Agile Passions

By Mrim Boutla

How do you get unstuck when you feel miserable in your job? In Agile Passions, you'll explore key neuroplasticity principles to secure a meaningful job you're passionate about. Through live coaching sessions with clients, including an associate at a top consulting firm, an engineer wanting more meaningful problems to solve, a PhD who wa

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885049665

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Agile Passions

Agile Passions

Musings from a Neuroscientist on Aligning Your Passions with Your Paycheck

Mrim Boutla, PhD

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Mrim Boutla, PhD

All rights reserved.

Agile Passions

Musings from a Neuroscientist on Aligning Your Passions with Your Paycheck

ISBN

979-8-88504-964-1 Paperback

979-8-88504-965-8 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-966-5 Ebook

To Mon Amélie, Mutti, Aïcha, Tiago, and Josh,

This book is for you.

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Clarify Your Triple Fit

Facing Career Fears

The Neuroscience of Overcoming Career Fears

Clarifying Your Triple Fit

Translating Passions into Industry Priorities

Turning Work Values into Sector Fit

Trading Your Undergraduate Skills as Career Currencies

Trading Your Master’s Degree Skills as Career Currencies

Trading Your PhD Skills into Industry Career Currencies

Part II. Connect Your Triple Fit to Twenty-First Century Career Options

Translating Skills into Job Titles: Marketing and Communications

Translating Skills into Job Titles: Finance and Accounting

Translating Skills into Job Titles: Operations

Translating Skills into Job Titles: Human Capital

Part III. Secure Your Next Triple-Fit-Aligned Opportunity

Aligning Your Employer Research with Your Triple Fit

Using Mind-Reading for Advanced Resumé Writing

Networking Reactively to Ace Interviews and Get Offers

Networking Proactively to Ace Interviews and Get Offers

Negotiating Money Meaningfully

Each End Is a New Beginning

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

It all started with the pinging sound of my email. I switched tabs and there it was, a sweet email from my undergraduate adviser congratulating me on my wedding and my new job as an Ivy League postdoctoral fellow in cognitive neuroscience. Since I started my new job a month ago, I had been receiving a steady stream of heartwarming emails from all corners of the globe.

Mentors, colleagues, and friends wrote to tell me how proud they were of my trajectory. Some knew I was the first in my family to graduate from high school. Others I met after I moved to Belgium, where I paid my way through my undergraduate and master’s degree in neuropsychology through all the odd jobs I could find. I smiled as I remembered colleagues I had met when I was doing data entry for an insurance company, when I was a barista at a small coffee shop, and the patients and colleagues I had crossed paths with when I was a night guard in a drug rehab center. Other emails came from my time as a full-ride PhD student in neuroplasticity at the University of Rochester in upstate New York.

I chuckled as I remembered when I first heard of Rochester, New York. Unfamiliar with US geography, I had thought Rochester was a neighborhood of New York City. In my defense, the internet wasn’t widely available at the time. When I got my hands on a map of the United States, I realized New York was the name of that famous city, and that of a US state, and a large state at that. In fact, Rochester and New York City were about an eight-hour drive from one another. That is twice the distance of any big cities within Switzerland, where I grew up.

I still took the plunge and earned my PhD in brain and cognitive sciences in under four years. During the spring of my last semester, I secured a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, an Ivy League school. I should have felt excited and very accomplished. Why, then, was I feeling so miserable?

Feeling uncomfortable with the feelings of doom rising from my chest like a tidal wave, I took a deep breath and did what I did whenever things got tough: work harder.

I placed my fingers resolutely on the keyboard of my desktop and directed my eyes toward the screen. The familiar bright green lines of code on the black background of my screen would get me out of my funk. I had to debug one more data loop—just one more. Oh gosh, I hated MATLAB, the maddening yet amazing data science software I was spending most of my days working on.

To succeed in my field, I had to create or update lines and lines of code to perform complex statistical analyses of brain imaging data. These analyses would then allow me to decide whether the experimental design I had formulated would point at a statistically significant result that I could then write about and publish, ideally in a high-reputation, peer-reviewed journal.

Most of my colleagues seemed to use MATLAB and a host of other tools with delight, losing track of time as they found new ways to analyze data sets, wrote up their results, and formulated new experiments. In contrast, each minute I spent coding in MATLAB felt like weeks. I had gotten into neuroplasticity research to help people and now look at me. It had been months since I had talked to a research participant.

Yes, I had achieved career success as a neuroscientist, but what if it was the wrong career for me? As I grappled with the truth, the green lines of code started to blur in front of my eyes. My breathing sped up, and it felt as though all my thoughts and emotions turned into a dense fog moving in slow motion inside my skull.

The upside of my training as a neuroplasticity PhD was that I could put words onto what was happening: I had too many thoughts and emotions that my brain could not interpret, and therefore it was going blank. Sooner or later, though, my neural networks would start doing what they did best: applying a quick interpretation to the mush based on previous habits so I feel comfortable again. And in my case, it was going to be finding reassuring answers to the questions that started to whirl in my mind:

Is what I’m feeling just a phase?

Maybe this is what happens with every new job. Perhaps you should give this a shot; things might get better once you’re more used to this new job with new people.

How do you tell my supporters that you do not want to pursue the career path they dedicated their lives to?

Would I lose my work visa if my boss learned that I was considering leaving science?

What other career paths are there for a cognitive neuroscience researcher who does not like to crunch data?

My brain retreated to my old habits, the same ones that had gotten me through hard times before: Of course, it was just a phase; it will, of course, get better when you get used to this new job, new colleagues, new town; you’ve done all of that so many times before. No need to share this with anyone; it will get better; you will keep your visa, the respect of everyone around you, and you will be fine. And yeah, who will want to hire a neuroscientist who does not like to do research?

My heart sank, and it took a while before I registered that the strings of gibberish being added to my code on the screen were the results of my fingers shaking on my sensitive keyboard. I removed my hands from the keyboard as though it were burning hot. Why has it become so hard to draw a breath? Recognizing the little sparks in front of my eyes as a possible sign that I was close to fainting, I straightened up and started deep breathing: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. I knew this breathing pattern would allow my brain to switch from a sympathetic response (i.e., flight-or-fight reactions to emotions and situations) to a parasympathetic response (i.e., be present and strategically respond to emotions and situations). With each round of breathing, my body relaxed, and I could focus on making sense of the flow of my thoughts and emotions.

An advantage of being a trained psychologist and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience was that I had the tools to fight back against habits that no longer served me. I knew that habits are formed to help us navigate the world without feeling overwhelmed over time. Habits can be very useful to make sense of our emotions and formulate actions that served us well in the past. As they get reinforced, our habits become unconscious behaviors, and we do things that are so ingrained we are not even aware we are doing them. Most habits are useful. They provide go-to answers to recurring situations we face in our everyday life without feeling exhausted all the time. However, some habits over time might no longer serve us, becoming brain bugs that we need to change to adapt to new circumstances.

The good news is that neuroplasticity research has shown in the past twenty years that our brain bugs can be resolved and that we can overcome our resistance to change through reflective awareness and disciplined practice. As a neuroscientist, I could harness these neuroplasticity principles to address my own brain bugs around career success. I could also rewire my brain to build, live, and work by a different definition of career success and fulfillment.

Over the next few months, I took a deep dive into definitions of career success and how to integrate more meaning into one’s career. The more I read, the more I was confused by the contradictory career advice available in books and online. Granted, it was 1999, and considerably fewer careers were available than we have today in 2022, especially related to technology and the internet industry. Back then, I thought you could either earn a good salary working at a big company on something meaningless, or you could live paycheck to paycheck working on something you find meaningful at a nonprofit or in government. Having money or meaning in your career seemed to be mutually exclusive choices. This did not make sense to me, as I had many examples of scientists and friends who had careers where they made good money and found their work very meaningful.

How to build a meaningful yet well-paid career became my quest. I started out as a career coach for PhDs at Brown University in 2004. My approach as a career and leadership coach was informed by my undergraduate and master’s studies in psychology as well as my PhD research in neuroplasticity. Both were critical in turning scientific results into accessible leadership and career development insights so clients could identify and overcome how their emotions and thought patterns might have been influencing their career decisions. Over the years, as I served as an MBA career coach at the Indiana University School of Business, I attended professional development conferences along with training sessions on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (or MBTI, a popular personality tool) and CareerLeader (an MBA-level career assessment tool).

In 2009, I was fortunate to cross paths with Dr. Mark Albion, a former Harvard Business School professor and the faculty founder of Net Impact, a professional development association for meaning-driven business professionals. Mark and I were honored to receive the 2013 AshokaU/Cordes Prize for Higher Education Social Innovation for our efforts in building More Than Money Careers, a software and training company that included over forty partnerships with higher education institutions in North America. Through More Than Money Careers, Mark and I coached students and trained career coaches to boost the ability of more than five thousand users to build careers that blend meaning and money. More recently, I served as a leadership and career coach for master’s students and alumni from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service. Always seeking to further expand the effectiveness of my coaching approach, I earned my certification as a Gallup Strength Coach as well as my executive certificate in diversity, equity, and inclusion from the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies.

As I kept digging and consolidated a body of research and insights from positive psychology to organizational leadership to management best practices about how professionals derive meaning at work. Over time, I have synthesized around the Triple Fit framework, which focuses on three levels of building meaning at work:

Your role (the strengths, skills, and knowledge you leverage to reach your goals, see, for example, Gallup, 2019, and Gallup n.d. for details),

Your fit with the organizational culture (or how aligned are you with how things get done at the organization or sector, including perks such as a flexible schedule or work from home, as well as how you get along with your colleagues and boss; see for example Global News Wire, 2018, and Yoh, 2021, for details insights), and

Your connection or passion alignment with the core mission or industry of the organization you work for (see, for example, Alexander, 2016).

How aligned are you in each of these three levels? The more you’re aligned on all three, the more likely you will feel a deep sense of purpose at work. Research shows that your sense of purpose at work is, in turn correlated with your career satisfaction and how much meaning you associate with your career (for more details on the connection between purpose and work satisfaction and purpose, see, for example, Weston et al. 2021).

The clash between the dimensions of meaningful work and money has been made even more pronounced due to the onset of and ongoing adjustments that professionals have had to make since the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic. As I write this in January 2022, it is hard to believe that so much has changed about how we perceive success and work satisfaction since the global lockdown in March 2020 and subsequent waves of hybrid or work from home models. The great resignation is upon employers, with research showing that at least 70 to 80 percent of professionals intend to change jobs and move to other organizations as soon as they are able to (Yoh, 2021; Casselman, 2021).

As I observed the massive work shifts occurring in 2020 and the great resignation unfolding in 2021, I received a surge of requests from previous clients and students, asking for my help in guiding them in their next career move. This is why I am writing this book now. I have been coaching thousands of emerging and established professionals as they went from discouraged to empowered as they secured and thrived in careers that maximized meaning and money. Through the lenses of the triple fit process, my clients had mentioned how they felt clearer about their own definition of success, and how to filter job choices through their own unique preferences of roles, organizational culture, and industry.

Over the years, so many have said, You should write a book! So here it is, my attempt at democratizing the coaching process I facilitate in my coaching sessions so you, too, can define and secure jobs that match your own definition of career success, whichever blend of money and meaning that takes for now. Whether you are an impatient optimist or a pragmatic impact-driven professional seeking a new balance between meaning and money at work, this book will combine data as well as stories and approaches to help you overcome your brain bugs to achieve your own definition of career success.

This book is organized into three parts: (1) clarify, (2) connect, and (3) secure your next opportunity.

In Part 1, you will learn how to train your brain to clarify your own career priorities. In Chapter 1, you will learn about brain top-down mechanisms and the role of pain and fears in keeping us stuck in jobs that make us miserable. In Chapter 2, you will explore four neuroplasticity principles to help you clarify your own career goals. In Chapter 3, you will learn about the triple fit framework so you can determine what job title, at which organization, and within which industry might be a better fit for you. In Chapter 4, you will go through the Passions Mosaic, a tool to help clarify your passions and connect them to industries. In Chapter 5, you will explore your work values and connect them to sectors and organizational culture at employers across the private, nonprofit, government, and multilateral sectors. In Chapters 6 through 8, you will clarify the valuable transferable skills you have developed during your education, whether you graduated with an undergraduate, master’s, or PhD degree in the humanities, social sciences, or if you earned a sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degree.

In Part 2 of this book, you will focus on connecting your transferable skills to different types of job titles across functions and sectors. In Chapter 9, you will connect transferable skills to job possibilities in marketing and communications across the private, nonprofit, government, and multilateral sectors. In Chapter 10, you will explore transferable skills and their fit with finance and accounting roles across sectors. In Chapter 11, you will explore operational roles in product-based, service-based, and technology entities across sectors. In Chapter 12, you will learn about transferable skills deemed valuable in human resources and learning roles across sectors.

In Part 3 of this book, you will learn tips to secure your next triple fit-aligned career opportunity. In Chapter 13, you will train your brain to assess your triple fit while researching organizations. In Chapter 14, you will use mind reading abilities to tailor your resumé and cover letters for specific job or internship openings. In Chapters 15 and 16, you will learn how to integrate your networking efforts to convert applications into interviews and interviews into offers. In Chapter 17, you will gain access to twenty-first-century best practices to negotiate offers. In Chapter 18, you will integrate your learnings so you can keep using the triple fit and this book’s insights every time you want to make a career move.

Throughout the book, you will follow the stories of different coaching clients. These clients are composite vignettes that