Category: career

career, failure, fear

Beginning: Facing Up to Fear, Failure, and Monsters

Christa Avampato
Scene from Monsters Inc. by Pixar

Earlier this week I mentioned the tough conversation that Brian and I had about my fear of just jumping into my own business full-time. Admittedly, I was in his office whining and trying to decision tree my way out of fear. His sentiments about my fear have echoed throughout my week in a variety of other experiences and reading. One week later, the key piece of advice from him that I keep coming back to is that taking a leap like this is always scary. There will never be a time when the fear subsides.

Fear is a part of the process
This same idea was framed up by Sean Duffy in his Talent Zoo post entitled “Seven Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs”. Though the title seems a bit dull and run-of-the-mill, I read it anyway and I’m glad I did. The article is loaded with sobering advice for anyone considering a jump like mine like this: “The dictionary says that an entrepreneur is someone who starts and manages a business or other enterprise with considerable initiative and risk.” The risk, and the fear associated with it, cannot be extricated from the work of heading off on our own. Fear and risk are bound up in the very nature of the work itself. In other words, get used to it! 

Sobering failure stat
But what if I fail? What if I hold my head up, look fear dead in the eye, and I don’t make it? Duffy lays out some statistics that first made me ill and then gave me hope:

A company’s chances of surviving its first five years in business = 20%
A product’s chances of surviving past launch = 5%
A company’s chances of ever reaching its long-term financial goals = 5% survival

This may be enough to cause us to throw in the towel before we even start. After all, the odds are steeply stacked against us, but there is some deeper meaning hidden in those numbers. These statistics actually helped me to set aside some of my fear. The great likelihood is that I will fail. It’s practically a given so there’s no sense in worrying about it. Whew – it’s kind of a relief to know this, isn’t it? If I do fail then I will be in good company. And still, I want to give it a whirl on the slight chance that maybe I’m stronger than the odds.

A one-sentence mission helps to release fear
I had coffee last weekend with my friend, Sara, who was in my yoga teacher training. She was also not having it with my decision tree abilities that are delaying my decisions about how to move forward in my career. “Didn’t you go to college and get all of these business skills to have something to fall back on?” I nodded. “Okay, then,” she said. “So try to do what you want. Talk yourself up!” I couldn’t refute that statement. She’s right.

I am a master planner but what I’ve done is plan my way right into plan B without even giving plan A a shot. With Sara’s prompting, I crystallized exactly what I want plan A to be in one sentence: “I want to buy into a holistic medical practice where I work with doctors and therapists to treat the whole patient.” From there, the fear started to dissipate not because I had successfully walled it off so I could walk peacefully around it, but because I just stood up and walked straight through it with my words. And in the process, it made my next steps clearer and more meaningful. Now, I have a concrete goal. (More on those steps in a later post.)

Fear takes a new form
I had been envisioning fear as this big, obnoxious monster whom I thought could be wrestled to the ground and contained. I imagined myself lassoing a big rope around its neck and tethering it to a tree so it couldn’t get to me. Fear is more slippery than that. There isn’t a way to keep it at a safe distance. It’s going to get us, and what really matters is how we face up to it when it is on our doorstep.

In my mind’s eye, I’m trying to put my fear in the form of Sully from Monsters, Inc., someone who looks very scary on the outside but on the inside isn’t so scary at all. I think of myself grabbing the furry hand of this fear monster and leading him along as we chart our course forward up over a grassy hill and on toward a brighter future, together. We can’t shake fear so we might as well befriend it and learn what it has to teach us.

business, career, yoga

Beginning: Moving Away from Welfare Yoga

Christa Avampato

Last week New York magazine ran an article entitled “Welfare Yoga” about the current state of yoga teachers and their lack of income sources. Below is the letter to the editor I wrote in response. The points raised in this piece further confirm that I made the right decision by turning away from the traditional studio teaching route; my gut steered me toward a brighter future by seeking to integrate with the traditional healthcare system.

“Dear Editor,

Thank you for your excellent piece “Welfare Yoga” on October 2, 2011. As a yoga instructor, I’ve been disappointed to see how the value of yoga classes in New York has been deeply diminished by offers through Groupon, Living Social, and other similar sites, as well as the less-than-savvy marketing efforts of many studios.

In many ways, yoga teachers have created the trend of cheap-to-free yoga to their own detriment. Now their own efforts have put them in the bind of people expecting free yoga and the studios not being able to keep their doors open. Rather than fixing this broken business model, an increasing number of studios are compounding the problem by generating their income through teacher training programs that produce even more teachers who compete for an ever-decreasing number of paying teacher gigs. It’s a vicious cycle that yogis are feeding at a dizzying rate.

Unfortunately, “karma” has been equated with “free” in the yoga world, and some teachers and practitioners have come to believe that all yoga should be free to everyone, regardless of the means of their students. We live in a world where eventually there is a cost for everything. In the case of yoga classes in New York City, the ones truly bearing the cost are the instructors who have to work several jobs in addition to (their often free) teaching so they can meet their own basic personal expenses.

Sadly, the only people we have to blame for this situation are ourselves.

Sincerely,
Christa Avampato”
career, choices, yoga

Beginning: The Battle Between the Belly and the Eye

Christa Avampato
A quote from my favorite yogi

“The Sage considers the belly, not the eye.” ~ The Way and Its Power

In the past few weeks, I’ve been wrestling through a next step I’d like to take in my life and career. My interest is in building healthy systems, whether those systems are in healthcare settings, work environments, schools, and in the personal lives of people. My conflict has been whether to continue my training in yoga (NYC is home to a few of the top 500 hour training schools), pursue a different path of training through another graduate degree, or start a new adventure in a form of healing other than yoga. I’ve pro/coned and decision-treed my way to bleary eyes on more than one late evening. All these paths seem to be evenly matched.

I revisited my friend, Susan‘s, advice on careers – compare options to what you really want, not to each other. With this particular decision, I had a hard time making that distinction. It seemed that all of these paths could help me down the road toward turning my career toward building healthy systems. No one way seems surer than the others. On top of Susan’s brilliant advice, I had to grab another piece of her advice from her book The Right Job, Right Now: I had to consider my life values outside of just career in order to make this choice. In other words, I need to look in more than look out.

In my gut, I know:
1.) I am so happy to be nearing an end to my student loans. Being free of debt is very important to me.
2.) I truly relish my free time when I can use to pursue my own projects
3.) No matter what I’ve faced in my life, my yoga and my meditation practices have been there for me, available wherever I go. They are critically important to me.

Though all of these options are good options, in my belly, my gut, it seems like the right choice is to continue down the yoga path for now. I am always open to more information and additional insight. In the immediate future, more training in yoga that focuses on anatomy, alignment, and keeping students safe in class feels like the right place for me to be. And I couldn’t know that by looking out into the world. As The Way and Its Power so beautifully conveys, the way forward is in.  

career, change, choices, decision-making

Beginning: The Grass is Greener Where You Water It

Christa Avampato

“The grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s greener where you water it.” ~ my pal, Sharni

Earlier this week I wrote about my decision to turn down a recent job offer in favor of staying at my current company and pursing my own entrepreneurial projects through Compass Yoga and my writing. I have been surprised by how invigorated I feel from the decision. There is something to be said for having a look around at the career landscape, being given the opportunity to move, and then realizing that I have it pretty good exactly where I am. My current company, while it has its flaws, offers me tremendous flexibility and the opportunity to work with a lot of people whom I truly like and respect. The process of considering another offer gave me fresh eyes to see my current situation’s benefits to my life.

Just before receiving this new offer, friends of mine cautioned me about leaving. I initially wrote off the caution as their own hang-up about change. However, their advice planted a seed of balanced decision making. I really did need to weigh what I was giving up at my current company and what I could potentially receive in return at the new company. Ultimately it came down to realizing that I was going to have to give up a lot (flexibility, relationships and a reputation that I have worked hard for, and a solid compensation package), and I wasn’t going to get enough in return (lower title and compensation than I had expected, and a real loss of my personal time). Once that became clear to me, I knew the new offer wasn’t the right fit for me.

I was away on a business trip when I received the new offer and on the flight to my destination I saw the movie Midnight in Paris. The movie follows the lead character who is obsessed with 1920s Paris and The Lost Generation. He has the opportunity to live in that era of history, and in the process realizes that the people of that period longed for the Belle Époque, Paris in the 1890s. While he realizes his life in 2010 needs some changes, he recognizes that we’re always longing for another time. Too often we think the grass is greener elsewhere when in fact we almost always have the opportunity to make the grass we already have greener through our own efforts.

My friend, Sharni, has been blogging about this very point-of-view and her tag line “the grass is greener where you water it” perfectly sums up my recent career decision. My cautious friends were absolutely right – I have a lot more opportunity right at my fingertips than I realized. I bet you do to!

career, choices, decision-making

Beginning: Let Priorities Shape Reality

Christa Avampato

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ~ Nietzche

With my recent career decision, I had to get my priorities back in order. I used to think of priority setting as a one-and-done action. It’s actually a daily process, a constant tinkering based on new bits of information and insights.

To make my latest career decision, I relied on an old technique that has worked for me in the past: I write my priorities down on paper and post them just above the doorknob of my front door.

 

Here’s the latest list:

  1. Developing Compass Yoga
  2. Teaching – yoga and business
  3. Writing – the daily posts on this blog as well as several other writing projects currently underway
  4. Freedom – in terms of finances, time, and geography

These priorities give me broad context for how to cultivate and slot in opportunities. If an opportunity doesn’t support one of these priorities, then I can pass it on. These priorities are lenses and funnels, a deceptively simple decision tree of sorts. In Nietzche’s words, they are the “whys”. Now, I have a way to evaluate the “hows”.

career, decision-making, job

Beginning: Why I Chose to Not Leave My Job

Christa Avampato

“Man is without a doubt the most interesting fool there is.” ~ Mark Twain

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my conversation with Brian that involved the futility of living on a ledge. At the time, I thought the name of that ledge was the job that I currently have that pays my bills and makes the financing of all of my personal projects possible. That job had grown stale and boring to me. I felt like time was slipping away from me in a wasteful way and so I decided to look around, up and away from my current job and on to new pastures.

As it turned out, I was on a very different ledge. I was offered the opportunity to move on to a new company. I was all set to take it though the offer was not exactly what I had expected. The title of the job had changed, as had the compensation, and there was a sticky direct report situation to deal with that was created by potential future boss. I was asked to share the burden of cleaning up the mess left behind. I didn’t know what to do, so I paused and consulted. I am blessed with an incredible inner circle of loyal, honest, and exceedingly brilliant friends. I contacted a number of them with my conundrum.

The advice was split down the middle: some felt I should absolutely jump to the new role; others had a truly visceral action to my potential departure for this possibly greener pasture that wasn’t of my design. My friend, Susan, a career and personal branding guru, was an exceptionally shining voice. (Her book The Right Job, Right Now: The Complete Toolkit for Finding Your Perfect Career is literally my career bible.) She did something more than offer yes / no advice. She gave me a way to think about opportunities. She asked me to look at the job I wanted, not the options in front of me, and use that as my yardstick. Put another way, what mattered most was the life I imagined and wanted to live, not the opportunities created by others. I was looking in the wrong direction – outward instead of inward. The focus needs to be on the road I want to pave, not on the road that is laid out before me.

My friend, Lon, offered up sage advice as well. He’s had 34 years of Fortune 50 company experience. He has seen it all and then some. He cautioned against the sale pitch of the new job and asked me to truly see what was being masked. While I believe the new company had every wish of keeping my best intentions in mind, they are truthfully in a bind. They need me more than I need them, and I was not getting enough in return for my efforts.

The new job promised a review to change my title and salary in 6 months. Lon reminded me that promises are empty until fulfilled, no matter how earnestly they are initially crafted. People are fickle; they change their minds so all we can truly know are their current words and actions. Now is certain; later is all guesswork, no matter how educated those guesses may be. Lon helped me to see that the ledge I had really been on the well-paved and traveled road built by someone else. The courageous jump I’ve been looking for starts by using the fuel I have in my current job to get me to a new place of my own making.

I received loads of other phenomenal advice from friends and colleagues and I plan to reveal the nuggets of wisdom from each one, paying tribute to each friend, in my posts this week and next. They will be as helpful to you as they were to me. I call out Lon and Susan in this post because their advice hangs together so well, and reminded me so much of advice (and foreshadowing!) that I received 4 years ago from my then-boss and forever-mentor, Bob G. I’ve detailed it before in other posts, but it bears repeating: the difference of my generation to earlier generations is that we will bet on ourselves, not companies, to make our careers.

I didn’t believe Bob at the time. I had never thought of myself as an entrepreneur; I didn’t yet know that I wanted to be at the helm. I thought I needed others to design the structure of my career. I didn’t yet know my ability and desire to craft and design; Bob did and it is his advice, like Susan’s and Lon’s, that I will never forget and always be grateful for.

career, choices, school, student

Beginning: The Process and Product of a Career

Christa Avampato

A friend of mine recently asked me for some advice on how to get into the kind of work I do. I’m currently a product developer in the mobile space, and my first question to her was, “Why do you want to do this kind of work?” She was a little surprised though my interest in the answer was very genuine. She talked about how much she loves technology and how much it does for us to help keep us connected. That’s the end product, and I wanted to know what work, day-to-day, she really enjoyed doing.

The wow of an end-product and the work that goes into making that product are two very different things. I think losing sight of this idea leads many people to jobs they end up disliking. (Though the stats vary widely from study to study, it’s estimated that between 60% and 80% of Americans dislike their jobs.) This is completely understandable – it’s a fine nuance to get our heads around. I started out at Penn as an undergraduate in the engineering school. I loved science and math all through school, and so I thought engineering would blend the two nicely. Plus, I loved the end products of engineering.

I was quickly very unhappy in my classes. I hated the actual work of engineering. What I found I loved was understanding the engineers themselves. How could they possibly sit by themselves in labs for so many long hours. Didn’t they want to talk to anyone? I was fascinated by their focus.

It took me a long time to learn what careers were really for me – those that involve understanding the human mind and the choices we make. I love people and knowing what makes them tick. I want to know why when confronted with choices A, B, and C, they go for C under one set of circumstances and B under another set of circumstances, or even more interestingly, why they sometimes make no choice at all. And then I like to see how those choices impact their lives and the lives of those around them. (After I realized this interest of mine, I became a double major in Economics and History with a minor in Psychology. These are areas of study that all pivot around the psychology of choice, my favorite subject.)

So if you’re looking to start a new career, or you’re trying to understand how on Earth you got yourself into a career that really isn’t for you, my advice is to focus on process. Don’t be so concerned with what you’re creating; consider the act of creation that’s most exciting for you. Don’t let what you’ll be overshadow what you’ll actually do. A career is an action more than it is a title.

career, experience

Beginning: Putting the Pieces of a Career Together

Christa Avampato

If you look at my resume, you’ll see a wide variety of experiences. I’ve worked in 6 industries, companies both big and small, and become a purveyor of so many hats that it’s hard for anyone to put me into a traditional box. This is all by my own design. There are lots of interesting pieces in there, and a person recently asked me how all of this hangs together. (I think he really wanted to ask me what I’m up to!)

I actually do have a box, and it’s one I lovingly crafted myself that proudly carries the sign “puzzle solver”. I love puzzles of all kinds, literal and figurative. I like figuring out how all of the pieces fit to form the cohesive whole. I love the details as much as I love the big picture. I love science and art with equal fervor; sometimes I like to work independently and sometimes I like to work with others. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How are close friends of mine. I use them in my every day conversations as much as possible. For me, pursuit and discovery equal joy.

Companies are made up of lots of little parts and because I like to be an orchestrator, I need to have an intimate understanding of those little parts. So I took different jobs in different industries to learn different skills and meet different kinds of people. This is why relationship-based jobs are so much fun to me; they give me the chance to figure out what makes people tick and that “thing” is different for everyone. I like to know what gets people jazzed and figure out how to give them more of it. People are endlessly fascinating and confounding to me because they are always changing. It’s impossible to be bored with studying them. Each one is so unique.

And I think that may just be the key to building a lifetime career you love – go try all different sorts of things. Don’t be so concerned about how it all fits together in the moment. I didn’t know this love of puzzles would begin to coalesce for me; I just hopped on opportunities that gave me a chance to learn something new. And with every experience, I took what I learned and applied it forward. All you really need is a sense of curiosity, and the insight will take care of itself.

career, work, yoga

Beginning: Knowing When to Walk

Christa Avampato

By Miruna Uzdris
I’ve been speaking with a number of potential partners for Compass Yoga as I explore the possibility of offering on-site yoga classes. Classes begin at the Manhattan VA Hospital on October 7th. The VA development came about so quickly because one of the clinical directors has practiced yoga for quite a few years and believes in its power. She is a kindred spirit and so we’re giving this a try to see how it goes. We’re partners and collaborators.

Another organization I’ve been speaking to has not been able to mirror the experience I’ve had the VA. The Executive Director, a social worker, was on the defensive the moment I met her. I know I can help the people in her program through a yoga and meditation class. I know they will benefit greatly from my personal and professional experience. All she had to do was have an open mind and provide an space for a trial class. She would have seen the low-cost, high-quality impact immediately.

Instead her haunches were up and her aggression was released. “All that woman wants is to come in here and do her little program so she can get some PR for her website.” And worst of all, she asked one of her staff members to deliver that message rather than contacting me herself. The board and I put together Compass Yoga with a lot of heart. No one’s going to spit on our efforts on my watch. Rather than taking the second-hand abuse, I consulted with the board and walked away from the opportunity, much to the shock of the social worker.

Several hours later I got a call from the social worker, and somehow the Executive Director has completely changed her tune and is interested in having me present at a community meeting. I guess he thought I’d be honored by the invitation. Instead, I turned it down in favor of focusing our efforts on other partners who want to be true collaborators.

Here’s what I learned from this situation:

1.) We have to focus our efforts if we’re going to make this practice available to all who are open to it. There is tremendous need for wellness programming among populations like returning veterans who have specific healthcare issues that yoga and meditation can address. We don’t have time to get bogged down by naysayers and people who are trying to defeat our efforts just as we’re beginning to lift off.

2.) A fish rots from the head down, especially in the nonprofit world. If there’s a surly Executive Director in place, the chances of break-through innovation and partnership are slim to non-existent. The organization can have the greatest mission in the world, but if the leadership in place isn’t qualified to actually manage and lead then the mission, and it’s recipients, lose. Management matters.

3.) We have to be well ourselves before we can help others be well. This Executive Director is a therapist. She is trained to help others heal and transcend their own grief, and yet she is not a healthy person. I understand the scarring that can occur from being burned one too many times and the trauma that ensues. I get that on a very personal level. Before I could be a teacher, I needed to be whole and healthy. I needed to deal with my own issues so they didn’t become anyone else’s. It took great courage to face up to my issues and I’m exceedingly proud of that personal work. Many people pass one without taking this road. I hope this Executive Director takes up the challenge and heals her own grief before it’s too late for her and for the people who need her help.

4.) People will treat you the way you let them treat you. If I had let that Executive Director run over me, she would have without thinking twice. Had I gone to that community meeting under those pretenses, I would have set a dangerous precedent with her. The right and professional action to take was to walk away and focus on the partners who want to be well. We have very little time on this Earth – we have to make the most of it.

career, happiness

Beginning: The 10 Commandments of Steve Jobs

Christa Avampato

My friend, Lon, sent this infographic to me. I immediately printed it out and hung it up at my desk. I’m working on my own version of the 10 commandments – how I work and live, what I believe to be the blocks that help to build a life to a happy, fulfilling life. I’ll share them as soon as I’ve completed. Do you have a Until then, here’s Steve’s. Do you have a version you’d like to share?