Wondering...

At a Christmas party, I was talking to my dear friend Emily. Emily's really good at so many things & I'm really fond of her. She started my beloved book club and was my pal in grad school (which she completed and I have not). 

She mentioned (as an aside, I might add) that a friend of hers from college makes $160,000 a year working as a grant writer for an educational supports company. I was floored. I would LOVE to make that kind of money, but mostly I was floored because one of my bucket list items is to become a full-fledged successful grant writer. 

I either asked with my shocked look or the actual words,"Over $100,000 a year as a grant writer!?!" 

Emily replied, "Oh, she writes grants to help schools who want to use her company's products find the funds to purchase them." 

Emily's offhand statement about her friend got me thinking: My job is to find community needs and gaps in services and then work to fill those gaps. My job requires seeking and procuring grants. I love to help people find solutions to their desires & needs. Heck, I could DO a job like THAT!? I know that there are no jobs like that in Muncie, but what about in Indy. Could I set my sights higher than where I am.

And then I've been approached recently about several grant opportunities locally. I've been planning, strategizing and gap-filling in all my free time. I'm working to learn more about non-profit work and once again asking myself if I want to go for the degree that I've half-completed-- what I call "An MBA for non-profits" or if I would actually like to complete an MBA from a REAL business school. 

As I work on my "40 before 40" list (inspired by Heather Sari Miles), these issues really come to the front of my mind. Completing my Master's Degree AND writing successful grant applications are two on my list.

This former Career Counselor keeps asking career questions, but not finding any answers.

Decisions

Life is full of decisions.  Cornell researchers have found that people make over 200 decisions PER DAY just regarding food!

Most days we make mundane decisions with barely a thought: when to get out of bed, when to go to the bathroom, when to sneeze, when to go to bed, what store to shop at. Even what foods we buy and which clothes in our wardrobe we wear become routine. The choice becomes less of a decision than a habit. As choices become habits, they barely get our cognitive attention, because they are rote. When we decide to change a behavior, decisions that are usually rote come to the front of our consciousness and receive more profound attention.

This, I believe, is why change is so emotionally taxing.

When we decide to change ONE thing in our lives, it disrupts our routines. Many mundane or rote decisions must get more of our cognitive attention, thereby creating more decisions. What in the routine of life is a foregone conclusion must be decided in a new way when our lives are sent out of order. This, I believe is the case when someone decides to do anything different be it deciding to diet, add an exercise routine, or even just join a new group or club. But enter a BIG change - moving or job change, a new child or a marriage - and your life is sent into a new gear. Additional choices are required while our brains reset to our "new normal."

It's been six weeks now that I've not been working. Job change is a BIG change, I believe. I've developed a routine by accident in this time and find that I'm not exactly using my time as I would prefer. I love the structure that routine affords me, and I find myself adrift when it's lacking. So the one decision - to quit my job- leads to a plethora of decisions I wasn't anticipating.

I have to remember that I'm not stuck. Be reminded that my new, albeit accidental, routine is not set in stone and decide to DECIDE on how my time will be spent, what my priorities are and how I will choose to invest my energies. Today I'm deciding to decide.

Happenstance isn't a choice. Serendipity is foolish. But choosing has both intrinsic and incidental rewards. So today I'm resetting. Renewing. Re-deciding.

The Once and Future Worker

It feels a bit like purgatory, to be between jobs. Held in limbo between what a specific investment of energy and the unknown Next. Looking for work is it's own special kind of hell. Requiring a prostration that other forms of self inquiry do not, because looking for work requires one's critical self-inventory to become public. That self-inventory is dusted off, shook out, polished within an inch of it's life, then presented to unknown authorities for their acceptance or rejection.

Several times yesterday Elliott told me I was "ruining his rep." Really? I wonder, how does one go about ruining a 6 year old's rep? Sigh.


Since two days ago, I found myself without a job, I too have been concerned about my "rep". It was my decision to resign, but I wasn't expecting it to play out as it did. Leaving for reasons other than another job make the "why are you applying" questions that much more difficult. And make the particular part of purgatory I'm in feel hotter, more intense.

So here I go, self-inventory and reputation in hand, to discover if in an employer's eyes my reputation is still intact. And (although this may be overly melodramatic) thereby to be released from purgatory.