Tuesday, August 16, 2016

PERSONAL ASPIRATION SPECIAL ......THE CUBICLE EPIPHANY

THE CUBICLE EPIPHANY 

One day in the spring of 1999, Julie Kasten’s career aspirations shifted in an instant. She was sitting in her cubicle at the time, eavesdropping on the woman in the neighboring cube.

Kasten, 24, was working for a well-respected consulting firm in Washington, DC. She had joined the firm about 18 months earlier, attracted by the chance to work in marketing communications. The cubicle next to her was reserved for the use of out-of-town executives while they were visiting the DC office. Kasten didn’t know the woman who was using the cube that day. Nevertheless, the woman changed her life.

“She was smartly attired… Blue pantsuit. Well-tailored. Polished. She stuck out among the other visitors,” said Kasten. “She was on the phone pretty much for the duration of her stay. And what struck me was her enthusiasm. 

“I knew she was looking at the blank walls around her—same as mine. But she was so skillful at what she was doing, and obviously enjoying herself.”

It occurred to Kasten that the woman was doing the same job she would be doing if she were promoted a few times from her current role.  

Kasten’s next thoughts came as a jolt.

If that’s what success in this role sounds like, I don’t want it. She’s energized by what she’s talking about. But it bores me to death.

“I imagined myself wanting to be like she was. But talking about something else,” said Kasten.

At that moment, she knew she would quit her job. 

She was too sensible to quit on the spot, but she began plotting her exit. A few months later, she visited a career counselor, hoping to discover a career that better suited her interests. That’s when her life shifted a second time. 

The counselor listened to her aspirations and offered some tools—personality tests and skills assessments—to clarify the kind of work she wanted to do. Armed with this data, the counselor suggested to Kasten a few careers that might fit her. But Kasten had already decided. She remembers looking at the counselor, thinking, I like your job. I want to do what you do.

By the fall of 1999, Kasten was enrolled in graduate school for counseling. As of 2016, she had been a career counselor for 14 years.

It took only two lightning-bolt moments to shape Kasten’s career. Neither one was planned, and neither one was foreseen. They just happened, and in an instant, her life was different.  

How can such big shifts happen so quickly? The psychologist Roy Baumeister studied people like Kasten who experience sudden life changes. He described what she experienced, sitting in her cubicle that day, as the “crystallization of discontent,” a moment when an array of concerns and misgivings were suddenly stitched together.

She’d had doubts about her position before, vague feelings of dissatisfaction. But she would argue against herself: “It’s a good job, it pays well, what’s my problem?” So the doubts never cohered—that is, until the day she eavesdropped on a woman in the neighboring cube and—BOOM—she suddenly knew. This isn’t for me. Notice that nothing about her job had changed. She wasn’t demoted or demeaned by a supervisor or given unfair assignments. She wasn’t reacting to a change in circumstances. She was reacting to a change in thinking.

Baumeister’s point is that it’s the linkage among the dissatisfactions that is new in the moment of crystallization. All the clues were there before, but as long as they stayed isolated from each other, they didn’t spark action.

Baumeister said that the crystallization of discontent often precedes divorce: “Marital breakup seems to show a similar pattern. Initially, marital dissatisfaction is felt and expressed in terms of specific and often minor problems. Instead of saying ‘I am not satisfied with our marriage,’ the person criticizes the partner’s actions in many individual, particular ways. Later, however, the person comes to see the problems and dissatisfactions as part of a global pattern.”

Baumeister did not study the opposite phenomenon: a “crystallization of contentment” (or satisfaction, perhaps). But that’s exactly what seemed to happen to Kasten, later, in the career counselor’s office: a sudden stitching-together of the clues that she was well-suited for the life of a counselor.  

-Dan & Chip

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