Heads Up—Get Unstuck in Your Career
We hear it all the time and many of us live it—”I hate my job!” There are multitudes of reasons why people might find their work to be drudgery. It is not true that work is invariably a curse. Adam and Eve were given the responsibility of tending the Garden of Eden in a perfect world. Their “job” gave them an opportunity to learn, to invent, to be useful—all of these are part of the Creation Mandate in Genesis 1:28 where they are charged with the responsibility of subduing the earth and exercising dominion.
For many today, retirement from the workforce makes them feel useless. They may have been defined (in possibly unhelpful ways) by their jobs, but endless days of vacation with no responsibility and thus no personal contribution to make is definitely not the answer. We were created to contribute and the exercise of our unique gifting blesses others as it gives meaning and purpose to our days.
Discovering what you were made to do is an essential part of joyful living.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast episode Questioning Your Way to Vocational Clarity with Dr. Will Gray:
[00:03] Mike Gray: Socrates is reputed to have said, “the unexamined life is not worth living” at his trial for corrupting the youth of Athens through his probing questions. Most of us are not in the habit of examining our assumptions, but we need to. Most people have bought into questionable assumptions about the work they were made to do. Today, we'll unseat five assumptions that commonly lead to frustration in our work lives. Stay with us for specific guidance on how to get unstuck in your career.
This season, we're exploring transformational learning, which starts with a disorienting dilemma. I'm joined today by my son, Dr. Will Gray, who's founder and CEO of Vocationality. Great to have you here today.
[01:00] Will Gray: It's good to be with you.
[01:03] Mike Gray: You received a PhD from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. For people who don't know, it is actually one of the top three universities in the UK. In fact, arguably, by some metrics, it ranks ahead of Oxford and Cambridge.
[01:20] Will Gray: It's true.
[01:23] Mike Gray: In fact, Prince William of the UK graduated from St Andrews, I think both undergraduate and a master's degrees there. So, your PhD studies there particularly focused on the work of T. S. Eliot. It sounds like a long way away from talking about vocation. So could you briefly take us on your own journey, from your own personal disorienting dilemma to the founding of Vocationality?
[01:57] Will Gray: Absolutely. And these kinds of things become clearer in hindsight. I don't think I would have even known what was unfolding at the time. The other William and I missed each other by one year. I think he finished up one year before we were there, but we were alerted all along the way that, oh, this building never used to have a security system, but it has one now because of Prince William being here. And I also was made aware that Oxbridge, which is normally how Oxford and Cambridge are referred to over there, people are saying it should now be called Stoxsbridge, if I remember correctly, now that St Andrews, for two years in a row has, or two seasons in a row, has bested Cambridge and Oxford for the top UK university honors, for whatever that's worth, I'm happy for them. Well, I was planning at that point in my life to spend the rest of my life teaching on the college and graduate school level, literature in particular, and 20th century and contemporary literature in particular. Beyond that, which is part of the reason why I was studying T. S. Eliot. What I did not know, and I'm sure this will be part of what we talk about otherwise in this conversation, is that the system of higher education was changing dramatically during the entire time I was getting graduate degrees. And in addition to that, the system of our economy was about to crash in 2008 and 2009. And this was around the time I was finishing. So, by the time I was done with my PhD and even teaching full time, the availability of tenure track roles were shrinking and shrinking and shrinking on purpose in higher education. And I don't know that there's necessarily anything sinister about it. As we all know, higher education has gotten more and more expensive. And what you may not know is that most of the teachers in higher education are paid less and less than they used to be. In fact, I had to work a second job while I was working full time just to make ends meet for our family. We could have, you know, lived on whatever it was, $37,000 a year, but that's all it was. And I was full time. I was not adjunct.
[04:11] Mike Gray: So, adjunct's another step down from there.
[04:13] Will Gray: That's right. That's another step down from there. So, 80% of the teaching in my department was done by people on a one-year contract that paid that little. So, we had a decision to make. Were we going to try to fight what seemed to be a losing battle in higher education to make that work, which I really wanted to, or was I going to have to change careers? Providentially while I was there teaching, one of the courses I was assigned to teach was not a literature course at all. It was business communication. I did not want to teach it, and it turns out the students did not want to take it. So that's about as much of a perfect storm as you can get. It's one of those courses that you had a choice of depending on your major for a required slot. So, you could either take business communication or, I think, maybe technical writing or something like, something that most people would be even more afraid of.
[05:08] Mike Gray: Something practical.
[05:09] Will Gray: Something practical, right. And most of these juniors and seniors taking this course were convinced that this sounded less painful, and it sounded like it was going to help them to get a job, because the first part of the course was resume writing and interviewing, and I had my choice of the textbooks for the course. There's a lot of freedom, but every textbook taught it the same way that I vaguely recalled being taught how careers worked, which is that it's a fill in the blank exercise. You have a resume template, you have a cover letter template, and you fill them out. And of course, you have all the other questions answered: what you should put on your resume, what you should put in your cover letter, where you should even be applying, what kind of work you should even be up to. None of those questions were addressed at all. And I felt like that was a mistake. And so, I didn't think I was going to get in trouble for this. But I announced to the class we would not be using a textbook for that part of the course, and that I was cobbling together some other tools to help them research themselves and then research the kinds of places where they might be applying to make sure it even made sense for them to apply there. And what shocked me, I was about to say surprised, but it shocked me, was that several of those juniors and seniors changed their majors after that part of the course. And that's the first time that I realized this is a pretty significant thing. And it was years later that Vocationality was an actual business. But in many ways, those couple hundred students were the first clients.
[06:38] Mike Gray: You kind of brought us up to the edge. In a sentence or two, what is Vocationality trying to do?
[06:45] Will Gray: Sure. Well, I know now that it is not only common, but it is the majority experience in careers that people feel stuck or lost. And that's not just at the point of college education when 75% of students have no idea what to major in. That percentage has held steady for a couple decades now, if I understand correctly. But it continues on into people's work life and career. I call it work life rather than career. It feels a little more hopeful to me where somewhere between two thirds and maybe even up to 87% in some parts of the world of people are not emotionally engaged with their work, don't look forward to their jobs, aren't seeking out ways of actively improving their workplace, because they just don't feel like that's what they're made to be doing. So, for all those people who are lost and stuck, Vocationality is a way of helping them get proactive with their careers and unstuck, and also helping them to navigate based on a discovery of the work that they were made to do. So, in many ways, I found this is not a normal approach to career guidance. But as you can hear, I didn't create this in order to find some sort of niche in that industry. It just so turns out Vocationality is going about career guidance in a very different way than the other options.
[08:08] Mike Gray: So, part of this difficulty that you've described here, I guess we could call it going with the flow of your life, you know, what expectations you have or others have for you, that probably behind that there are some unhelpful assumptions that people are making. And the nature of assumptions is that we assume them, that we don't criticize them, we don't try and take them apart. We don't evaluate whether they're called for or justifiable. So that's part of getting out of a disorienting dilemma. As we've emphasized over and over again this season, these assumptions that need to be reevaluated, I think you list five of them. So, could you take us through what that assumption looks like and then why it's questionable or maybe even false on the face once you think about, once you've got it out and you're looking at it?
[09:11] Will Gray: Yes, absolutely. And before I do, I just want to mention maybe this is something you've already talked about this season, maybe not. But these assumptions or systems in many ways are actually a feature. Like if they're working well, it's something we can all be grateful for. And I would, I would not equate exactly assumptions and systems, but I think we're talking about that same level of something that has become invisible because it's so widely practiced. In my mind, it's the same thing as a habit. On a personal level, once you develop a habit, one of the features of it is that it becomes invisible. You don't have to think about it anymore. That's the new norm. That's what you do. And you can imagine that would be a real plus. If the habit is a good habit, you don't have to use any energy or mind space. You don't have to try to remember it. It's just become instinctive. It's not a—it's not a feature, however, if that system or assumption or habit is not a helpful one, uh, that, then it's doubly dangerous because you, you're not even aware that you're doing it. It just seems to be the norm or it seems to be the status quo. It's just what's going to happen. But these assumptions within our work life, I don't know if, if they're ever verbalized. You know, in my experience, I don't know that any of these necessarily were verbalized. But if you hear them, my hope is that you recognize that this is part of the water that we're all swimming in too. And I'm sure you've heard that analogy when the older fish swims by, the younger fish and says, how's the water today, boys? And the fish look at each other and say, what's water? Right? This is how assumptions and systems work. We just—It's what we're swimming in and we don't realize what it is. So, first of all, there is an assumption that school prepares us for everything we need to know in our work life. And many, many years ago, when school became more of a standardized thing, that was still not exactly true. In many ways, school was pulling people away from maybe the agricultural kinds of work that might have been going on in their family. And ever since, I think there's been this healthy tug of war between what people are up to at school and what the actual jobs are in the world. I know that I, for instance, have held several jobs that did not exist when I first studied in college. That's how quickly things are changing these days. So, is it school's job to keep up with all of that? Maybe, I guess. Is it our job to realize that maybe this was never true, and it can't fully hold true. That for many kinds of work, it's not just going to be school that prepares you and you should go into school and that will be all you need. But I think most of us believe that on some level, and beyond that, (2) there's this sense that if you study hard at school or if you work hard in your jobs, and this is just kind of that showing up kind of assumption, like I'm doing, I'm doing my best. If I do my best, then the rest of my career will take care of itself. And I've worked with many people who verbalize this to me that they either felt that they were told that on multiple occasions or they just believed that strongly. And this is a sad one because you'd love for people who are working hard for things to work out for them. And that is not often the case. Sometimes it happens to be. But there's so much else that goes into a successful work life that just studying hard and working hard unfortunately, is not enough. The third assumption is that we, in our culture at least, have this strange sense that by age 18, you should have the rest of your life pretty much figured out. Because if you're going to college or if you're not going to college these days, that is the point at which you choose the direction for the rest of your work life. And as you know, your brain is still seven years away from settling and you still have hormones rushing through your body. And it's not exactly a fair thing, particularly in a culture where we don't know ourselves very well, to ask an 18-year-old to predict the rest of their work life, and yet we do. Fourth assumption, careers that are working well look like staying in one job for most of your life. Now this is curious because I have spoken with many people about this statistic I'm about to share with you. And most people are convinced that this statistic relates to our generations today and by our generations today. I don't know who you are listening, but maybe this is talking about millennials or Gen Z or something like that. And that's the reality that it's normal to hold at least twelve jobs over the course of your career. Now that is an actual statistic, and this is from the US Bureau of Labor. That statistic is about baby boomers because they couldn't measure that statistic until the generation was retiring. And so, this stereotype that many people have about baby boomers, that that was the generation where people held one job for most of their careers. So maybe we're looking at three tops. You know, that was twelve or more. And now it's going to be much, much beyond 15, probably in these younger generations. That's not a sign of failure and it's not a sign that people are just hard to please. It's a sign that the nature of work has changed dramatically and the nature of jobs and how long they're needed in a particular company. And so, this assumption that careers are just going to work well and it's going to look like staying in one job for the rest of your life, well, you're going to get frustrated if that's your assumption. Finally, fifth one, getting offered a promotion is the main sign that you're doing good work. And in fact, you should always take that promotion, especially if it means more income. Now, I've learned these from clients. I've learned them in some ways from my own career. I've come to believe that each of those assumptions are false and unhelpful and will not lead to a work life that is satisfying on almost any level.
[15:12] Mike Gray: Maybe we can circle back around and talk a little bit about a few of these. So, the idea that school prepares us for what we need in work life. There is—as somebody who's been in higher education for most of my adult life—there is this tension between what we typically call the vocational approach to higher education. I'm a scientist, but I've been in liberal arts education, and I am a firm believer that that is probably the best way to develop the kinds of problem-solving thinking skills that will serve you well, regardless of what you do with them later on. But parents, in particular (the ones who pay the bills), are particularly anxious that their money is going to result in something that provides stability for their child and hopefully fulfillment, but tend to emphasize what we call the vocational track, which sounds kind of negative, like it doesn't matter so much. The real question is, does this pay well and can you make a living at it or maybe a comfortable living? What kind of preparation do we expect school to give us realistically? And then I guess secondarily, I think there are many jobs that don't require a college education, and it's a one size fits all kind of thing that has been unfortunate for both the people who end up with massive loans and can't get a job that will pay for those loans and the problem that they get themselves into when really this was probably not a wise decision upfront based on who they are and where they end up. So maybe you could talk about a little bit about the tension of what realistically you can expect college education to do and why it's probably a mistake for colleges to be intensely focused on, on a vocational outcome.
[17:31] Will Gray: Sure. Well, part of what I shared earlier was there is always going to be a gap or a lag between what colleges are prepared to equip people for and the actual jobs that might need to be filled. So not just on that level, but also on the humane level. I'm a big believer in the liberal arts as well, that higher education is not just preparing you for a job, but hopefully for a whole adult life. And I think if we knew that, we probably restructure what we're teaching on the higher education level, maybe even in a liberal arts setting. There's so much that goes untaught, right. But that is not just incidental but quite crucial to adult lives. So, I'm not sure from a family, from family to family what they're expecting, but my sense culturally is that we feel that the job market is more competitive than ever, and we must prepare our children for this competitive job market. And whether you have money to throw at private schools or prep schools or whatever the case may be or not, or whether you're going after scholarships, I think there's this sense that is my child getting what they will need to get in order to be successful in their career. And probably a close second is, are the finances going to work out not just to pay for college, but, you know, are they going to, are they going to go into, you know, one of these careers that has no chance of paying off the debt? And if so, that doesn't make any sense. This is one of the challenges with a system that's kind of gone off the rails a little bit, financially at least, and why we have all this controversy now about whether student loans should be forgiven or not forgiven or whether people should have known better or whatever the case may be. It's hard to justify or hard to land really, on that when we have a whole culture that's saying you've got to go to college, and this is how much college is, it's just more and more expensive all the time. So, I'm not sure from family to family what the expectations are, but my sense is there's always going to be a need for preparing people for adult human life. It may be that higher education is in need of a shakeup or disruption, as some people might say, or some alternative measure. But there are so many careers that require a college major still and appropriately so, or that have some kind of credential associated with them. This is a complicated question. I just think the cultural forces of the last several decades have been that everybody should be going to college. And I don't know that that was ever true or the case. And I'm a big believer in college. So, when several years ago you had Microsoft and Google, I think were the first two, if I remember correctly saying you no longer needed a college degree in order to be hired there, there was a huge seismic shift and kind of echoes out into lots of other places that maybe college education wasn't required. But I think if you're considering it, it's vocational. Yes, but also there's a lot more implications of what's going on there that probably aren't what we're thinking about for the adult human.
[20:33] Mike Gray: So, the indirectness of it, I think, catches some people off guard. Like four years of this is adding up to something that is going to improve you as a human being in ways that are difficult to quantify. That some employers might recognize the value and some might not, depending on the nature of the job. And that might, in fact be part of why you move from one job to another that you're not leveraging in this particular career, what you know you were trained to do. And in fact, it might even be a hindrance here.
[21:10] Will Gray: Yes.
[21:11] Mike Gray: To be thoughtful about things that you're just supposed to do without questioning them.
[21:17] Will Gray: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I could see that.
[21:20] Mike Gray: And of course, part of the way this works out for kids who go to college is the changing of majors over time as they get a sense of what this major is about and whether I'm suited for this, either dispositionally, intellectually, and possibly whether I have any kind of passion at all. For this kind of work. So, I think it's probably inevitable that there's some of this back and forth, that it's not necessarily a failure, that I change majors a few times. But when it gets to be like, I'm trying, I'm now three semesters away from graduation, I'm trying to salvage all of the coursework that I've already taken, and I've got to find something that puts all of this debt together into a degree I can get out with and not incur any more debt. In fact, some people end up in that desperation kind of phase. Like, I don't think there's really anything here that really attracts me, but I've got to. I've got to cobble together something that will allow me to graduate. Which means they enter the workforce then with still no clue about what they were made to do.
[22:41] Will Gray: Yes, and that's an extreme version of, you know, what some people would call the sunk cost fallacy. You know, like, I put all this money into it. I've spent all this time taking these courses. I guess I've got to figure out, I don't know, physical education or something as my degree. And that's not to diss anybody who's gone into physical education. I think there are versions all the way back to really mild ones, which is, I guess I should choose this because one of my parents did it, or I guess I should choose this because this seems hot right now, or I guess I should choose this because this will make a lot of money, or whatever the case may be. I mean, those are all versions of the, in some ways, of the sunk cost fallacy, where you're just choosing something based on some other kind of bizarre momentum that you're experiencing that may have nothing to do with you and your ability to do this work well or even understand it well, which some people run into on a college level.
There's an analogy that I often use in Vocationality of going to a jeans store to buy jeans for the first time. And I know it's a bit bizarre because most people haven't bought jeans throughout their life, but you could imagine going to a jean store and never having bought jeans and realizing when you're showing up that not all of the jeans are going to fit you. How are you possibly going to find a pair that fits you? And one strategy, of course, is just to start trying on lots of pairs of jeans, you know? But what happens if you, all those pairs of jeans don't fit? You know, that's still not a great strategy to change your major, change your major. Or for many people, change your job, change your job, change your job. Because inevitably one of these will fit. You know, you're skipping a major step there, which is understanding some things about yourself and work that's part of your design. That makes that analogy silly. Most of us walk into a jeans store and because of some simple things we know about ourselves, we can filter out 99% of the jeans from our view and just focus in on the ones that have the best chance of fitting us.
[24:30] Mike Gray: So, when you're talking about a little while ago, changing careers twelve times as a baby boomer, which I am, but I haven't changed my career twelve times, maybe I want to define a little bit about for that generation what changing career looked like. I mean, we're talking about basically doing the same thing, but a company that's more in tune with my values. Or are we talking that statistic applying to complete—let's just say the job description would not be the same for the job. Even though, you know, I did change companies, I also changed job descriptions. So, you.
[25:12] Will Gray: It's a good question. I don't know is the short answer. But for them to say, and I'm. Did I say career changes earlier? Did I say job changes? Because I believe it's job changes. And some of those, of course, are going to be wide enough that it would be considered a career change. When I used to do this kind of work, now I'm doing this other kind of work. Some of those, of course, happen during your teenage years when you're stocking shelves or when you're flipping hamburgers. Whatever the case may be, that may be wildly different than what you do for work later in life. But what is the case is that the number of job changes you should expect is wildly higher than most people anticipate. They're not prepared for any of them as a result, you know, all of them might come as a surprise, or all of them might come as this is, I guess, what I'm supposed to be doing next. There's a lot of careers that I would describe as in reactive mode because we think that if we work hard and we do our part, the rest just takes care of itself. Well, no one's at the wheel of the rest of it, you know, as I say sometimes, “your boss is not actively looking out for your best work.” I mean, unless they're an extraordinary individual, that's not their job to be managing your career for you. They're just looking at what the needs look like and sure, maybe you should get promoted to be a manager now, but that has nothing to do with whether you are a good fit to be a manager and a leader of people or not.
[26:38] Mike Gray: Yeah. So, I think particularly for my parents’ generation, which I guess is the greatest.
[26:42] Will Gray: Generation, with all humility.
[26:47] Mike Gray: There was this sense that part of this was loyalty to your company and your company was loyal to you. They were looking out for you.
[26:57] Will Gray: Yes.
[26:57] Mike Gray: And so if you gave it your best every day that your company was not going to undercut you, that in downtimes for the business, they would find ways to keep you on, that they would tolerate losses for a period of time until things righted themselves again, because you had earned a place in the company. So particularly in that generation, it was not uncommon for somebody to have this at least mental sense of what it means to be part of pick something, General Motors or whatever, and in the south, it would be textile mills. This is going to keep going, and it may not be particularly fulfilling, but there is this sense of security that the company and I are working together, and my efforts are being noticed and rewarded on some level, at least, that I'm not going to get laid off from this job. And of course, my generation, of course, I'm baby boomers is a long span. So, I'm actually in the hippie generation, which started to question all of that, like, yeah, well, that model really doesn't work very well. And companies are. It kind of flipped the narrative completely to the other side. Companies are in it for themselves. They're in it. They'll cut you out anytime it's not to their advantage. They want you to think that you're valuable as long as it's really valuable to them. And if not, then you may not have a job. And companies did restructure during that period of time, and technology had something to do with that, but there were lots of other forces involved. So, I think what you're saying in the current era, particularly, jobs are very unpredictable. Markets are very unpredictable. You can take the automotive industry, since I brought General Motors up, so what are electric vehicles going to do? And so, companies are kind of caught in the middle, so they're going to need to transition to electric vehicles. But what's that going to do to the demand for workers? And workers want to be assured that I’ve got a job because I've been here a long time, and I want to retire with that job in place, or a better one in this company. So, I think part of the landscape changing has at least exacerbated the situation where it's difficult to predict if you're a company that wants to do right by your workers, whether in fact your company is going to be solvent in ten years or whether what you do is not going to be a commodity that anybody's interested in any longer superseded by something else.
[30:00] Will Gray: Absolutely.
[30:01] Mike Gray: That to say, I guess, that these days, in particular, people who are in their careers all the more need to evaluate those assumptions and I think move to a more active involvement in trying to assess their situation and not wait until the hammer falls. And now they don't know what to do. They haven't been thinking in those terms that that was even a possibility. And now, effectively, they're out on the street with a pink slip in their hands. So, I've heard you talk about the kind of agency that somebody needs to take that is proactive, that's getting out in front of this. It's not waiting to be shocked that the industry has disintegrated, and I don't have a job anymore. You've defined some roles that people need to inhabit. It may sound a little bit odd to inhabit more than one role simultaneously, but this is not a split personality kind of.
[31:05] Will Gray: Right. It's similar to being, you know, I'm a father and a husband and a brother and a son. You know, I'm able somehow to pull up some of those roles at the same time. Right. Yeah. There are really three roles. And this is, in my mind, one of the simplest ways of understanding. Well, what am I supposed to do about this? Because I think a lot of people, when they realize what you mean, all those assumptions are not sound. I can't just rely on those. And you're saying there's this invisible system that we're all using, and this invisible system is leading to these pretty lousy outcomes where people in college and careers don't really love things. Well, what can I do about that? Well, the reality is these three roles that I'm about to name are already yours. It's just not a part of our culture to teach that. And I don't think it's because anybody's winning, particularly by keeping these under the surface. I think it's just not part of our culture, and I think it's not part of most parts of the world's culture. The first role is that there is a CEO of your career, and it always has been you, and it was never anybody else. And by CEO, I'm not sure how that lands with everybody. Some people don't like the idea of a CEO that CEO's are, like you were describing earlier, out for themselves. Well, some of them are. Not all of them are. But there needs to be a CEO of a company of a particular size, somebody to look out for the big picture of things, somebody to try to keep the potential unlocked of what's going on in the company. If you found out that you were a CEO of a company that you didn't realize you were the CEO of, hopefully that would make you quite curious to learn, well, what company, what does it provide, what does it offer? And what do I get to decide then as a, as a CEO of this company? The same thing is true about your career. And that doesn't need to feel overwhelming. It just means that there is somebody who can choose what to do with your career, and nobody else was ever going to be the one to be thoughtfully getting ahead of you in your career. And choosing your boss does. I can tell you from being a boss in the past and from having other people lead me, they've got enough on their plate. They're not trying to actively manage your career for you. Your spouse. It's not their job, right? It's not your friend's job. And this is what happens, really, when we go to ask people for frustrated advice, usually is that we're trying. We're realizing there's no CEO of my career, maybe, will you be the CEO of my career and tell me what I need to do next? And so, this is not a critique of anyone, because I didn't realize until decades into my career that I was not being CEO of my career. I was just letting it happen to me, for good or for bad. There was nobody at the wheel. And in many ways, this is the first job that you need to reclaim, because this is the act of shifting your career out of reactive mode and into proactive mode, saying, I will take some agency for what's about to happen. And in many ways that leads to this second role, which is the role of a curious self detective. I mentioned earlier about the jeans shopping analogy. They're magical things that we know about ourselves and genes. They're not qualities of us primarily or jeans. They're of the match between us and jeans. Or you could think in your work life, the match between the best work I'm designed to do for, for others that is discoverable for anybody, just like your waist and inseam, or just like preferences like cut and fabric and color are discoverable. Your best work is discoverable. But this is not going to be something that they teach you in school, how to do or about yourself. And you can become curious about how you are designed. And everybody is designed. And I can tell you from even having worked with avowed atheists who have gone through the Vocationality program, they're pretty much convinced that they're designed, too. And they're not at all surprised when there are things that they discover about their design that they can cooperate with and live out of. You could imagine if you were designed and you didn't cooperate with your design, that might be a really frustrating life. If you did discover at least some of your design and live out of that, a lot gets easier, including your best work. Final role is a best work agent. And if you've heard of an agent before, this is somebody who acts on your behalf to try to find the best fit, whether it's with an actor or some other kind of talent, or whether you have a real estate agent, they're trying to find the best match possible. And this comes back to all those job changes that you may have across your career. Are you just going to let those happen to you? Because you can. Many people do. And this is why I think many people end up in jobs where they feel stuck. You could be looking out on a regular basis, let's say an annual basis. You could give yourself an annual checkup to see how your work life is going, because it may be that there are things you can do to refocus into your best work without changing jobs at all. It could be that you're being offered a promotion or you're being offered to some kind of lateral move. Well, is that actually going to move you out of your best work or into your best work or something else? Right. Or if you're getting headhunted or whatever the case may be, somebody's sending you a LinkedIn message to try to get you to go somewhere else. You don't just have to let all these things happen to you. You get to ask the question, from what I know now, is this going to be a place where I can do my best work, or is it not? And these are not overwhelming roles to play. They're just. It's almost like awakening to the realization that you've always had those three roles and no one's called them to your attention. Yeah.
[36:50] Mike Gray: So, practically speaking, what are some concrete steps that involve implementing those roles in trying to evaluate, I suppose, where you are at present, whether that's training for a career or whether it's in the midst of a career, what does this look like? You've touched on it a little bit, but maybe you can make it a little bit more concrete in terms of some steps that could be taken to move you to where what it looks like to inhabit all of these rules simultaneously.
[37:27] Will Gray: Yes. Well, years ago, I would have thought that the first step was to figure out what your best work is. That's still a pretty crucial step. But now I realize that's the second step. There's a first step that may not even feel like a step because it doesn't necessarily look any different to anybody else, but it's the decision that you want a new chapter in your career. In many, I call this the Bethesda principle, sometimes based on this account of Jesus going to the pool of Bethesda, where a man's been lying by the pool for decades, and he asked the man, do you want to be healed? Well, which is a pretty gutsy question to ask, I guess, but he knew that was the right question to ask. And there is a first question for anybody who's been stuck in any kind of status quo. And this could be in any part of your life. It can be in your work, it can be in a relationship, it can be in a friendship. It can be some kind of habit that you're not happy with. There has to be a decision, first of all, to move out of that, that you actually want something different. And I found until that happens, there's no other change that can really happen on the other side of that. That is the first step of any change or growth is wanting to change or grow.
[38:37] Mike Gray: So, people often feel that's risky, though. Like, at least I'm getting a paycheck, right?
[38:42] Will Gray: Right. Well, sure.
[38:43] Mike Gray: Yes. And this would be like upsetting the apple cart. Like, I'm going to come home and I'm going to tell my wife, yes, you know, this is what I'm going to do. And she's like, are you crazy?
[38:52] Will Gray: Yeah. Fortunately, that is not the change that I am recommending. This is. This is a decision that you make for yourself, that you are going to. That things are going to look different in your career. And I think it includes a couple of sub steps, almost, that it includes, first of all, the decision that the way your career has been happening is not what you wish for the rest of your life. Now, maybe that sounds straightforward, but I think for many people, that's kind of looking it in the eyes to say, all right, what's been happening is not what I want to continue happening. But then you can shift pretty quickly into what I would call dreaming, which is really getting specific with what you'd love to become more true about your work life and trying to get as specific as possible. And I think writing these down is really helpful. And it may be that those things never fully become true, but that some of them become more true over time. And so, none of this is quitting your job. I don't believe in creating active risk. I think that's a mistake. Even if you're in the worst job ever, there are ways of transitioning out of that safely. But deciding that you want to start a new chapter is claiming that role of CEO of your career, even though there's been no change yet, it's showing up for that job, and then you're ready for that second job, which is to start getting really curious about what your best work is. And of course, Vocationality has some shapes to make this easier, but anybody can eavesdrop on their best work. Some of it is as simple as noticing what comes more easily to you than it does to other people. I call the reality of how we're designed difference. All of us are designed differently. And difference is not a negative thing or a positive thing. It's just a distinct thing. So, what comes more easily to you than other people? You should probably keep track of that and play to that. That might be a source of your best work. What about what you're so interested in that you would make time for it anyway? Okay, that might be a source of your best work. And these kinds of things you can be. You can act like a curious self detective and start to notice. You can commission what in Vocationality we call insight partners. A couple of people, two or three people in your life, who know you well and care about you and are willing to be honest with you, to start noticing these specific things in you, because the clearer you have a sense of your best work, the easier it is to do, the vaguer your sense of your best work. Boy, that's tough. You know, when people have this sense, like, I don't know, I think I'm a people person, or, you know, like, numbers make sense to me. Well, what do you do with that? That's too vague. You know, so there has to be this belief that your work is radically specific. And I have found that from working with hundreds of people now, everybody's best work is radically specific. And thank God, because there's a lot of radically specific work out there that needs to be done. Well, at that point, once you've reclaimed CEO of your career as a job that is yours, and once you've gotten curious about your best work. I think it makes sense to run a checkup like I mentioned a moment ago. Okay. Is there a gap between my current work and my best work? And probably there is if you've had these questions. And that could even be wildly successful careers. I've worked with a client before who was meeting me from his private yacht in order to join our calls. He had been wildly successful, but he had never felt like any of his work was very meaningful and it didn't feel like very “him” to participate in. And he wanted the next chapter of his life to be a little more like what he was designed for. So, what is that gap? Because for some people, it's just going to be showing up differently to the work that they already have in front of them. And I've seen this many times where it's like suddenly the same job lights up in Technicolor in whole new ways. It could be all the way to the other extreme, where you're not only in a kind of work that you're not equipped for at all, but you're not even in the right kind of career, and it is right time for a career change or somewhere in between. I think that's kind of the point of clarity. And from there, depending on what that gap is, you can decide: do I just take the lead in showing up differently? Do I take the lead in navigating to a better fit job? Do I initiate what I would call a best work conversation with my current boss to ask if certain things can change so that my best work can show up, which everybody cares about your best work. This is not just a matter of preference at that point. If your boss knows there's best work at stake, now that's a different kind of conversation. So those are some very practical steps on putting this into practice. And again, Vocationality creates tools to make this easier, but I think anybody can do this if they want to.
[43:26] Mike Gray: So, speaking of tools, you've got a weekly newsletter called what? Work Life Wednesday. Yes, it comes out every Wednesday and continues the conversation that we're having. Moves in other directions, but always helpful. And that's free.
[43:43] Will Gray: Yes.
[43:44] Mike Gray: So, the blog that accompanies this will have a way to join that newsletter. And then, of course, there's Vocationality itself, which people can find out about by going on the web to vocationality.com.
[43:58] Will Gray: Absolutely.
[43:59] Mike Gray: We've started your wheels spinning, maybe, and there's lots more to think about, but it's been helpful. Thanks for sharing this and for your desire to help other people get unstuck.
[44:12] Will Gray: It's a pleasure.
[44:18] Mike Gray: Join me in two weeks. As we consider embedded misconceptions about learning that we impose on the education of young children. We're not consciously trying to be mean. Most of us simply don't know better. Optimal learning for young children is suspiciously like deep and durable learning in adults. Rekindle joy and wonder personally as you learn what's best for your children. See you soon.
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