The Career Clinic

By Maureen Anderson

The secret to life is doing the work we are meant to do. As the longtime host of a radio show devoted to helping people find work they love, Maureen Anderson has often invited listeners in to hear firsthand accounts of people who not only relish their work, but live without regret. The Career Clinic is filled with intimate, revealing, and inspiring stories of career transitions that led to fulfillment, meaning, and peace. . .and offers suggestions for how others can make them too. Readers will find plenty of practical guidance on how to make the leap from the 9-to-5 doldrums to a love affair with their career. From a fashion designer who became a psychotherapist, to a husband and wife who followed their dream to open a bookstore, to a secretary who became the famous editor of a legendary magazine, the book offers warmhearted advice and encouragement. Readers will learn how to find their place in the world, have fun, and say, “Yes!” to what truly makes them happy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Oct 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780814410523

Book preview

PREFACE

I am afraid to die.

I know this because for a while, I wasn’t. I was writing my first book, and so immersed in work I loved that it was as if magic dust had been sprinkled on everything. I was filled with such a sense of purpose and peace that if someone had asked me what I thought about dying, I think I would have brushed off the question. Well, whatever, I can imagine having said. I just want to get back to my book.

The minute I turned in the manuscript, it returned—what Gregg Levoy, author of Callings, calls a low-grade, background anxiety about death.

It made me think the secret to life is doing the work we are meant to do.

It was also about this time I began hosting a radio program that helps people find work they love. Since then I’ve done hundreds of interviews and met many people who not only love their work, but live without regret. They don’t necessarily define themselves by their work, but it was their foundation—the starting place from which their lives evolved. As someone put it, they know where they’re going, whom they want to take along, and what they want the scenery to be like.

I want to share some of their stories with you because I believe they have something important to teach us about how to live.

Levoy thinks we want to die with a yes on our lips and not a no. We don’t want to enter kingdom come kicking and screaming and begging for more time.

I don’t want to, anyway. I don’t want to get to the end of the road and find out my life hasn’t added up to anything. I want to run a subtotal now, so I can make adjustments.

Most of all I want to be like the monk in Bernie Siegel’s Prescriptions for Living. When asked what he would do if he had only fifteen minutes left to live, he smiled, said This—and went back to his gardening.

ONE

No Regrets

They never warn you. The old ones. There should be volumes written on it. There should be billboards proclaiming it on every street corner. Government pamphlets should be printed up and distributed to every citizen. But as it is, only the old ones know, and they never tell. They keep it to themselves like one final inside joke. Passing knowing glances and head nods. This is for them to know and for the rest of us to find out. And we, all of us, do find out eventually—when it’s too late to do anything about it.

We grow up hearing the worn adages: Time flies, time is of the essence, there’s no time like the present. Words of wisdom that we commit to memory and never completely grasp. We never took it seriously, not really. We should have been shaken awake, slapped hard across the face, somehow been made to appreciate fully the preciousness of time.

—Greg Crosby, Newsweek

I’ve already mentioned that I’m afraid to die. Since writing that, I’ve made peace with the concept—to some extent. But my peace was tested recently. A routine medical test came back with the recommendation to get more tests. For twenty hours or so, I was in a place I’d never been before, and it wasn’t fear I felt, only grief.

If more tests confirmed there was something to worry about, what would I do then? How could I say good-bye to my sweethearts? I wasn’t afraid to die. I just didn’t want to.

There wasn’t room for much of anything else. Just sadness at the thought of saying good-bye.

Work did cross my mind, though. What, exactly, have I contributed? Has it mattered that I’ve been here? And in those scary moments, it wasn’t the past I was thinking about. It was now. What am I up to now? I thought of two things: this book, and a speech I was giving a few weeks later that terrified me.

They were comfort, those two things, because I was still reaching—and that’s all that mattered. Giving myself a chance to matter. Not knowing how my story’s going to turn out, but not minding—because I’m still having fun writing it, still excited to turn the page.

Before this health scare I would have told you I was on speaking terms with death. What a crock. I had no idea. But I can report there isn’t much I’ve changed, having had a glimpse of just how much I love my life. From now on I want to do more of what I’ve been doing, become more me, throw myself out there with more abandon.

When I interview people for The Career Clinic we often talk about death. We begin with the end, as the saying goes. How do you want it to have mattered that you were here? Now do that.

Gregg Levoy

CALLINGS

Consult your death.

Given the fact, the brute, existential fact that you’re going to die and be a million years dead, what do you want to do with this little nick of time? What do you really want to do?

I agree with Nietzsche, who said that life is a thousand times too short to bore ourselves. And I wonder if your life flashed before your eyes, would it hold your interest?

Some people consider me an expert on finding work you love because of a book I wrote, Callings. I first started working on the book in 1993, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I was living in Taos, New Mexico, and teaching a workshop for writers called The True Material. Essentially it was a four-day retreat, and it was about how to know that you’re writing what you really need to be writing. I had started to teach the workshops with my partner, Robin, and one day I was sitting at my computer preparing for another one. I had an inch-thick stack of notes sitting there, and she walked in and looked at it. It looks like you’re writing a book rather than preparing for a workshop, she said. And I realized either I was grossly overpreparing or she was right.

I tried writing the book for writers for about six months, and kept hitting a brick wall. Then one afternoon I had a revelation. The book wanted to get bigger; I wanted to help everyone find his true material.

I had a sense while I was writing Callings of absolute rightness. A question I get asked a lot is, How do you figure out whether this is a true calling that comes from a deeper, higher place, or just the ego, wishful thinking, or even a desire for escape? So I was looking at this sense of rightness that I had, and that was one of the clear signals—that this was definitely the book that wanted to be written through me. It was an absolute feeling of being on the ball, being in line with what really wanted to come through me, and a sense that it was also aligned with my deeper values. The book just felt absolutely right all the way along.

At the moment, my calling is to take the book out on the road. Being on the road is healing and satisfies the other side of my personality. It’s the antidote to the isolation of writing. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since the book came out, workshops and lectures, to the point where, when people ask me what I do, my old standby, I’m a writer, doesn’t even feel quite right anymore. Now I would say, first and foremost, I’m a teacher.

People ask me what a calling is. Before I answer, I like to point out that it’s easy to scare the daylights out of yourself by thinking a calling has to be something exalted, like the ministry. It doesn’t. It doesn’t have to relate to work at all. An intuition is a calling, a dream is a calling, a body symptom is a calling. Literally, the word symptom means sign, so it is therefore also a calling. Intuition, dreams, and symptoms are like fire drills for the bigger calls. I think paying attention to the smaller ones can help you recognize the big ones when they appear.

All the religions of the world seem to agree that dreams are one of the channels through which the gods traditionally speak to mortals. I think by paying attention to your dreams, promising yourself that you will interpret them as best you can and attend to them, and just in general honoring them, you will bring all sorts of incredible insights and instructions into your life. Why sleep through them?

That said, I have had to cultivate patience on the order of years for callings to come through. The kind of passion and clarity I felt while writing Callings, that this is what I was put on the earth to do, has seemed to come in waves. In between, I’m just hanging there, awaiting further instructions, my marching orders. The key for me is to keep asking the question. However long it takes, I keep asking for dreams, keep paying attention to my intuition, keep looking at my loves and my hates. I pay attention to all those little emotional tropisms: what I move toward, what I move away from. Eventually there’s a significant clustering of signals that indicates, okay, this is what’s next.

When I was writing the book I had this overwhelming anxiety that I wouldn’t live long enough to finish it. I’ve never had this feeling before, but I was afraid I would get into an accident or something would happen to prevent me from fulfilling what felt like a piece of destiny to me. I was so immensely relieved when it was over. It felt like, now’s a good time to die. I could die fulfilled because at least I made this contribution to the world and got this proverbial music out of me.

I have since come back to my usual, low-grade, background anxiety about death, which of course just means there’s still more inside of me I want to get out.

At any given time I want to feel like I’m really using myself up, that I’m using the gifts that I have, not just giving a generous tip of the hat to them, but really making the most of them.

David Sutherland

FILMMAKER

I am a documentary portraitist.

I make my living producing films that are totally driven by the audio. You can hear and feel the characters from as much as a hundred yards away, like you’re living in their skin, and that’s really what drives the plot—the feeling that you’re so close to these people you’re a part of the family. I joke that I do the PBS version of reality TV. It’s not cost-effective. There can be more than a half million pieces of audio in a single film that you have to painstakingly edit, and on one film it took me nineteen weeks just to do that.

The production I’m most known for is The Farmer’s Wife. The goal with my work is to portray the cost and value of a dream. In this film I wanted to put a face on the people who were chasing the dream of family farming. I was looking for a woman who had something in her voice. I had never even met Juanita Buschkoetter when I decided she was the one. I talked to her on the phone and just knew. She had a catch in her voice, and she spoke from her heart.

I fell in love with Nebraska while we were doing this film. You can be on the street and hear people talking a quarter mile away. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you can hear exactly what they’re saying. That’s part of what gave me the inspiration to use several microphones while we were taping. I used as many as six at once. They’re wireless, they’re in their shirts, and Juanita and her husband got so used to them being there it’s like they weren’t. I’d be in a kitchen cupboard monitoring sound and Juanita would be putting dishes away and she’d slam the cupboard doors into me like I was part of the furniture, she was that into what she was talking about.

We were with Juanita and her husband when they woke up, and we stayed with them until they went to bed. Then we went back to the motel room for some editing, before getting up at six the next morning and starting all over again. It took years to make this film, and there were many times I could identify with the Buschkoetters more than I would have liked. We went through two-thirds of our retirement money on the production, and in some ways it was the lowest point of my life. You don’t even want to know how many people told me I was out of my mind, doing what I was doing. There were no programmers who, before they saw footage from The Farmer’s Wife, said anyone would watch six and a half hours about a farm family.

And you know what? The show had 18 million viewers. It came out the day the videotape of Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal was released. It also coincided with the season premier of Monday Night Football and the debut of the new sitcoms in the fall schedule. By the third night, the website had more than 800,000 hits and we had

Reviews for The Career Clinic

[fishpi · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This isn't so much a guide to finding your career as it is a collection of stories and essays on the topic from a wide range of people; the "8 simple rules" are just an attempt to impose structure on the essays by grouping them vaguely according to the message they contain.There are some wise people among those whose contributions are featured, including people like Richard Bolles and Marshall Goldsmith who have made names for themselves helping people with their careers. There are also plenty of fairly ordinary people doing fairly ordinary jobs after extraordinary career changes.While the editor has obviously made an effort to bring in people with a wide range of experiences, truth be told the stories get a bit samey. Most follow the pattern of "I was making six figures in the brillo-pad industry, but I wasn't happy, so I gave it all up to sell window boxes hand made from my husband's toenail clippings and now I couldn't be happier."I suspect different stories will inspire different people, which probably justifies their inclusion. Though some of them border on rambling or self-promotion none are inappropriately long, so even if you find a few of them dull it doesn't spoil the book too much.Probably the best way to enjoy this book is not to rush it, and to read the stories a few at a time. All in all not a bad book if you need career inspiration, but it's not a how-to manual.