identity.

All too often, our maiden voyages crash against the hard rocks of reality:

• The world isn't waiting for us to make a difference.
• There aren't fulfilling jobs waiting on every corner.
• We'll never have it "all figured out."
• We're not special after all.

How We Set to Sea

Before we can discover these realities, however, we have to set out to sea.

Compelled by society and the our passing birthdays, we undertake our first fully independent acts:  finding jobs, apartments, relationships, and a lifestyle all our own.

In the twenties, though, nothing is truly "all our own."

We like to think we're finally independent, but the influence of our parents looms large. (I've yet to get through a coaching session without a twentysomething client mentioning mom or dad!)

Taylor points to work by scholar Marcia Baxter Magolda to explain our parent-centric perspective:

"We each have a voice around us that informs our sense of the world, which [Magolda] calls the 'external influences that shaped you as an adolescent.' These external influences form a basic foundation for the way we view life as we step out into college and life beyond, helping us decide who we want to be and what our purposes in life will be. These come from our families, friends, and mentors and are the voices inside our heads guiding us and influencing each decision we make. The beauty of all these voices and expectations is that they form the first “ship” that keeps us afloat on the sea of life...We take with us the maps and navigating systems that guided our families’ or caregivers’ boats. We know these maps; we’re familiar with them, so they are our first lifeline. It’s not until we hit storms that we begin to rethink exactly how these maps and compasses work and whether they work for us at all. " - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Developmental psychologists call the process of rethinking our inherited "maps" individuation. Through it, we gradually become separate individuals with stable personalities and goals that may or may not match those of our parents.

To say that this process can be painful is an understatement and a half.

And no wonder:  since birth, we relied on our parents to support, guide, and care for us. Breaking from their expectations - however benign or benevolent they may be - can feel like a betrayal, both to us and to them.

Or, put differently, it can feel like being washed up on the shores of an unknown land.

Emerging from Shipwreck

To emerge successfully from the "shipwreck" process, we need some help from someone or something beyond our family.

Taylor points to research by psychologist Nevitt Sanford, who found that "every society sprouts up institutions beyond the family unit to help develop a person’s identity. He says, 'It is as if the society understands implicitly that it cannot leave the development of the individual personality to natural maturation.'"

These institutions include colleges, graduate programs, military settings, churches, psychotherapeutic and coaching relationships, and corporate mentorship programs.

For many of us, these "rescue vessels" don't appear naturally in our lives. We have to go and seek them out.

Finding one is well worth the effort. With the help of institutions that help us draw new maps, we find a fresh path forward:

"The journey out of shipwreck is the journey of coming home. If it were not for the cold waters of pain and chaos that shipwreck plunges us into, we would never reevaluate the faulty presuppositions we’ve had about the world and ourselves. We would never be forced to sift through the dead weight of our identities. Shipwreck shatters us, so that we are forced to pick through the rubble, to see clearly what no longer works, and find what has been a part of our being all along." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

The Beauty of Shipwreck

As someone who has experienced her twentysomething shipwreck and watched countless others hit their own, I can attest that it's a lonely, challenging phase.

It's also completely necessary.

If we forever rely on the maps of others - the expectations, goals, and "shoulds" passed down to us implicitly and explicitly - we never get to doing the work that holds meaning for us.

Lasting happiness is something for which we'll constantly struggle, relying on passing pleasures to fill the void rather than trusting in the resonating power of deep, grounded fulfillment.

Most importantly, the work that will make a genuine difference beyond ourselves remains undone, replaced by work that someone else wants us to be doing.

When we instead choose to accept the shipwreck process, actively seek out supportive institutions as we run aground, and then set sail anew, our lives take the form we'd always hoped for them.

"What’s the net gain of this pilgrimage home? The world gets bigger, and we grow with it. And though we would never wish to go through the pain of shipwreck again, though the gain does not nullify the pain, we also wouldn’t trade this newfound sense of the world around us and ourselves. We are grateful for the more nuanced view we now have of the world. The ground feels firmer and the horizon looks brighter." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Related articles

• Breaking Down The Gen Y "Quarterlife Crisis": A Generation's Expectations in Context
• Quarter Life Crisis
• So this is 25.
• My Quarter Life Crisis [Part 2]
• The Vulnerability of Growing Up

The Vulnerability of Growing Up

Today I'd simply like to share the preceding quotation with you. I discovered it in Brene Brown's terrific book Daring Greatly:  How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. If you haven't read it, now's the time. Truly.

In the spirit of vulnerability, I will say that this I'm keeping this post quotation-centered because that's all I can muster at the moment.

Over the past week I drafted two full-length posts but when I read them this morning, they simply didn't ring true.

They sounded like someone trying to sound like she knows what she's talking about.

The reality is, life is a process of trial and error. It's a deep, all-encompassing, often-frightening foray into questions that only you can answer for yourself.

Which begs the question, what can I say on Working Self that you can't discover for yourself? What can I write that hasn't already been said by countless life coaches and self-proclaimed personal growth gurus? What can I offer that truly enables us all to transcend the platitudes and wrestle with the messy stuff, side by side, one seeker next to another?

I believe in my core that community and reading and research can help us grapple with possible answers.

I know in my gut that the blogosphere was created for just this purpose - not for making money off of ads and affliliates or spouting more cliches or self-promoting ad nauseum.

And I know beyond all other knowledges that I'm here to help others discover the work they're meant to do, and to walk beside them as they finally get down to doing it, lest that work never be done.

Yet translating that into a website? <sigh> Hard stuff.

I'll be giving this place a facelift soon, and I want a contentlift to accompany it.

I just don't know how.

(Sheesh, no wonder I can't write any more!)

So here's my vulnerable moment:  I'm scared I may never be able to fully do the work I'm meant to do. I'm afraid I'll squander this prime opportunity to trigger the unfurling of others' great, important work. I'm terrified that I'll write for decades only to look back and discover that I did nothing to further the conversation, adding only more hollow words to the already overloaded information explosion.

Maybe that's precisely will happen.

Life has no guarantees.

But I'm determined to keep writing all the same. One word at a time.

And with each word, I'll thank you for continuing reading. We can grow more vulnerable together.

In what ways have you become more vulnerable as you've gotten older? 

(PS - Since I know how amazingly supportive this community of readers is, I want to head you off by saying that I'm sincerely not fishing for compliments. I realize that the standard I hold myself to may be higher than what others may expect from me. In some domains this may be problematic, but on this blog I think it's reasonable:  you're worth as much. And more.)

Meaning or Happiness. What'll It Be?

You walk into a bar and the bartender asks, "So what'll it be tonight? Meaning or happiness?" "I'll take both," you say.

He laughs hard. "No, come on. Meaning or happiness?"

"Both," you repeat, unamused.

He abruptly stops smiling and stares you down. "You honestly don't get it, do you? You're gonna have to pick."

Welcome to the bar called Life.

And boy have I been feeling it lately.

A Foray Into a Meaningful, Unhappy Existence

As you probably haven't noticed in the crush of your busy life, I've been largely silent over the past week or so. No blog posts. Barely any social media presence. No newsletter that is now weeks overdue.

That's because I've been positively drowning in meaningful activities lately.

And totally miserable to boot.

Between intensive care of a molar-teething, potty-training, not-sleeping toddler; shepherding a gaggle of first year students into my Psychology 101 class; advising sophomores on their choice of classes, majors, and that little thing called life; helping senior students prepare mandatory proposals for their empirical theses (due today); attending meetings to improve purposeful work and student thriving on campus; and of course being fully present and available for my amazing, making-life-changes-as-we-speak coaching clients, it's been an "interesting" couple of weeks.

Don't get me wrong:  everything I listed I have worked very hard to have in my life. They are all the product of intentional search. In fact, the list reads precisely like the vague vision I held in my mind over ten years ago when I quit my graduate program and stumbled confusedly into the woods of Maine.

In other words, every single thing I'm doing is deeply and urgently meaningful.

Then why have I been so gosh-darn unhappy recently?

The Meaning-Happiness Disconnect

As I'm wont to do, I looked to the research for an answer and, by golly, a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in August gave it to me.

The survey of 400 Americans indicates that if we want to be happy, it's likely we won't have as much meaning in our lives. If we want to pursue meaningfulness, it's likely we won't have tons of happiness.

That's because happiness and meaning arise from different sources. Which tend to be in conflict.

"Meaningfulness is associated with doing things for others. Happiness is associated with others doing things for oneself. Engagement with others that sacrifices the self or that builds relationships over time contributes to meaningfulness, but it has a negligible or negative link to happiness." - Psychologists Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, and Emily Garbinsky (2013)

To be fair, meaning and happiness overlap a good deal. In fact, "almost half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice versa," Baumeister writes in a recent insightful article in Aeon Magazine.

But that other half - the half that doesn't overlap - is highly telling. It hints at all of the choices and compromises we must make as we intentionally and purposefully construct our lives.

Where Meaning and Happiness Diverge

Baumeister and colleagues found five areas where happiness and meaning diverge:

1. Getting What We Want and Need. "People are happier to the extent that they find their lives easy rather than difficult," Baumeister writes in Aeon. On the other hand, "the frequency of good and bad feelings turns out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions."
2. The Time Frame We Focus On. The old mindfulness adage about staying present to increase happiness is true. Thing is, being present-focused doesn't contribute to meaningfulness. The study showed that "the more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were."
3. Social Life. Relationships contribute to both meaningfulness and happiness. That said, taking from social relationships increases happiness but reduces meaning, while being a giver is associated with meaning but not happiness. In fact, "helping others can actually detract from one’s own happiness." This especially seems to be the case in parenting. While parenthood has been frequently shown to reduce happiness, people still pursue and undertake the endeavor because it adds meaning to one's life.
4. The Hard Times. Positive life events make us feel both happiness and meaning. It's the hard times of life that reveal a divide. "Stress, problems, worrying, arguing, reflecting on challenges and struggles — all these are notably low or absent from the lives of purely happy people, but they seem to be part and parcel of a highly meaningful life," says Baumeister.
5. Identity. On this site I repeatedly emphasize the importance of finding work that expresses who you genuinely are. This is good advice in terms of increasing meaning in your life. But happiness? Not so much. "Even just caring about issues of personal identity and self-definition was associated with more meaning, though it was irrelevant, if not outright detrimental, to happiness." So, uh, I just decreased your happiness by asking you read this article...Sorry.

Why Meaning is Still Worth Pursuing

After reading all of this, you might be thinking, "Screw meaning. I'm going with happiness." And in my present condition, I can't say I blame you.

The thing is, life is about much more than right now. Our existence is dynamic; life's unpredictable curves are liable to snatch our present pleasures at a moment's notice. Not only that, but questing after present pleasures becomes a constant search, called the hedonic treadmill, in which we adjust to what we have and always desire more.

Meaning, on the other hand, is satiable and "more stable than emotion...so living things use meaning as part of their never-ending quest to achieve stability," Baumeister writes.

That's probably why meaning is associated with higher life satisfaction, better physical health, and even lower mortality rates.

Not that I'd advise living my life the way I have the past two weeks. Sleeping, eating healthy food sitting down, getting a moment or two to brush and bathe and be braindead - those things do matter. And while there not be a way to strike a genuine "balance" between meaning and happiness - as "balance" is an unattainable desire in most any domain of life - a tad of present pleasure goes a long way.

That said, in the Bar of Life, given the choice, I'd go for a thick swill of meaning any day.

"If your life had a purpose and you didn’t know it, you might end up wasting it. How sad to miss out on the meaning of life, if there is one." - Roy Baumeister, psychologist

4 Ways to Cope When You Have Too Many Options

When it comes to career, do you feel like you simply have too many options? Did you believe so fully in the "you can do anything" mantra of childhood that you don't know how to let it go?

Can you think of a ton of things you could imagine yourself doing, but can't figure out how you'll ever pick just ONE?

I get it. I felt the same way.

And so do many of my college students and coaching clients. In fact, it's one of the most common questions I hear.

Yet we all know we have to narrow it down. We can't be a doctor AND a professional musician AND a world-class artist AND a entrepreneur.

At least not while staying sane!

So HOW do we do choose?

Here are my four steps for overcoming career choice overload and the dreaded paralysis that accompanies it. (Hint: Your logical brain is probably putting options out there that you don't truly want.)

After you watch, I want to hear from you:  What strategy do YOU use to overcome career choice overload?

Are You Getting Frustrated Productively?

What do you do when you're frustrated? Not sure? Then consider what you'd do in the following situation:

Last week you had an interview for your dream job. I'm talking, the job so perfect you couldn't have created it if it had been pulled straight from your imagination. The interview went amazingly well - you clicked with the panelists, your answers were spot-on, and you could see in the panelists' eyes that you'd synched it.

Problem is, you haven't heard from them since.

The phone finally rings. It's the Head of HR at Dream Company. "Sorry," she says. "We're unable to offer you a job at this time. There were many outstanding applicants and rest assured that our inability to offer you a job is not a reflection on your qualifications. We hope you'll consider applying again in the future."

After you hang up, what do you do?

A) Think, "Oh well. Whatever. I didn't want that job anyway." Then sit down and watch Netflix for hours on end.

B) Immediately start sobbing. Then keep sobbing. Then sob every time you recount the outcome to friends, family, or the random woman buying grapes beside you in the market.

C) March out to your roommate and scream, "They don't want me?! Who do they think they are, not wanting me? I'll show them! One day I'll be the biggest news since Miley's foam finger and they'll be sorry. Really, really sorry." After yelling, you feel better, although a glowing ember of anger remains in your core.

So which one is you?

And which response do you think is the healthiest?

If you answered C to both questions, your future is in good shape. If not, read on!

What We Learn By Frustrating Babies

My first paid job in my twenties was frustrating babies. I'm not kidding. (See? Your job could be worse.)

I was literally paid to talk moms into bringing their 4-month-old sweethearts into a laboratory so that I could make said sweethearts mind-numbingly, red-face-screamingly frustrated.

I did this by teaching the bambinos how to turn on a picture by pulling a string...and then, once they'd learned it, making the picture and music not turn on when they wanted it to.

After the families left - oddly cheerful because I gave them a bib in exchange for the crying - I got to watch videos of the babies' screaming faces in super slow-motion for the rest of my work day.

While it may sound like I was involved in some uber-sketchy torture ring, this was in fact valid and valuable research conducted at The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

And what we learned from the research could change your life.

Three Ways of Responding to Being Frustrated

When we watched the videos, we noticed that the babies who got MAD when frustrated had the most productive behavior. Their tiny faces contorted into anger expressions - eyebrows knitted, mouth in a square, nose wrinkled - and they pulled the crap out of the string for minutes on end, determined to make things go their way.

The babies who got sad simply gave up. They sat there like limp little blobs, the string dangling flacidly, their only motion being intense, racking tears. (We often had to stop the study session early to relieve these kiddos - and their distraught moms.)

Notably, not a single baby became emotionless, the way many adults do when frustrated. That's because apathy is a learned response. It's a defense mechanism consisting partly of repression ("I'm not upset") and rationalization ("I couldn't care less about that job anyway.") Babies don't do this sort of thing. Since it's so unnatural, we shouldn't either. It's no wonder repression has been linked to many physical ailments, including high blood pressure, cancer, asthma, and diabetes.

How To Best Respond When Frustrated

The bad news is, your response to frustration is probably largely innate. Hence why 4-month-olds showed different patterns; it was inborn.

The good news is that you can fight what's innate.

Simply having the knowledge that anger results in better outcomes than sadness and apathy can enable you to make the choice to go against your first impulses.

I'm not saying not to express your sadness if that's what you're feeling. Go ahead and express it. But then move the heck on.

Get pissed. Rile up the works. Shake a few limbs.

Force yourself to channel that sadness - a passive emotion - into anger - an active one.

Whatever you do, don't go off into a corner and cry for days. Or weeks. Or months.

How Frustration Response Relates to The Twenties

In the years since frustrating babies for a living, I've watched countless twentysomethings relive the frustration patterns time and again.

No shocker there:  the twenties are inherently frustrating times. In a very real way, they're like having a picture that used to show up when you pull a string suddenly start to show up randomly, or not at all.

To be sure, all of adult life has its frustrations. But it's in our twenties when we first learn we're not in control the way we used to be. Which is hella frustrating:

You used to do all your homework and receive verbal praise from everyone around you. Now you do all your work in the office and the niece of the boss/the blowhard/the socialite gets all the praise.

You used to put your best foot forward in a class presentation and earn an A. Now you prep like crazy for an interview and get a "no thank you" in response.

You used to have many ways to pursue your interests:  picking college classes you liked, choosing paper topics that resonated with you, doing extracurriculars that lit you on fire. Now you're spending your days doing what's dictated to you, and you don't have the time or energy to pursue your own interests when the day of dictation ends.

In short, the twenties are about adjusting to having the rug pulled out from under you.

Are you gonna cry about it, or are you gonna get up and weave a new rug?

The angry babies, they'd do the latter.

And I'd highly suggest you do, too.

Because the twentysomethings I've seen get angry, they're the ones who are actively creating the lives they desire.

The ones who are crying and withdrawing? They're working the crappy jobs and lamenting that their adult lives will never be what they imagined.

So what's it gonna be?

It's your choice.

Now I want to know:  How do you typically respond to frustration? What are you going to do differently going forward? Write your answer in the comments below!

Ready to get riled up? There's no better way to make constructive use of your anger than by getting clear on your vision for your life, setting goals based on that vision, and making a plan to get what you want.

Let's work together to turn your anger into action!

Check out my coaching page for details. September slots are going fast!

Work and Career Are Not Synonyms (And Only One Matters)

How much time have you spent trying to find your career? How much time have you spent trying to find your work? If you think I'm asking the same question twice, think again.

Not only should these questions yield distinct answers, the ratio between them may deeply affect the quality - and length - of your life.

What is "Career?"

"Career" is the buzzword everyone wanders around searching for. It's where networking and resumes and cover letters and all those cut-and-dry, formulaic elements come into play.

"Career" is positively entangled with extrinsic rewards, most notably money and status.

Notably, career isn't defined by what happens within a person. It's defined by what happens around him.

What is "Work?"

Work has a million connotations, not all of them positive. Regardless of formulation, though, work implies a concentrated effort on some task.

"Work" encompasses far more human experiences than "career:"

1. "Work" moves beyond a focus on pay. Think of the full-time parents or the retired guy making birdhouses in his basement to give to neighbors and community organizations. Would we call their activities "careers?" Highly unlikely. But are they "working?" Absolutely.
2. Our circumstances don't affect our ability to work, while they may affect our ability to pursue a career. We can work when chronic illness keeps us shut in our houses. We can work when our children need us so heavily that having outside commitments is laughable. We can work when we're imprisoned, as Victor Frankl did, spurring him to recognize work as one of the three sources of meaning in life.
3. "Work" moves beyond the obsession with full-time status that gets hooked to "career." For instance, it may be hard to make a career of waitressing, but you certainly are working when you're doing it.
4. Our relationships with others can fall under the category of "work." We "work" on our friendships, don't we? (Or at least we do if we want to keep them...)

The Work vs. Career Search Ratio

My contention is that we spend far too much time looking for a career and far too little time looking for work.

I honestly couldn't care less what career you end up with. And I'm frankly sick of my college seniors bumrushing my office to inquire about career options.

What do you want to DO? That's the question I want you to figure out how to answer.

What do you want to BE? That's irrelevant.

This can be freeing because career is somewhat out of your control in your twenties, especially in a tight job market. You'll end up being something-or-other, at least for the next five to ten years. But you can DO anything.

You get to pick your work.

The Question That Matters

Of course work doesn't necessarily add value to our lives. There's a lot of meaningless work out there.

That said, since work is internally defined, it naturally lends itself to some other wonderful internally-defined attributes. Such as feeling meaningful and purposeful.

This is important since having meaning and purpose in life are tightly linked to quality of life and happiness. Even more remarkable, having a sense of purpose is associated with a lower mortality rate in late adulthood.

The lead researcher of the purpose-mortality study, Patricia Boyle, said when explaining her findings:

The take-home message is that people need to be thoughtful about their lives, because having that sense of meaning or purpose will make a huge difference.

So from now to the end of your life the important question is:  are you doing work that matters to  you?

If this work is unpaid, so be it. If this work is something you only engage in during the wee hours of the morning or the still, haunting moments at the end of the day, so be it. If "the world" doesn't recognize this work as a "profession" - or worse, actively criticizes it - so be it. If this work is solely centered on your relationships with others, so be it.

All that matters is that you're regularly engaging in work that gives you meaning and purpose. Then you'll have hit the jackpot of life.

Your career is beside the point.

Turning Meaningful Work Into a Meaningful Career

You might be thinking, "But I want to find meaning and purpose in the thing I make money doing."

Fair enough. Our ideal goal may indeed be to have a career full of meaningful work. It's nice to not have to worry about paying the bills with AND making time for meaningful unpaid work.

It's also true that having a misery-inducing career is sure to detract from one's meaningful work.

Assuming a level of "good-enough-ness" to one's career, though, sometimes turning meaningful work into a career isn't the goal. There are situations in which doing so kills the meaning (e.g., turning an enjoyable hobby into a hard-driving, profit-driven business.) And sometimes it's downright impossible to make meaningful work into a career (e.g., in the case of parenting.)

Even if a career filled with meaningful work is your goal - as it has long been for me - to get to that meaningful career, you almost always have to first do meaningful work that isn't part of your career. For instance, by volunteering, engaging in a hobby, taking on part-time jobs, starting a side hustle that makes $0 for years on end.

So how should you spend your time?

Identifying the work that genuinely matters to you and engaging in it regularly. 

Not chasing your next hot career.

You Don't Want Grad School. You Want Your Childhood Autumn Back.

When you think of autumn, what springs to mind? Crisp evenings? Shortening days? Earthy scents? Halloween pranks? Oh come on, you're holding back. Just try to convince me you don't think of school.

And no wonder you do:  after umpteen-odd years of trucking off to pencils, books, and dirty looks at the first drop of a leaf, autumn and school are strongly conditioned in our minds.

Which is fine and all.

Until this association starts making you think you want something that you don't.

The Dangerous Grad School/Autumn Link

Let's get this out of the way up front, lest I be labeled an anti-gradschoolite. There are many valid, terrific reasons to attend grad school. For instance:

• Working toward better placement/career potential in a field in which you have proven and sustained interest
• Increasing your knowledge of a subject about which you have proven and sustained interest
• Engaging with the brightest minds in an area in which you have proven and sustained interest

(Sense a theme?)

If everyone were attending grad school for valid reasons, though, I wouldn't see a sudden surge in "hey former prof, I'm thinking of going to grad school!" emails every darn autumn. Which I do. Every year. The onslaught is a-coming.

To understand why the "huh, grad school is sounding good" blitz is a seasonal phenomenon, we must travel back in time to our childhood autumns. In particular, to the prelude of our first day at school. (Cue the wavy lines and do-do-do-do music.)

The New School Year Scene:  Your mom is ironing the brand-new outfit you’ll wear on your first day, and you’re loading your crisp, clean backpack with all manner of school supplies. Your erasers are pink and four-cornered. Your pencils are sharp and smell like a day in the words. Your notebooks are ripe with blank pages so fresh and new that they stick to one another in their spiral spine.

Can you feel it?

I'll bet you can.

For twentysomethings, The New School Year Scene is as irresistible as the (ever so brief) 'N Sync reunion.

Why Twentysomethings Crave Autumns of Their Past

How come? Because in our twenties, we're positively unmoored by the lack of what I call The 3 P’s:  possibility, predictability, and purpose.

When we conjure The New School Year Scene, those 3 P's become tangible all over again. We remember what it felt like to be poised on the edge of an entire new existence. Life seemed organized, opportunity-filled, and oh-so-beautifully structured.

No wonder, then, when autumn comes lugging its conditioned associations to The New School Year Scene we think:

“Oh! I could have those feelings again! I want that! I think I’ll go to grad school!”

Sorry to break it to you, but your days of experiencing an externally-imposed sense of the 3 Ps are over. Period.

The twenties are all about accepting that very point. And then figuring out how to create your own internally-driven sense of predictability, possibility and purpose all the same.

This process is often termed "becoming an adult." And it sucks. Totally sucks. No sugarcoating there.

Thing is, going to grad school solve the underlying issue of needing to learn how to create for yourself what the world once created for you.

It only defers it.

(Full disclosure:  I write this not as someone who took my own advice, but rather as a recovering Autumn-Allure Addict. Yes, a AAA. As bad as it gets. To avoid facing the fact that my days of externally-derived 3 Ps were over, I jumped into grad school AND teaching. That's right, I'm here to scare you straight.)

The Problem With Going to Grad School To Relive Childhood Autumns

Point number two why grad school is the wrong answer if it's just hitting you each autumn:  not only does grad school fail to provide the 3 P's for the long run, it also fails to square with nostalgia.

To see what I mean, please join me again in my time machine. This time we're traveling back to about two months into any given school year.

The Two Months In Scenario:  You’re back to wearing hand-me-down clothes that fit awkwardly and get you teased. Your backpack’s bottom has blackened and the zippers have begun to show signs of rebellion. Your erasers have turned into dark, amorphous blobs that are inexplicably sticky. Your pencils are perpetually broken and smell of cheese puffs. And your notebooks? Oh, your notebooks. Once a stack of possibility, they now hold words and symbols you barely care to try to understand and their voluminous ranks have been decimated from notes passed to friends and paper airplanes flown at recess.

Had you forgotten that scene? Ours minds are convenient like that, scraping the moderately crapping portions of life from our memories. Hence the onset of Twentysomething School Nostalgia.

This delusional nostalgia is a major issue. I’d wager it causes a good portion of poor-grad-school choices, with desire to impress and social comparisons being the other major reasons. (Or you can be really awesome and go for the trifecta. I did!)

The reality is that grad school consists much more of the Two Months In Scenario and barely any of the New School Year Scene.

In fact, you don’t even get The New School Scene beyond the first year of grad school - if you even get that - because you work your butt off year round. And you’d better be damned sure that you care about the words and symbols that you’re writing in notebooks because you won’t only be jotting them down, you’ll be creating some of those jammies of your very own.

(For the record, the same could be said of teaching, so don’t even go there unless you have a “proven and sustained interest” in pedagogy. Identical urge, different cloak.)

How to Fight the Autumn Siren Call to Grad School

Alright, now for the good part:  how to not end up like me.

1) Start by accepting what you’re actually craving each autumn:  a return to a life you’ve outgrown. Allow yourself to grieve the loss of the rhythms of childhood and the comforts those rhythms brought.

As Meg Jay writes in The Defining Decade:

“Our twenties can be like living beyond time. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cavelike experience.” –Meg Jay

2) After grieving, create ways of infusing your current existence with hints of seasonality. It’ll take the edge off the false allure of autumn. For instance:

• Schedule a day-long clothes shopping trip every autumn (bonus:  take mom with you; nostalgia and financial support in one fell swoop)
• Go back to using a paper planner and choose an academic year one even though you now live on a calendar – or fiscal! - year
• Reinvigorate your office supplies every fall with a fresh infusion of pens and desk organizers. And some of those big rubber erasers. Just for kicks.

3) Make a concerted effort to construct the 3 P's – purpose, possibility, and predictability – for yourself. This is, of course, a humongous task. No wonder I devoted an entire website to the process.

All in all, do whatever you have to do to experience the clear path, opportunities, and “my life is all in order” feeling of your childhood autumns…without jumping into grad school. Your wallet, social life, and mental stability will thank you for it.

I’d love to hear you commit to one thing right now:  what are you going to do l to create a sense of purpose, possibilities and predictability this autumn – without entertaining the notion of going back to school? Tell me in the comments below!

Ready to jump into the creation of your 3 P's? There's no better time to start career & life coaching than in the fall! That said, I have room for only FOUR new coaching clients this September, so if you're ready for some Action & Accountability in your life, become one of those four by checking out my Coaching Page. ASAP!

The Great Fear of the Twenties: Wasting Our Potential

How often do you think about the potential of wasting your potential? Once a year? Once a month? Once a day? Once an hour? If you're anything like I was, that last choice rings the buzzer. If it comes with a parenthesis that says "or maybe more..."

I spent most of my twenties fearing I'd waste my potential. I mean, intensely fearing it. Thinking about it every time a room went quiet. Avoiding "successful" friends because they reminded me of it. Experiencing cardiovascular conditioning over it, without moving a single muscle.

Yet I never spoke this fear to anyone.

I'd picture myself old and gray, sitting on a porch talking to some faceless person, saying

"I could've been anything. I could've done so much with my life. And instead it all slipped by me."

I came to hate the word "potential" itself, resenting it and all that it symbolized. "Potential" was the concentrated pill containing crushed-up remnants of my hoped-for adult life.

"Potential" also feels so damn patronizing. Like, "oh, there's Sara. She has so much potential." And you just know that 9 times out of 10 that's said in that tone that implies "and she's not doing a frickin' thing about it."

I actually had a guidance counselor come up to me in high school and say, "I saw the colleges you applied to. Sure undershot your potential, didn't you?"

Did I? Well maybe in his book I did, but not in mine. I applied to schools that were a genuine "whole person" fit for me.

Which is how, for the most part, I lived my 20s - making choices that resonated with something deep within me and that squared with my awareness of my identity and deeply-held desires.

The rub was, I felt guilty about every single decision. Like I was "letting everyone down" by being true to me.

Like I was wasting my potential.

Smart people get PhDs, don't they? Star college students get high-paying jobs, don't they? Good daughters stay close to home, don't they?

At my core, I knew the answer to all of those questions is not necessarily. And that the answer for me personally was hell no.

Yet I felt pushed to live up to those stereotypical goals. Lest I waste my potential.

"Potential" felt like an imposition of another person's storyline on top of my unfolding story. (Cue Sara Bareilles' King of Anything).

I'm writing all of this not to complain but rather to say what someone might have said to me, had I had the guts to admit how much this fear ruled my life:  you do not have to live in fear of wasting your potential.

How do you break free?

By getting clear on this one key, vital, the-contentment-of-your-life-hinges-on-accepting-this-fact fact:

The only person who is going to be sitting in that rocking chair at 90 years old is you. Not your mom. Not your dad. Not your teacher or brother or best friend's aunt. YOU. What'll feel like wasting your potential then isn't having failed to live up to their standards for you. It's having lived someone else's story.

Period.

All clear? Good. Then you can move onto bigger and better things. Like figuring out what you want your story to be.

How to Not Be Pathetic: Stop Talking, Start Doing

Last week in a rental house along the Maine coast, I had a run-in with full-on patheticness. I’m not saying this to be judgmental. I’m saying it to be honest. And let's face it, we all could use a little honesty when it comes to being pathetic.

The Crux of the Pathetic

Here’s the scene:  It’s 10pm. In the small backyard of an adjoining rental house, eight twentysomething men sit shirtless around a bonfire. They swig on beers and blast music while talking incessantly about the “chicks” they’d hook up with if they went to the local nightclub. They laugh and brag and curse and boast, endlessly rehashing the moves they’d use to “snag” the girls.

Until 2am.

Every night.

If I could have summoned my ballsy alter ego, I would have marched into the glow of their bonfire and said, “Get the hell off your asses! Why don't you parade your pathetic selves down to that night club you’re talking about that's what? A fifteen minute walk away? And go TRY some of those moves you’re talking about. Then tomorrow you’ll actually have something to talk about. No, it probably won’t be about the “chicks” you “snagged." Instead it’ll be about something that actually matters – like WHY you can’t get “chicks” and the fundamentals you need to change to make an encounter with the opposite sex actually possible.”

What makes those twentysomethings pathetic, in my mind, isn’t their redux of a B-grade college movie motif, nor even their patently offensive objectification of women.

It’s their incessant talk with no action. That’s the crux of the pathetic.

Why We Slip Into Talking Instead of Doing

I don’t hesitate to label that gang of guys pathetic because I’ve been there. Not scoping nonexistent chicks (!), but lingering in looping chatter about a life I’m about to go out and live...once I’m done talking about it. Believe me, I know pathetic intimately.

It's a common trap to fall into because talk does help to feed our goals. The problem is that it’s too darn comfortable to get stuck in the talking phase.

Let me explain by sharing my view of the goal-pursuit process:

1. A goal enters our mind in half-baked, tentative form.
2. We cocoon around the sliver of a goal, keeping it to ourselves. At this point we make the decision to either let it blow away in the wind of distractions and fears, or to feed it with visionary thoughts that enable it grow into something of substance.
3. We hesitantly share the goal with one or two of our closest friends or relatives. The choice of confidants is crucial since the goal is now a tender pulsing mass that’s full of potential but can be crushed with the smallest doubting look.
4. If the goal is not obliterated by its early reveal, the goal gains strength from the “realness” of being put out there in spoken language in the world.
5. As the goal becomes less vulnerable, we share the goal more widely with people who are further from our inner circle of trust. This enables the goal to become even more fully real and worth working toward.
6. Finally the goal stands before us as a living, breathing entity and we take action to pursue it.

Look back over that list and identify how many of the items involve talking about the goal.

Three.

Half the list!

And how many involve DOING?

Just one.

No wonder we get confused and stuck. Talking is crucial to goal formation and pursuit.

But that tiny 1/6^th of the battle - the action stage – that’s where the money’s at.

How to Stop Talking and Start Doing

So how do you avoid being those pathetic guys on the shore, talking about a life that they aren’t bothering to try to live?

By taking an honest look at your life and doing the following:

1. Make a list of all of your goals, large and small. What are the things that are motivating, bothering and/or consuming your thoughts right now? Those are the basis for your goals.
2. Identify each goal’s stage. It’s unusual for all of our goals to be at the same stage simultaneously. Some you might be cocooning around, others might be half-formed, others might just be waiting to be acted upon. If you don’t know where your goals are, you can’t move them forward.
3. Make a plan to move each goal to their next stage. And then the stage after that. And after that. If your goals have stalled – especially in the “talking” phase, the most common site for lack of progress – it’s time to give them a kick in the rear. If you’d like, my alter ego could come and tell you to “get the hell off your ass.” (Since she's much more effective in the imagination than in the physical world, feel free to borrow her. Indefinitely.)

It is a mistake to try to substitute action for talk too early in the goal-pursuit process. That said, it’s way too easy to mistake talk for action.

My rule for determining when it’s time to move from talk to action? If I've said a goal to at least five people and find that it’s not changing form, I know it’s time to stop talking and start doing.

Otherwise, it's just pathetic. And believe me, nobody wears that well. Even in the light of a bonfire.

What do you do to keep your goals moving forward? In particular, how do you turn talk into action?

Where else to talk incessantly but beside a bonfire? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

3 Life Lessons from Einstein

While conducting research for my recent piece Are You Trying to Find Yourself or Construct Yourself?, I repeatedly stumbled upon life lessons from Einstein. He had fascinated me in my days as a physics major (back before my first surge of authenticity) because in many real ways he was the most nontraditional scientist, while also being the most brilliant. Thus it felt oddly comfortable to get back in touch with this man's great ideas, which extend far beyond the lab. Here are the life lessons he had to share about finding solutions, keeping balanced, and making space for important work. In other words, about all of the things with which we grapple here at Working Self!

Life Lesson #1:  Sudden Insights Come From Preparation

As we discussed recently, you can no more “find” who you are than Einstein could “find” the theory of relativity. It wasn’t written on some bathroom stall just waiting for him to happen by one day. “Oh my!” he’d exclaim upon seeing it all scrawled there, the superscripts hovering in bathroom-y bliss, “There it is! Now I know!”

It’s true that we often do experience a flash of insight – a moment when the answer we’ve been seeking suddenly appears in full form in our mind – and Einstein was famous for having such flashes of brilliance while bicycling. Insight is most likely to arrive while we’re doing something unrelated task that lets our mind wander – e.g., showering, hiking, doing the laundry you’ve put off for three weeks.

But here’s the trick to suddenly “finding” the answer:  you have to have put in a good deal of effort before that moment. It’s like a garden. One day, suddenly and without warning, your plants spring forth from the ground. But you have to have tilled and seeded and fertilized and watered first.

Einstein did his “garden preparation” through extensive reading of physics and philosophy. He became absorbed in the topics, marinating in the works’ words and dilemmas regularly and deeply. He put in the time long before any insights came his way.

"A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. That means it is not reached by conscious logical conclusions. But, thinking it through afterwards, you can always discover the reasons which have led you unconsciously to your guess and you will find a logical way to justify it. Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience."  - Einstein

Life Lesson #2: You Have to Make Room for the Important Work

How nice for him, you may think, to have had time to stew in philosophy and the like, passing it so deeply through his core that it stirred wholly original thoughts within him.

In fact, Einstein didn’t have leisurely hours to do this work. And he wasn't paid to do it. He was reading, researching, and thinking while supporting his wife and small child on a meager salary from a full-time job as a patent clerk.

“One must not think of Einstein as a tranquil academic, brooding at leisure on weighty intellectual problems. Rather one must imagine him fitting his intellectual work into the interstices of a professional career and personal life that might have overwhelmed someone with a different nature.” - writer John Stachel

Einstein wasn’t all that much unlike a contemporary twentysomething – holding down a crappy job, trying to make ends meet, knowing there were bigger questions that needed answering but not knowing how the heck to fit it in.

As Einstein found, the only way to fit it in is simply by doing it. By keeping your family and professional drama to a minimum so you can do the important work of constructing a vision of who you are, what you value, and the impact you want to make on the world, large or small. You must hold down a job, you should keep an active social life, you need and hopefully want to attend to your family. But don’t put your real work – the work of finding you and the work you're meant to release into the world - on the backburner while you do it all.

Life Lesson #3: Remain Active At All Times

While it was a different physicist who famously said, "A body in motion stays in motion," it's certainly a statement with which Einstein agreed. And not just on the lab bench:

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." - Einstein

Sitting around waiting for "the answer" to appear is the least likely way to find it. Whether that "answer" is who you are, what you're meant to do, or whether the work you're currently doing is the right fit, sitting around contemplating the question won't get you any closer to the solution.

We don't find answers by being in our heads, we find them by trying different possibilities out in the real world and seeing what sticks.

So get out there and ride your bicycle. It's the only way you'll stay upright.

Which of these life lessons resonates most for you? How come? (And if you have any great Einstein quotes to share, I'm all ears!)

Related articles

• Albert Einstein's advice to his son about learning.
• 10 AMAZING LIFE LESSONS ALBERT EINSTEIN Wants You To Learn [VIDEO]
• Albert Einstein Quotes
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• The Secret to Learning Anything: Albert Einstein's Advice to His Son
• Einstein: His Life and Universe

For every new idea we create, I believe we have to read at least 50 times the amount. (Photo credit: afagen)

He's still joyfully riding in cities around the world. (Photo credit: adambowie)

What Do I Want to Do? 5 Books That Offer Answers

I'm obsessed with books that offer help me ponder the question "What do I want to do?" The less prescriptive, the better - I want to sort things out for myself, TYVM, but it is helpful to hear what's worked for others. Here are five books that I've dog-earred, scribbled upon, and carried from beach to board room and everywhere in between.

1. What Should I Do With My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson

What It Is: Po Bronson spent significant chunks of time with seventy ordinary people in order to compile this lengthy, thought-provoking social documentary. The book provides detailed sketches of Americans grappling with questions of career, fulfillment, and purpose and lets you draw your own conclusions.

My Testimonial: This book popped onto shelves - and Oprah's couch - when I was smack-dab in the middle of debating whether to drop out of my fully-funded doctoral program. Reading Bronson's tales of everyday people who made changes in their lives gave me the courage to create my own defining moment. It wasn't long before I wrapped up my master's thesis research, gave notice, and set off to my dream state of Maine!

Favorite quotation: "This theme is going to reappear throughout: It's not easy / It's not supposed to be easy / Most people make mistakes / Most people have to learn the hardest lessons more than once. If that has been your experience, the people herein will comfort you. They did me. That alone was worth the trip."

2. Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for you Through the Secrets of Personality Type by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger

What It Is: This hefty book enables you to quickly figure out your Myers-Briggs Type (you know, those four letter codes people always seem to know about themselves, like INFP or ENTJ). You can then turn to the chapter dedicated to your type and read career profiles, elements of career satisfaction, and ways to job search effectively using your personality strengths. Best of all, the authors lay out specific occupations frequently pursued by people from your type.

My Testimonial: This book gave me wisdom in spades throughout my twenties. My college roommate and I first bought a "dorm room" copy and then, after graduating, passed it through the mail depending on which of us felt lost at the time. The occupations listed for my type are DEAD ON; I've tried or explored most of them of my own accord, even when I've forgotten they were listed in "my chapter." I recommend this book to my Intro Psych students every single semester. (Besides, you don't want to be caught at a party not knowing your MB Type. Total loser moment.)

Favorite Quotation: "The right job enhances your life. It is personally fulfilling because it nourishes the most important aspects of your personality. It suits the way you like to do things and reflects who you are. It lets you use your innate strengths in ways that come naturally to you, and it doesn't force you to do things you don't do well (at least, not often!)."

3. What Now? by Ann Patchett

What It Is: Based on a commencement address she gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College, novelist Ann Patchett (State of Wonder, Bel Canto) offers a refreshingly honest look at the winding path toward career and fulfillment. She explores her own ways of answering "What do I want to do?" while offering commencement-worthy nuggets of wisdom.

My Testimonial: Patchett is my favorite novelist, and I was an aspiring fiction writer myself at the time this book was released. I found it soothing to read that Patchett's road to literary stardom was littered with waitressing, odd jobs, and doubt, a confirmation that I wasn't the only one whose twenties didn't resemble the glamorous adult life we all envision.

Favorite Quotation: "Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

4. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon

What It Is: The book is based on a speech Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen gave to the Harvard Business School's graduating class. He had just overcome the type of cancer that had killed his father, and his brush with mortality made him urgently consider questions like "how do I find happiness in my career?" and "what is the role of relationships in my work and life?"

My Testimonial: Christensen is a no-nonsense business prof through and through. It's fun to watch him pair his love of theory and strategy with deep, philosophical questions. The result is practical, useful advice that has a "work it out your own way" twist. I haven't added a book to my list of Top "What Do I Want To Do" Books in almost a decade (and believe me, I've been looking!), so to finally find one worthy enough is testimonial enough. (And it even held up as a brainy beach read, as you can see here.)

Favorite Quotation: "When you were ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible...Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits. There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that's truly meaningful to them. But for many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it's not realistic to do something we truly love for a living. Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you'll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it's a compromise that will always eat away at you."

5. I Could Do Anything if Only I Knew What it Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It by Barbara Sher

What It Is: Career counselor Barbara Sher pulls out all the self-improvement stops in this classic book. You simply can't talk about "what do you want to do" books without mentioning this one. Between the brief exercises, practical tips, and get-off-your-butt wisdom, it really is the starting point for most career fulfillment seekers.

My Testimonial: This is an oldie but goodie, published way back when I was in high school. Its tone and examples are targeted toward a middle-aged audience, but that didn't stop this "there has to be more out there" high schooler from loving it (it didn't hurt that my second-hand copy came with a handwritten erotic love note tucked inside...which is still there!). After finishing the book, I dreamed of creating my own version of the book that would speak to young people. Who knows, maybe one day I will.

Favorite Quotation: "Did you know that fewer people get depressed during war than in peacetime? In a war, everything is important. Day to day, you know exactly what to do. Your life may be frightening, but the struggle to survive gives you direction and drive. You don't waste any time figuring out what you're worth or what you're supposed to do with your life. You just try to keep alive, save your home, help your neighbors. The reason we love to watch films about people whose lives are in danger is because every move is loaded with meaning. When there's no emergency to rise to, we have to create goals that have meaning. You can create such goals, if you know what your dream is."

What did I miss? Let me know your favorite books that help you ponder "What do I want to do?"

The second edition of the Working Self Newsletter hits inboxes this Wednesday! It features an exclusive, full-length article about how to negotiate toward a career you'll love. If you're on the list, watch your inbox (including your "junk" box and "promotions" tab!). If you're not on the list, sign up now:

PS - Check out my latest guest post, published today on Inside Jobs:  Parents Don't Love Your College Major? 5 Ways to Get Them on Board

Related articles

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Quarter Life Crisis Q&A

If you want to see someone get crazy enthusiastic about the quarter life crisis - I mean, arms flailing, camera bouncing, cheeks reddening - then check out the interview Nicole Denise conducted with me on the topic. To say I was "animated" while we were talking is an understatement. Don't believe me? Just look at the still image embedded below. <cringe> But there's good reason I get impassioned while talking about the quarter life crisis:

1. Having a quarter life crisis marked a major, wonderful turning point in own my life (as you'll hear on the video).
2. I strongly believe that the quarter life crisis can be an incredible (the best?) opportunity for positive change in the lives of twenty- and thirtysomethings.
3. I know, contrary to popular opinion, that having a crisis is a GOOD sign, not a bad one. It means that you're engaging with life and questioning your future rather than simply accepting what "others" say is best for you. In other words, you're making the time and space to find your true identity! That process should be celebrated, not lamented (or even worse, avoided).
4. I passionately believe that we can't do the work we're meant to do in the world unless we figure out who we are. Period.
5. Ergo, quarter life crises change the world. For the better.

Nicole interviewed me as part of her thoughtful, well-researched post called The Quarter Life Awakening: 20-Something Crisis as The Portal to Epiphany. I highly recommend you give it a read.

Then watch the 8-minute edited clip Nicole produced from our interview, in which she poses the following questions:

• What is your background?
• How did you find your true self?
• What does it feel like to be "not yourself"?
• How would you explain the symptoms of the quarter life crisis?
• What do you believe is the cause of the quarter life crisis?
• Is there a definite answer to identity crisis?
• What should come first:  thinking or acting?
• Do economic woes cause or affect the prevalence of the quarter life crisis?
• What is the solution to the quarter life crisis?

Want to know the answers? Then watch Ms. Ridiculously Enthusiastic give the answers!

When you're done, I want to hear from you in the comments: What are YOUR questions about the quarter life crisis? I'll gather the best Qs to address in future posts (or in embarrassing videos, whatever the case may be!)

Related articles

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5 Ways to Gain Well Being From Your Life Story

In the grand search for well being and happiness, our sense of identity plays a starring role. We grapple with three major questions:

• Who am I?
• How did I come to be?
• Where is my life going?

The best way to take on these behemoths is by "constructing and internalizing a life story," according to eminent developmental psychologist Dan McAdams and a host of research in support of his theory.

In other words, we figure out who we are by writing a nonfiction narrative starring yours truly.

How Meaningful Life Stories Relate to Well Being

You've been naturally writing your life story since you were an adolescent, when you first became able to identify themes and causation in your personal tales:  "That guy I'm crushing on ignored me because my jeans are so Goodwill. That's just like last year, when mom made me wear those hand-me-down Keds."

As you can probably remember, adolescent stories aren't exactly meaningful.

That's why our twenties are all about figuring out who we are in a way that matters. It's no small task:  when we make meaning from our life stories, we enjoy greater psychological well being and higher self-understanding, compared to people with life stories that have little to no meaning.

"Through meaning making, people go beyond the plots and event details of their personal stories to articulate what they believe their stories say about who they are. Storytellers may suggest that the events they describe illustrate or explain a particular personality trait, tendency, goal, skill, problem, complex, or pattern in their own lives. In making meaning, the storyteller draws a semantic conclusion about the self from the episodic information that the story conveys." - McAdams and McLean

Given that making meaning from our personal narrative creates well being, the obvious question is how can we make meaning from our life stories? Here are five research-based answers.

1. Don't Just Tell Stories for Entertainment

Barstool stories are fun and definitely have their place in our lives (I, for one, wouldn't want to be around someone who is constantly trying to extract meaning from their life stories...which is perhaps why I married my opposite!). If you get hooked on only telling personal anecdotes to get a laugh instead of explaining yourself, you're less likely to create meaning and experience high well being.

Two of my friends come to mind. They always had an elaborate, hilarious anecdote to share for all gathered around, and gatherings weren't the same if they weren't there. These same people were deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with life, however, which you'd only discover if you happened to catch them alone. Perhaps this is one reason why comedians have high rates of depression.

Action Step: Balance your entertaining anecdotes with explanatory anecdotes - and make sure to cultivate friendships that let you share each.

2. Emphasize Your Ability to Control Your World

This is a biggie. If you can reconstruct your life stories to emphasize how much control you have over your world, the more well being you'll experience. In fact, studies show that rewriting your personal narrative to have more self-mastery, empowerment and achievement - aspects collectively called "agency" - is precisely what makes psychotherapy effective. I call this the "Becoming the Hero in Your Own Story" effect.

"Increases in personal agency preceded and predicted improvement in therapy. As patients told stories that increasingly emphasized their ability to control their world and make self-determined decisions, they showed corresponding decreases in symptoms and increases in mental health." - McAdams and McLean

Action Step: Consider how you're telling your life stories. Are you the victim in them, or are you active and impactful? If the former, be the editor of your life tale and rewrite that sucker. ASAP.

3. Consider Whether Friends & Family Accept Your Life Story

The following finding fascinates me:

"When important people in a person’s life agree with his or her interpretation of a personal story, he or she is likely to hold on to that story and to incorporate it into his or her more general understanding of who he or she is and how he or she came to be." - McAdams and McLean

This speaks volumes about the influence of our family, close friends, and significant others on our well being.

It also begs the question:  if the important people in your life don't agree with how we interpret our life stories, are we supposed to ditch them? Since research clearly shows that social integration is key to well being, that probably isn't the best choice. That said, I do believe in pruning friendships that consistently bring more misery than support, and friends' acceptance of your life stories may be one indicator of friendships that have run their course (or were a bad choice from the start).

Action Step: From here on out, actively choose friends and significant others who accept and confirm your interpretation of your experiences. It's your story, after all. Don't let anyone else be the author of your narrative.

Important caveat:  you do NOT want to surround yourself with people who accept your stories if they're full of "why me?" and "life is horrible" - these stories need to be challenged. But if you're telling thoughtful life stories, you shouldn't feel attacked and challenged. Period.

4. Identify the Redemption in Your Stories

Another way to create well being is to find the good in the bad. Psychologists call these a "redemption sequence" and they're important:

Redemption sequences "may sustain the hope or confidence that is needed to weather short-term setbacks while reinforcing long-term commitments to improving the lives of others." - McAdams and McLean

It may be impossible to find the "silver lining" while withstanding a hard time; in fact, feeling the full intensity of negative emotions in the moment may enhance well being. But once the moment has passed, do the hard work of making meaning, one element at a time.

Action Step: After a negative life event - such as an illness, loss or disppointment - make an effort to find the good that arose from the hard time. For instance, are you closer to your family, or know something new about yourself, or feel like you can take on different challenges in the future?

5. Find Attentive Listeners

Finally, studies show that "attentive and responsive listeners cause tellers to narrate more personally elaborated stories compared with distracted listeners." This matches Point #2's take on psychotherapy's effectiveness.

Simply having a designated listener who reflects your feelings and asks clarifying questions can help you create meaning from your life story and find greater well being.

Action Step: Identify the friends and/or relative who consistently act as attentive listeners for your stories and make an effort to spend more time with them. You could also turn to a life coach, psychotherapist, or other professional. No matter how you find it, make sure you're being heard. It's the only way you'll hear yourself.

Now I Want to Hear From You

What do you do to create meaning from your life story? Or when have you actively changed your life story, and why did you do it?

What you have to say could make a big difference in another reader's life, so please share!

Source: McAdams, D. P, & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative Identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238.

Related articles

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• Man searching for 'the meaning of life' steals upwards of 800 books from a single store

Chevy Chase was the life of the party, but behind closed doors he suffered debilitating depression. (Photo credit: Alan Light)

You'll hear yourself best with an attentive listener at your side. Photo Credit: Leonard John Matthews

Are You Trying to Find Yourself or Construct Yourself?

I always hear the same thing from many of my twentysomething clients:  “I just need to find myself.” I wrote that in my own journal repeatedly, as if my identity were some fact waiting “out there” to be discovered. Like typing “who am I” into Google enough times might cause the answer to emerge, right alongside the atomic mass of boron and the circumference of the earth. But that isn't the way to find yourself.

Instead, the best method to find yourself is to stop searching and start constructing. And I propose doing this like a proper scientist:  By forming a theory. And revising it. Again and again.

Don't worry if you didn't make it beyond intro chem. The "science" you need to know you learned back in the first grade:  the good ol’ scientific method.

Here's how I suggest using that little dandy to construct yourself - and a life you'll love:

1. To find yourself, start with a preliminary theory of who you are and what you want to accomplish.

Your "working theory" should be created based on your past experiences and reflections on those experiences. You’re looking to identify activities that put you in flow and overlap with the needs of the world in some way so that you can get paid to do them.

Example (drawn from my own life):  I’m someone who wants to spend her days writing about and engaging with the field of psychology.

2. Create a hypothesis based on your theory.

This is a more specific idea about you and your work, usually in the form of a particular job that might be a good fit for you.

Example:  I may find meaning and purpose in being a full-time freelance writer for textbook companies, focused on psychology.

3. Collect data.

In this stage, you live your hypothesis. In plain english, you go to work.

Example:  I spend my days as a full-time freelance writer.

4. Analyze the data.

During this stage, you reflect upon your recent experiences and consider whether they are creating a sense of meaning, purpose and flow (i.e., true happiness), or whether something is missing.

Very important note:  do not mix up the “collecting data” and “analyzing data” stages! All too often I see people constantly analyzing their experiences as they’re living them. Doing so tends to makes you not experience meaning, purpose and flow in your work for the mere reason that you’re trying so hard to identify whether you are in fact feeling those things.

Instead, commit to a time period for collecting data (e.g., I will try this job for one year before re-assessing) and THEN begin analyzing.

Example: About nine months into my year commitment to full-time freelance writing for textbook companies, I looked back and saw that the work was too isolating and solitary. I missed interacting with people and getting immediate feedback and reactions to things I shared. I enjoyed the deep engagement of writing, but it needed to be balanced with interpersonal activities in the future.

5. Revise the theory.

Take what you learned from your “experiment” and then change what you know about who you are and what you want to do. Or if the data analysis yields good results, by all means keep on keepin’ on!

Example: I’m someone who wants to spend her days writing about and engaging with the field of psychology, while having the opportunity to directly interact with people on a regular basis.

6. Create a new hypothesis.

Example: I’ll gain fulfillment from writing half-time and teaching psychology half-time. (This is indeed how I found my current work!)

And the process continues…

…hopefully for our whole lives. Being engaged in the experimental process of life is the good stuff, in and of itself. <Click to Tweet>

Once you embrace the scientific method of constructing yourself, life becomes one great experiment – one great adventure – that never grows stale.

The best part of this approach is that it takes the pressure off of finding the "right" path. If we think of life as an experiment, we free ourselves to try different alternatives, to not feel like we're wedded to a choice forever, and to not feel like we "failed" when a hypothesis ends up being unsupported by the data. In addition, this approach cuts analysis paralysis off at its knees, and also keeps concerned relatives off our backs. Who can argue with the scientific method, after all?

The Alternative

The people who are most dissatisfied with life are those who don’t even realize they’re constructing and refining a theory of self and life. They’re simply existing, going through the motions of making money and spending it, not sure what it’s all for, vaguely disappointed that life isn’t turning out the way they’d hoped.

They may want to know how to make life better, they might even be actively, incessantly asking the question, but if queried about where they are in the theory of their life, they'd have no idea. And they wouldn't care to figure it out.

Instead they keep typing searches into Google, waiting for the answer to their discontent to be revealed, not realizing that the best way to find yourself is to construct yourself, intentionally, systematically, and thoughtfully. <Click to Tweet>

Like any good scientist would do.

I want to hear from you:  Where are you in constructing the theory of your self and your life?

Related articles

• The Scientific Method, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned How to Love Hard Science.
• The Scientific Method Isn't Just For Science
• Proof That Babies Know The Scientific Method | Edudemic
• Why We Fall
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How to Prepare to NOT Have it All

It fascinates me that we're totally comfortable with having to make choices in most aspects of our lives - we can't live in two cities simultaneously, nor in two apartments, nor take two competing job offers - yet when it comes to family and career, we remain obsessed with "having it all." In our last post we debunked five myths on this topic. Now it's time to get down to business and make a plan for living with the myth-ditching fallout.

1. Get Real

My college-aged self would think I've failed. I'm doing a shoddy job on not one but two fronts, she'd say as she popped Tums and returned to the library at 10 at night.

• Here's what I imagined: I'd go full bore with my career for about ten years; "opt out" to be an awesome makes-every-meal-from-scratch, doesn't-allow-screen-time, creates-home-based-preschool curriculum uber-mom for about five years (even though I disliked all things domestic at that time - and, surprise, still do!); then magically re-enter the work world in bold and brilliant style.
• Here's reality:  I teach two days a week; work on freelance projects one day a week; and spend the remaining weekdays with my toddler. There are no high-power fireworks going off in any domain of my life; I do everything competently, but not in a newsworthy fashion.

Do I "have it all"? Uh uh.

I have something better:  a life I actually want to live.

Dropping the "having it all" pressure is Step One to creating a meaningful, fulfilling life. Get real about what's possible - and what's sanely manageable. Reading my previous post is a good starting place, as is Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in The Atlantic "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" in which she writes the following about a speaking engagement:

"What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be."

2. Get Informed

It's also vital to get informed about the facts related to work and home life. In particular, I suggest that all 20somethings read up on the following:

• The real scoop on age-related infertility. Check out the brand new article in The Atlantic by Jean Twenge. The great news:  the late 30s aren't that bad for having a child. The bad news: "plan to have your last child by the time you turn 40. Beyond that, you’re rolling the dice."
• The reality of career off-ramps and on-ramps. It's easy to step off of a career path for a time (37% of highly-educated women do), but it's pretty darn difficult to get back ON (only 40% return to full-time jobs, even though 93% of "off-rampers" want to do so).

These facts stink. Period. But the only way to avoid bitterness in your future is to know and accept them up front. And then make decisions accordingly. Which brings us to the next step:

3. Get Authentic

This is my favorite step. The only decision you can't regret is the one made from your inner core. <click to Tweet>

So dig down and recognize what you want - not what society dictates, nor what your family wants for you, nor what you've been indoctrinated to believe.

• If you dream of sun-drenched days making paper hats and Play-Doh chickens with your kids, you are not a disgrace to your gender.
• If children make you itch and squirm and you want nothing to do with them, you are not a disgrace to your gender.
• If, like me, you realize the only way you can stand being either an employee or a parent is to be each in small measure, you are not a disgrace to your gender.

Be honest with you. Only then can you start being honest with everyone around you.

The students who make me feel saddest are those who "slip up" and admit their domestic dreams to me, then try to cover them up out of fear that I'll stop supporting them. Why, oh why do you do that? That "slip" was the real you. Be proud of hearing that voice; hearing it means you're doing better than 99% of your peers.

Likewise, I strongly commend Slaughter for her honesty when writing about her decision to step-down from a high-powered government career:

"I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults."

In contrast, I'm authentically not someone who is "mom material." Deep down, I want to work, a fact that caused me to feel much guilt during my daughter's infancy. Now I'm able to say, "she's cute and I love her, but being Mom isn't my natural role." Although I do feel guilty simply typing that. I want to do the best I can at being her mom. It just so happens that her mom happens to be someone who highly values meaningful, intrinsically-driven work. And who values modeling that love for her. I dream of being a domestic goddess who derives satisfaction and mastery from home life. But I'm simply not.

Bottomline:  whatever you desire, you will feel guilty for it. Might as well own up and live your truth, then shake off the guilt as best you can.

4. Get Grounded in Now

As I discussed last time, Sheryl Sandberg warns women not to "leave before they leave." By living in the present and fighting to create a fulfilling career while you can still focus solely on yourself, you build the resources you need to make a genuine choice when it comes time to figure out where family fits - if at all.

If you're in your early or mid-20s, you do not need to make career/family decisions at this.very.moment.

Should you think about all of this? Yes. Read up on the facts related to the topic? Absolutely. Take action? No.

Get informed about the future but live in the now. Make decisions only when it's time to actually make them.

5. Get Reacquainted With Yourself Regularly

The only way your work-life decisions will stay "un-regrettable" is if you keep updating those decisions. At 22, I thought kids were a pox that marked the end of a person's life. At 32, I was literally prepared to give my life to have one.

Let yourself develop, then check in regularly.

Set those check-in points now. As in today. Put them in your planner and hold yourself to them. You might try the Working Self "Who Am I These Days?" Annual Tune Up to keep yourself on track.

6. Get Ready to Live With the Consequences

This is the hardest step of all, by far. By the time you're 40, your major decisions about family and career trajectories will be behind you. You can and should keep tailoring and invigorating those trajectories for many decades to come, but you'll have set the general course by then.

• If you hit 40 and haven't had kids, the biological window is shutting, as are adoption options (there are age limits in many foreign countries, and health requirements in the US.)
• If you hit 40 and have had little/spotty "outside-the-home" work history, the career on-ramps are disappearing.

These aren't horrible consequences if the decision to get there was made actively, authentically, and based on genuine facts.

And if the decision wasn't made this way? The consequences are darn bitter pills. With an aftertaste.

7. Get Active

Finally, if you're angry about the concessions and compromises you have to make to create the life you want, good. There are plenty of policy and societal changes that could be made to increase career-family harmony, which Slaughter outlines in her article. She writes,

"I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured."

Make the best choices you can for yourself in the present moment. Then fight a little for the future. After all, we wouldn't be having this conversation at all if someone hadn't fought for us.

What are your thoughts on preparing for NOT "having it all?" Is this the wrong message to send entirely? I genuinely want to hear your ideas.

If you're on the Working Self Newsletter list and didn't receive a newsletter yesterday, check your "junk" folder or, if you use Gmail, your "Promotions" tab. If you find the newsletter there, take these steps to avoid the issue in the future:

• Add Rebecca@WorkingSelf.com to your "safe" list.
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Hope you enjoyed the newsletter! 

(Not on the list? What are you waiting for? The next Newsletter arrives Wednesday, August 14th!)

We should all tattoo this on ourselves. In a matter of speaking. (Photo credit: The Happy Robot)

Some want this. Some don't. You don't need to decide for yourself until it's time to decide. (Photo Credit: legends2k)

Put the annual check-in in writing. Now. (Photo credit: Mike Rohde)

Five Myths About Having it All

A secret to fulfillment is setting goals that are lofty yet attainable. Which means “having it all” and its associated myths need to be ditched. Right quick.

Myth #1: I can "have it all" - in sequence.

The notion of having it all at once has been deceased for some time. But we’ve been handed a sneaky alternative:  the idea that we can sequentially have it all. Be a hard-driving career woman, then a fully-focused family lady, then a career woman again. Voila! You had it all! (And, yes, this should apply to men, too…)

An article in Glass Hammer notes that while sequencing may work for some women, it often happens accidentally, at best. The author also notes:

“While there are certainly periods of more intense need, such as when caring for a newborn or a sick family member, no one can effectively slot child-rearing or elder-care efforts into neat time sequences.”

Family isn’t a two-year gig that ends; it’s a lifelong commitment. As is work, if it’s created in a manner that’s meaningful, self-driven, and intrinsically satisfying. We can aim to blend work and life, but we can’t be powerhouse perfect in both. Period. <Click to Tweet>

Myth #2: Having it all simply requires some good planning.

In the book Creating a Life, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett interviewed career-driven women who’d suffered from age-related infertility. One interviewee, who regretted waiting to try for kids, said:

“Ask yourself what you need to be happy at 45. And ask yourself this question early enough so that you have a shot at getting what you want. Learn to be as strategic with your personal life as you are with your career.”

Sounds nice, but is it possible?

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says no. In Lean In she writes, “I’m a big believer in thoughtful preparation…but when it comes to integrating career and family, planning too far in advance can close doors rather than open them.”

I agree with Sandberg. Not only can strategic planning prove inflexible, what you think you’ll want at 45 when you’re 25 tends to be quite different than what you actually end up wanting. Consider this:  your 8-year-old self probably thought you’d want to be living in a castle and wearing princess gowns 24-7 right about now. Was she right? (Alright, this may explain the Kate Middleton obsession, but still...)

Bottomline:  we aren’t good at projecting ourselves into our older self's mind. As a result, long-term work-life strategizing falls flat.

Myth #3:  My career will [matter less/be on auto-pilot] by the time I’m 30.

Sandberg is an outspoken critic of this myth. She writes, “Of all the ways women hold themselves back, perhaps the most pervasive is that they leave before they leave.”

Sandberg contends that women often step back from their career incrementally throughout their twenties, “making accommodations and sacrifices that they believe will be required to have a family.” She argues that as a result, many women have neither the financial power to purchase quality nonparental childcare, nor the motivation to stick with a job they’ve made uninteresting through years of parenting preparation.

Not to mention that the deeper we get into a career, the more engaged we tend to become, not less. Expertise yields passion, making it nearly impossible to walk away. Or to remain content if we do.

Sandberg’s advice to young women:

“Don’t enter the workforce already looking for the exit. Don’t put on the brakes. Accelerate. Keep a foot on the gas pedal until a decision must be made. That’s the only way to ensure that when that day comes, there will be a real decision to make.”

Myth #4:  I can figure work-life stuff out later.

I love this beauty:  the quandary deferment approach.

Uh, try again.

Putting off thinking about where family will fit may mean you never have a family to fit. About half of all high-achieving women in America are childless, “roughly twice the rate in the population at large,” according to Hewlett. Based on interviews, she believes that most of these cases are not by choice, but rather from waiting too long to find a mate and/or attempt conception.

Hewlett’s advice? “If a high-achieving woman were to make finding a partner a priority in her twenties or early thirties, attaining both career and children would be a much less daunting proposition.

As you might imagine, feminists loved that. I actually read Hewlett’s Creating a Life so I could join the feminist bandwagon against her, but I ended up feeling much like author Amy Richards:

“I came to sympathize with Hewlett and eventually realized that she was sadly just in the uncomfortable position of having to tell it like it is. Hewlett wasn't saying women must procreate, but women who wanted a chance at having their own biological child should try sooner rather than later.”

Which leads us to the granddaddy of them all:

Myth #5:  Reproductive technologies will save the day.

At least once a year my intelligent, data-driven females students sit in my seminar proclaiming they’re going to wait until 40 or so to get pregnant. “With technology these days, anything’s possible,” they say, followed by discussions of plans to freeze their eggs.

Thing is, reproductive technologies aren’t knights on white horses.

For instance, freezing eggs is a lengthy process that involves hormones and minor surgery, that costs about $40,000 all told, and that was just taken out of “experimental” status in 2012. Even after all that, it’s far from guaranteed:  embryos freeze better than eggs (i.e., sperm’s necessary), and even frozen embryos only produce children in about 35% of IVF cycles, if the woman is under 40.

Furthermore, the rate of live births after IVF using nonfrozen embryos is only 12% for women 41 or 42 years of age, and 4% after age 42. In other words, anything is not possible.

Simply put:  the timeline for leaving home and getting married has been extending but our biology hasn’t gotten the memo.

Next Time

This all sounds pretty dire, now doesn’t it? Fear not:  since I’m not one to pose a problem without floating a solution, on Thursday I’ll post How to Prepare to Not Have it All. As bad as things may sound, I’ve actually found "having just some" to be a relief. The key? Drilling into your core and figuring out your own priorities. No small task, but well worth the pay off.

• Do you have any “having it all” myths to add to the list? Or has one of the myths I mentioned been your pet myth? Let me know in the comments below!

Must-Read Related Article:

• Why Women Still Can't Have it All (The Atlantic)

ANNOUNCEMENT:  The first Working Self Newsletter will be hitting inboxes this Wednesday! It contains a full-length exclusive article on the science of job crafting (creating work that's fulfilling without leaving your existing job); links to the best stuff from around the web; the inside scoop on this site (including some embarassing tidbits about me as a 10-year-old); and much more. I poured my soul into this thing! If you want to receive it, get on the list before Wednesday morning.

The saga of IVF tends to be emotionally, financially and physically taxing. (Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennsjournal/69407890/)

Millennial Perspectives: March Your Way to the Top

The following guest post is part of our Millennial Perspectives series. It was written by Lexi Kubrak, who blogs at The Nerdy Socialite. Lexi started her own company at 22, a challenge she took on after knowing times were changing in social media and new innovations had to be made. Enigma Agency gave her the edge she needed to learn about business, competition, trends and mistakes. You can follow her on Twitter @LexiKubrak Boomers seem to have one thing that particularly ticks them off about millennials:  we’re too demanding.

It’s the same spiel every time I read a review about millennials in the workplace, or about "the GenY problem." It seems like Boomers are getting sick of us being arrogant, irrational, and entitled.

I say, you forced our hand.

One of the biggest bonuses of being in your 20s in 2013 is the available free connection tools we have to find the right people quickly. Once upon a time our predecessors had to climb their way to the top. Starting at the worst jobs, they worked every day for 20+ years at the same company, hoping and praying to get that needed meeting with the big cheese. But now, the economy isn’t based on lifetime contracts with amazing pension payouts. Unfortunately the business world is now about growth, meaning shorter contract times and harder work than ever before.

Millennials have to step up their game in order to succeed – and the most important part is getting noticed first.

I believe that Boomers have never had such an influx of young and brilliant minds into their workplaces. Traditionally, people slowly amassed reputation in one company. Hiring came straight out of post-secondary institutions as the older executives wanted to mold fresh graduates to keep the status quo of secure profits. Now, with the fickle stock market and online connectivity, corporate businesses don’t have the luxury of planning over decades, and the higher ups are finding out that the status quo doesn’t work.

Therefore Millennials unfortunately have to be a bit bolder than their predecessors. If you want to be hired even for a ground floor career, you have to be noticed by the knowledge and gumption you have. Sometimes the best way to get that first job is to march into the CEO’s office and treat them like an equal. Does it work every time? Not necessarily. But that type of courage is what business leaders see as a defining quality of a valuable employee.

In a world where things can fail within seconds, it takes someone who doesn’t fail in troubling situations to be a true asset to a company. Though I may evoke argument among my peers, I must say I have read about and seen firsthand more Millennials being hired by approaching heads of companies than by applying online and waiting for a response. Nontraditional ways may upset the status quo, but it’s creating a foundation of innovative workers who are changing multi-millions into billions overnight. 

Marching our way to the top is working, and it’s changing businesses for the better.

Do you agree that assertiveness is a positive attribute millennials are bringing to the workplace?