The gap

Last night our older son went to a Cub Scouts Halloween party. He was a ninja and won the "Looks like the Cub Scout did it himself" category of the pumpkin carving competition.

It seems as we get older the gap between what we want to be and what we are or believe to be gets wider and wider. At my son's age, he is a ninja because he wants to be. He can carve a prize-winning pumpkin and he can have fun at the party.

Who is it that I want to be? What do I need to do to become that? Is the gap really as great as I think it is?

Axed

The ax has fallen. Late Tuesday I got a message for a one on one conversation with my acting manager, first thing Wednesday. That night I couldn't sleep, then ended up oversleeping. While getting ready, I cut my finger on a a razor I left where shouldn't have. Of all things, I was almost late to be let go.

My meeting was short. 30 minutes were allotted, but only took 10. The highlights were explained and a folder with relevant information given to me. There would be a follow-up conference call with an out-placement service later. That day I was to turn in my badge and computer before leaving. I thought I had most everything covered, but in retrospect, I still have some loose ends. No matter, I suppose.

I went in thinking that the cuts would be isolated to my very specific function of the business unit. For months, those around me had been thinking they were safe. As it turns out, the cuts were more widespread, extending into parts I thought were more stable, taking out people who thought they were safe, some very low, and some relatively high (the very high ranks were thinned in the spring). Some had absolutely no idea and were completely unprepared. One person I know didn't even have a resume.

There have been significant cuts throughout my industry this year as it struggles with the new world order. Bloated bureaucracies, unfavorable exchange rates, unstable economies, iffy business strategies and flawed execution. One more quarter to go for 2012. I expect companies in my industry to be making more cuts and limp along with remaining staff through Q4 as they try to scrimp and save to boost their bottom lines. This is going to be a very rough year.

For practical purposes, I am planning on sitting the rest of the year out. My severance package does get me there and we have buffer. I expect with the new budget cycle, more openings will appear 2013 Q1, but there will be a surplus of applicants, bargains to be had if you are a company hiring, I'm sure.

I'm not in a tailspin. Thankfully I had warning. But I'm having trouble finding a new groove despite all my talk. I am pretty sure that in retrospect watching all four seasons of the new Battlestar Galactica would not be considered a productive use of time, but here I am at season two. 

The luxury of time

I think I have been looking forward to this in-between-job period for quite some time. Ever since I joined the company back in California, I've had my fears, so we've been diligently saving. Maybe not as aggressively as we could have, but compared to some, we are in pretty good shape. We relocated to the Midwest for its low housing costs, live in a house that I could easily cover with the paycheck I was getting, bought our now eight-year-old car with cash almost five years ago, do a lot of shopping at the thrift store, don't vary much in our grocery shopping habits--all that sort of frugal living. We contribute to various retirement accounts and best of all, we've been contributing to Coverdell Education Savings Accounts for the boys for years. We've paid a lot out-of-pocket this year for school and other classes, so we can use this account to cover those costs.

With our money buffer, I have the luxury of time. I don't have to panic about making ends meet and look for anything that will pay the bills. Instead, I can put career growth before paying the bills for now.

I am also using this time to work on getting some kind of balance with the boys and with the home.

Reflecting on my past way of doing things, I see that one of the road blocks to my getting things done and being "present" is the persistent chaos around the home. You might even say that work was my way of escaping that chaos. I understand that it is difficult to be the stay-at-home parent, but it's not easy to be the at-work parent either. When you are the at-work parent, you are expected to shift gears easily. Engage at work then engage at home.

Here's my problem. It's really, really difficult for me to engage at home at the end of the day. I am basically an introvert and need quiet time to recharge so when work is done I need to shut down. My guilty admission is that I really liked traveling for work because the end of my work day was the end of my work day and while I might have been calling or emailing people, I was not beginning another bout of negotiation and action, like getting unwilling children to brush. I could read or watch television, iron my clothes...the extravagance!

Secondly, what home with two young boys is not going to be... disorganized? When clothes, toys, and food are intermingled focus can be challenging. It's not just them, of course. Fat Tony and I also tend towards disorder.

On one hand you might say, "C'est la vie." On the other, I fear we may be unintentionally teaching our boys patterns that will make their adult lives more difficult. They might not be able to see the world in the way most do and are unable to relate to others well, might not be armed with a work-hard ethic, might not have the self-confidence and persistence to overcome challenges, might grow up with unacceptable (sloppy) behaviors that will make incorporating in society difficult. By being poor examples of how to take command of our surroundings, I am afraid we are in the process of raising two future homeless people.

Perhaps this is alarmist thinking. Another more pragmatic reason to change things is to make our lives easier. When there is a system, there is less ruminating about what to do. We can easily find things like, oh for example, the receipt and UPC label for the circular saw so we can register for the lifetime warranty.

So with my new-found time, I am going to invest in working on ways to make things better.

1. Engage with the boys.
Playing with them more would be a great start. Sadly, I am not the most fun, but I will try harder.

2. Declutter.
I do my best not to acquire things because letting go of them is difficult for me. I hold on to stuff. Those badge holders from conferences? Can't throw them out. Outgrown socks with no match? I might find it's missing half and then we can donate a usable pair.

Plus, I am not the only one that envisions what an item's life is like after I've parted with it? Sitting in a landfill, or dumped at sea? If there is some way I can find to make an item useful, don't I have some kind of responsibility to do it?

Because the rationalization for keeping things falls in line with frugal living, this resolution is the toughest.

3. Systemize household tasks.
I don't believe I really know how to run a house or ever understood how things "should" be done or sometimes even why. For whatever reasons, I just never got what homemaking was about. Now that I am a home owner, things are clicking and I feel like I am playing catch up with the rest of the world.

So I am taking little steps like making sure we have a place for measuring cups and spoons and making sure Fat Tony knows as well so he can put them in the same place. Yes, we have a long way to go because Fat Tony and I are organizationally challenged. We don't have a coach here to set us straight if we are deviating from plan, so it's up to us to police ourselves. Hello Excel spreadsheets!

3. Exercise more.
I was on a kick, running at least fifteen miles a week on our treadmill. Then our treadmill broke and we didn't fix it for months. Now I've got a persistent pain in my back and a growing beer belly. With all my free time, Fat Tony and I took the treadmill apart and fixed the problem. This is also something that can tie back to engaging with the boys. Our boys see us sitting at the computer all the time, not outside. We need to set a better example.

4. Find things I love doing.
Like writing a blog. I've always dreamed of having my own business, but I've always let outside circumstances control what I do. What was the point of studying for college, when I had no idea what I wanted to learn? Why did I spent weekends and nights working and thinking about the company's goals? I've been working for other people for far too long, doing things I didn't care about. If I don't find the things I love doing now and invest the time into becoming great at them, I will never find that future business.

That's it for now. To keep myself in line I will be reporting on my progress here.

My job search process

It's been over 3 weeks since I got news of our lay off and each day has been very different from the last. If I were to break down the weeks, I'd say that the first week was filled with straight-up grieving--a real demonstration of how mental state (reminder of the loss of identity for past 4 years and impact to family and future) translates to the physical (sobbing, inability to act). Again and again, I could explain why being let go is actually a really, really good thing for the company and me, but on the more primal side, it is a loss, plain and simple, like losing someone you love to a prolonged terminal illness, only many times less bad. Not a surprise and perhaps even a relief, but intensely painful nonetheless. Rather than fight the feeling, I went with the flow and kept myself out of public view until my body could catch up with the rational side of things.

That first week was about finding things to distract myself like talking to colleagues, doing small projects around the house, helping throw a birthday party, writing, and exercise so I could make it to bed each night and wake up the next day feeling like a different person.

Others I spoke to were submitting resumes almost immediately after the news. The kinds of sentiments I heard were fraught with anxiety. People had just moved jobs, relocated, needed the money, had much invested in finding jobs at the same level. There is a good deal of fear that comes out at these times and I can descend into worst case scenarios with the best. But for the most part, knowing we had a rainy day fund made things so much better and knowing that I had already been working on the the "next thing" helped too. My resume was pretty polished (could always use fine-tuning for specific jobs, but highlights were captured in the most flattering way I could manage), I had been working with a mentor at another division, and Fat Tony and I had been thinking about needing to get another income stream into the house. This turn of events was exactly what I needed to move on.

What surprised me was how methodical I got, not in a documenting and cataloging kind of way, but in a deliberate, "this is my goal this week, this is my goal next, and so on" way. First week was all about grieving. Second week was about reflection: who am I, what do I want? what do I need? Third week was about gathering information. Fourth week for applying for the first set. Then it will be about reiterating reflection, information gathering, and application.

The moment I started my job search was not when I started looking at ads, but when I started imagining myself doing a job, pretending I was in that role and imagining the kinds of customers or markets I would be working in. The jobs certainly weren't ones that cleanly fit my background and experience. They were simply jobs that just sound kind of interesting within sales and marketing. From there I started digging into the companies. I reached out to certain people in my network (LinkedIn is so great), telling them where things are and asking people with connections to those companies to talk to me about what they know. People can be incredibly helpful as most understand they might be in the same boat sooner or later. I made a list and starting keeping tabs on progress for each one.


I will take a moment to say that I can't stress how important it is to have informational interviewing skills here. Ideally, you should always be looking for the opportunity for informational interviews. It builds your network, builds your base of knowledge, builds your interviewing skills, makes you bolder. To prosper in the corporate world, I believe it is absolutely essential. But again and again, I get the sentiment that networking is difficult, not something people want to do, they find reasons not to send a simple email suggesting some sort of common activity like a call, a customer visit, an informational interview. This is a great shame because you are willingly keeping yourself in the dark. I can proselytize here because I avoided networking for most of my life too. I get why you might not want to reach out, but the way I've made it work for me has been to think that it is not about me being schmoozy and overly ambitious, but having honest desire to learn. And as far as fearing rejection, we should all learn to deal with rejection and failure as soon as possible. It wasn't until I was well into my thirties that I understood that rejection and failure are more informative than success in a lot of ways. I've made many attempts to reach out with a good number of failures, where people blow you off, make you feel small, or where nothing comes of your meeting. That's OK That's just life. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't.

All this said, I still have my hang-ups. I am certainly not comfortable with "networking events". The one time I attended one in the Bay Area, I came away thinking I was an utter moron and destined for failure. That was really not the right venue for me at the time and the excuse I like to use now for avoiding these events is that I live too far away from where they happen to attend and be a responsible family member. So my goal here is to find other ways to meet people. Perhaps in the blogosphere, perhaps at community events, as long as it doesn't feel like a corporate meat market, I'm good.

OK, so where was I? Oh yes, this week is about applying. Wish me luck.