Unsticking Your Career

Tim Butler: Well impasse is a career situation or a life situation where our old ways of problem solving, our old ways of understanding, our old ways of moving forward, are simply no longer working. Now, it's different from just a bad day on the job, or it's different from just a bad day or a frustrating day in a relationship or in another life situation, in that an impasse, this sense of frustration or being stuck, persists, and try as we may our old ways of going at it no longer work.

Rachel Salaman: Now you're an expert on this topic. What excites you about it?

Tim Butler: Well, what excites me about it is that it's part of the human condition. We all must reach states of impasse many times in our lives if we're going to grow and move forward, and it's ironic because typically the way we experience impasse is as a problem, as something that is pathological. We internalize it and we experience it as something that's wrong with us, something that's broken with us, and something – some way in which we are inadequate, when in fact impasse is a developmental necessity. We have to get stuck in order for us to realize that we must change in a fundamental way the way we think about the world and the way in which we see our self in our world.

Rachel Salaman: So everybody hits impasse sometimes?

Tim Butler: Absolutely.

Rachel Salaman: What causes people to reach this point?

Tim Butler: What causes them to reach the point will be unique to that particular individual, but psychologically what's happening; the process is that we have a mental model. We have a way of cognitively understanding the world around us and our role in it, but the model always fails reality; in other words our models are never complete. And when there are changes, when there's a shift in relationships, a shift in the environment, in the power structure, a shift in the circumstances of other important individuals, our model may not encompass that. So what we find is that our way of thinking about understanding the situation doesn't include everything and we're forced to look at it again and understand it in a new way.

Rachel Salaman: Can you give an example of that?

Tim Butler: Certainly, you know, there are a number of examples in the book, and maybe I'll just take one of the stories from the book. Would that be a good idea?

Rachel Salaman: Sounds great.

Tim Butler: Okay. One of the characters, one of the stories in one of the chapters, he's called Tom Wilson in the book, that's not his real name of course, but it gives the example of Tom who is a very successful Social Worker, he had a – he worked for a Social Service Agency, he had a private practice doing psychotherapy, and was quite satisfied with this. He was someone who is naturally talented as a Counselor and really enjoyed working with his clients. Now what happened here in America, during the 1990's, was that there was a big change in healthcare and in the way in which reimbursement is made; it's referred to here as 'managed care'. And when this happened at the agency where Tom was working, suddenly there was a crisis. The structure had to be changed, the whole style of delivering counseling the sessions had to be shortened; the flow of money was reduced and Tom found himself in a situation where he had to respond because his income was significantly reduced and his position had been reorganized. Now he thought for a while that perhaps relying on his private practice and he was thinking that what he really wanted to do was to retreat from the situation, build up his private practice and essentially move away from the difficulties at the agency where he worked, and was planning on doing this, though it obviously presented problems. Then, while he was working on this and thinking about what he wanted to do he had the following dream: in this dream he's in his kitchen at home and he's preparing breakfast, he's preparing breakfast for an army, an army that for some reason or other is dining in his dining room. His job is to be the cook however. But then in the dream the Commanding Officer comes in and says to him that every person is needed in this battle and that he will have to go to battle with all the others. Now when Tom woke up and he thought about this dream and analyzed it he realized what the message was; that he had to become a warrior; that his idea of having a comfortable private practice and not having to deal with the challenges of the marketplace simply was not going to work. What he did was over the next half year is he worked to put together a business, a company that provided what's known here in the United States as Employee Assistance Counseling to small businesses that provides counseling services to employees. He had to tap into that warrior part of himself and become a businessman and a salesperson and develop those skills. Now, as I tell the story I make it sound too easy. You know, Tom, this was difficult for Tom to make this transition, but he realized when he was doing it that there was really this warrior part of himself that was – had never been leaked out before, and that was really energy, an aspect of his personality that needed to be expressed. This was several years ago, so today Tom in fact is a successful business person. This business has grown. He has a number of businesses who are clients and he's in demand as a speaker on this whole process of providing assistance to these types of programs. So this was an example where Tom's model of what his life was and how he fit into it, and even the type of person he was, more of a empathic, a mild mannered counselor, had to shift. It looked like it had to shift because there was a big change in his environment. In fact, there was a whole part of his personality, this warrior part if you will, that wasn't being lived, and that was an important source of energy for him.

Rachel Salaman: So it sounds like the bad patch he went through at work enabled him to uncover a whole other part of his personality that enabled him to move on in his career.

Tim Butler: Absolutely, and even enabled I think doesn't quite capture it, but it comes close. It's almost as if there was this correspondence between the changing environment and Tom's personal growth.

Rachel Salaman: Well if we can talk in more detail about your book, Getting Unstuck, you explore this impasse cycle and you define it in six distinct phases. Now the first of these phases is the arrival of the crisis and the impasse what are the signs of these for people so they recognize them?

Tim Butler: Well in the first phase it feels like any other difficult time, yet it persists. So usually there is a feeling of down mood, a feeling of frustration, a feeling that you're not moving forward, if it's in a career situation, and maybe experiences of sense of flatness, of feeling like you're not inspired, that you're not learning, and you can't see how you're going to grow or take on interesting challenges at work. If it's in a relationship or other life situation it may have that similar stale feeling or a sense of frustration. But the difference in impasse is that this persists, and so our attempts at rationalizing it or trying, i.e. taking a vacation, trying the usual things that we do to adjust to circumstances, they don't work. The crisis seems to deepen and the sense of heaviness, the sense of frustration or sadness, of uncertainty, grows.

Rachel Salaman: And then you reach phase two, which is finding out what the unresolved issues are behind it, is that correct?

Tim Butler: Well, it's interesting. At a time of impasse as the feelings from the impasse deepen what happens is this. Old issues from the past return on their own; things that we thought we had resolved, okay? For Tom, in the example I gave, it was issues around his aggressiveness and his assertiveness that he had never felt comfortable with. It was issues around him feeling like he couldn't make it in the world of business, whereas he had never seen himself in that light before and had doubts about that. At times of impasse we're brought right back to the frontier of our personal development where we laughed off issues that needed to be worked through, but were not worked through, so they return and they return in an unexpected way, and along with them returns a sense of self-doubt. The inner critic returns at times of impasse, that inner critical voice that questions our adequacy, questions our accomplishments, questions whatever, fill in the blank, our looks, our attitude; that painful inner critic experience becomes more pronounced at a time of impasse. And the second phase is a time of self-doubt and a return of all the issues. And in the book there's a chapter devoted to this; how to deal with the inner critic, how to use the second phase as an opportunity to work again on these issues and move them forward.

Rachel Salaman: Now you often use dreams to explain some of the underlying anxieties, as you did with the example of Tom. How have you seen this work? How is it helpful?

Tim Butler: In many of my sessions with clients I don't use dreams as all. I used that example with Tom and actually there are a couple of other cases in the book where I do mention dreams. But what is really needed – this really, actually, moves us on to phase three of the cycle, the cycle that in the book we call 'Letting Go', and what is required at phase three is that we suspend our current model. We say, "Okay, I give up. The way I'm thinking about this is not working. The usual way I do problem solving is not working. I've got to let go of my usual ways of seeing things and thinking about things." And there is an exercise in the book that helps us to suspend our current mental model. When we do this we are then open to a new type of information because what we're looking for are images or metaphors where – what we're really looking for is a new model, a new way of going forward, but it typically comes in the form of images or metaphors or creative ideas. Now dreams are just one way that this might happen during this phase three. There are other ways. In the book there are a number of exercises. One exercise in particular is called 'The Hundred Jobs Exercise', another is called 'The Image Gathering Exercise', and these are exercises that are used to evoke a new imagination, a new type of information, yet allow us to shift in our way of thinking about the impasse situation.

Rachel Salaman: Is it difficult for people to find that new understanding? What kind of percentage of success have you seen among the people you've worked with on this?

Tim Butler: It is difficult, but inevitable, okay? In other words it's the only way we're going to go forward. We can fight it, we can block it, we can just try to tough it out and use our old methods, but sooner or later we must realize that that's not going to work, and hopefully it will be sooner. Now, working with someone who's skilled at a time of impasse can be very helpful, or having a resource like this book that puts the reader through exercises to evoke this type of imagination can be very helpful and very important because it really requires some courage. It really requires some courage to go at the situation, to experience the situation in a different way.

Rachel Salaman: Well we'll talk a bit more about the exercises in a minute, but if we could continue through the cycle of the six phases.

Tim Butler: Sure, well we, actually we've already gone onto the fourth phase. That's what we call 'Shifting'; it's when we imagine a new way of understanding our circumstances, that's what comes out of when we let go and we suspend our current mental model, when we allow a new imagination to emerge, we shift to a new way of framing or approaching the situation altogether. If we go back to our example of Tom, and if you had asked him one year before this event had taken place, well, how did he see himself as a business person he would have laughed at you. He would have told you, "I'm not. I'm a therapist. I'm not a business person at all, you know, I don't like those corporate types. They're too aggressive, you know, like who wants to be caught up in that rat race?" That's the sort of language you would have heard from him, but after his impasse experience, after his working through and recognizing that, you know, this warrior archetype, this warrior self is part of the human personality and it's what he needed at this time in his life to actually be more engaged in his life, that was a shift to a whole new way of seeing his situation and really of seeing his self. So the fourth step really is coming to realize that there is a new way and a very different way to understand what life is demanding of us at the moment.

Rachel Salaman: The fifth stage is a further exploration of personality patterns. Is it possible to generalize about types of personality?

Tim Butler: Well, you know, I think it's often a mistake to stereotype about personalities. I know if you use any quick and easy model of personality type, you know, that can too easily lead to stereotyping. However, at the same time, what we talk about in the book as being this phase five, is, the sense that over time we do recognize patterns in our self. We do recognize better and better as we go through impasses, as we gain more insight, we gain more understanding about the types of people we want to be around, the role in the work situation that are the most meaningful roles for us, the types of activities that are most meaningful, the types of organizational cultures where we want – where we feel most comfortable or the types of life cultures where we will feel most comfortable. So there is this learning about patterns of the self that happen, and the way we handle it in the book is we do present models of the self that can be used to help the reader map out certain patterns and keep track of them over time. So we talk about deeply embedded life interests, which are so important to understand, to understand which types of deeply embedded interests are most meaningful for us, so there's a whole model of the ten basic life interests. There is a model about social motivators, power affiliation and achievement and which one of those is dominant for us and what our particular pattern is. So in the fifth phase we add to this deeper sense of pattern that we accumulate over a lifetime.

Rachel Salaman: And is the idea that you would then take that knowledge and from it work out your next career move?

Tim Butler: What really happens is that we begin in the fourth phase to get images and ideas and a notion of what the most important themes are for us at this moment and then there is a recognition and that is more intuitive, that is more imaginative. In the fifth phase we – the fifth phase is more analytical. We begin to say, "Okay, I see that power is more important for me than I realized. I see that these life interests need to be expressed more." So yes, we begin in the fifth phase to move towards specific ideas, specific solutions if you will, to the impasse situation.

Rachel Salaman: The final phase of the cycle is Taking Action. Now for a lot of people this is the most difficult part how can you transform intent into action?

Tim Butler: Well, first of all let me say that taking some action is vital to make the whole impasse process authentic, okay? Taking some very specific action, whatever it might be, you know, we decide to leave our job or we decide to stay, but to have a very direct conversation with our boss that we had – perhaps were not able to make a year earlier, or we decide to take out our credit card and buy those art materials and set up a studio in our home. Whatever it is, some concrete action is necessary in order to make the work that we've done going through impasse, being stuck, dealing with those painful past issues, suspending our mental model, coming up with a new imagination of who we are and what we need all that has to be authenticated by an action step. And in the book we talk about the actual process of taking the action and we talk about it in terms of decisions, in terms of deciding between two or more potential ways of moving forward and we talk about a particular process of decision making when we look at, let's say, in a simple case where there's a decision between two alternatives and it's very difficult because some has elements that we want, but others that we don't and the other has different ones that we want and different ones that we don't, and we're torn between them, which is typically the way a decision to move forward appears; it appears as a dynamic tension between competing alternatives. And in the book we show a way of working with these dynamic tensions, about how we need to go to each pole in turn and experience it, experience it in an 'as if' fashion. So we take option a) and we pretend, and we pretend that we've made the decision that we're going to accept that alternative, and therefore we go forward and we do things to gather information about it. We interview people, let's say, if it were a career situation, who know about that career, and we find out more about it. We find out about the types of companies that would be appropriate. We may go for information at interviews at those companies and walk the actual halls of those companies and see how at a gut level we're feeling there. We jump into the pool, if you will, and we get wet, and we move forward in the 'as if' fashion, and we do that for both of the poles in turn, one at a time, and what this allows us to do is to gather the type of information we need in order to actually make the decision. In other words we have to gather intuitive data, emotional data; we even have to gather sensory data. What's it like to be in this building? What's it like to be with these people, in addition to the cognitive, analytical data that we typically rely on. The typical way of trying to make a decision is to rely solely on the analytical function, to try to solve the whole thing in our heads, but that can't work because we need a more complete range of information from all aspects of the self. So we have to go deeper into both of the poles and experience them before we get the type of data we need to make an ultimate decision.

Rachel Salaman: Well your book is peppered with what you call 'Deep Dives' and these are the exercises that readers can do as they follow the six phases of the impasse cycle. You mentioned some of them earlier, but let's just talk in more detail now. Could you talk about the 'Stakeholder's Deep Dive', 'cause I thought that was particularly useful?

Tim Butler: Yes, you know whenever we make a decision in our career or in our life we're never making it alone. There are always stakeholders; people who have a strong influence on us, who have a point of view, whether it's conscious or unconscious, about what's right for us. You know, something that I tell my students at Harvard who are trying to make a career decision, you know, what I say to them is this. "Look, you may go into a room and close the door and say this is it, I've got these three alternatives and I must decide, so I'm just going to think it through and come up with a decision." Well, you may think that you're sitting in that room alone, but you never are. There are important people whom you've internalized, who have a point of view that's influencing you. You know, the obvious would be influential parents or other family members, a spouse or a partner, or someone who has – someone who is rather, a stakeholder, and the thing about stakeholders is you need to recognize them and you need to honor them. You need to know who they are. You need to know what point of view they're taking so that you can say, "Okay, I will listen to you and I will take what you have to say into account, but I won't let your voice be the ultimate decision maker."

Often stakeholders have our best interests in mind, but they don't know ourselves fully and they don't have the complete life experience that we have, going into the decision. So in that exercise I guide the reader through taking an inventory of their stakeholders. The stakeholder exercise becomes difficult when the perspective of the stakeholder is unconscious. In other words there's some very important figure, and I think we all have experienced this to a certain extent if we've been able to become aware of it, that there is a viewpoint that the stakeholder has, but they've never come out and said it explicitly. They really do feel that we should be doing this and not that. They really do feel that we should be with this person and not that person. They really do feel we should be living here and not there, but it's never been put right out there on the table, so there's the more difficult part of doing this stakeholder analysis, but in the book, in that particular deep dive, I guide the reader through that process.

Rachel Salaman: Another very, very useful exercise is one you mentioned earlier: 'The Hundred Jobs Exercise'. Could you briefly explain that one?

Tim Butler: Yes, actually the Hundred Jobs looks very simple and straightforward when in fact it's rather subtle and very psychological. It's really a word association exercise and it looks like a simple list of a hundred occupations. You pick out the 12 that are most exciting for you and then you're guided through an analysis. Well, what's really happening here is actually a rather sophisticated, you know, psychological process. For example, let us say that one of those 100 was jet fighter pilot, and if I said to you, Rachel, "Zero through three, and zero being not at all, three being very much, how much would you like to be a jet fighter pilot? Could you give me the answer, please, zero through three?"

Rachel Salaman: Zero.

Tim Butler: Well zero. Now that came rather quickly, Rachel. Have you ever been in the cockpit of a jet fighter?

Rachel Salaman: No, so perhaps it was about not knowing what it was really about.

Tim Butler: Well, it's actually more than that. You've never been in the cockpit of a jet fighter yet you gave me a zero almost instantly. What that means is that the stimulus of the words 'jet fighter pilot' is linked to a complex of meaning for you. It's associated with ideas like violence, high speed, danger, noise, and aggression. Now, I have asked that question to people who – and many people give me zeros by the way. I think that's the answer I'd give myself. I've given that question to people who have given me a three, and for them that same stimulus, jet fighter pilot, is associated with adventure, excitement, service, speed as an exhilarating phenomenon, teamwork, all of those ideas are part of the complex that's tapped into by that stimulus. So when you respond to those 100 jobs and give me your top 12 for excitement, in the book I show you how to analyze them to extract the elemental themes that are behind those 12, the complexes of meaning. And these complexes of meaning become a guide for you at that particular moment in your life for understanding what needs to happen next.

Rachel Salaman: Well it certainly is a very, very interesting exercise and I'm sure lots of people have found it very useful. Because a lot of your work takes place at Harvard Business School many of the people featured in your case studies are talented high achievers. Does this plan laid out in your book for finding new paths work for everyone?

Tim Butler: Yes. Psychological impasse is part of the human condition. We all arrive at psychological impasse and we all go through the six stages in this cycle and we all have to drop our old mental model to suspend it so that we can find a new way of understanding. It is true that a lot of the cases in the book are high achievers. I work with a lot of them in my professional practice and in my work at Harvard, but the process is universal.

Rachel Salaman: And what happens if the Hundred Jobs exercise points you in a direction where you don't really have the talent to make it work? How can people figure out a realistic way forward?

Tim Butler: First let me say that for that particular phase of finding a new imagination, Hundred Jobs is one of the exercises; there are others such as the Image Gathering exercise, which is another important exercise, and that one actually I step you through as an audio on the website that's associated with the book and that website is www.careerleader and career leader is all one word, www.careerleader.com/gettingunstuck and at that site there are other exercises that are linked to the book. So what if it points you in a direction where you don't feel you have the talent? Well, obviously, if there is a type of work or a type of setting that is deeply interesting for you, but you don't feel you have the talent and you need to develop that talent, so it means that you're probably going to move in that direction in a stepwise fashion. So your first step may not be a fulfillment of the vision, okay? But it may be a step that will allow you to build skills on your way toward that vision. This is the way careers work generally. You know, often we have a vision of – often modeled on someone that we admire or someone that we observe, that – who represents the type of role that we would want, but we know that we cannot move there directly. So that a lot of career development is the stepwise finding of the next opportunity, the next work situation that will allow us to develop the skill we need to move closer to the vision.

Rachel Salaman: Well Dr Butler, thank you very much for joining us today.

Tim Butler: You're quite welcome and it's been my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: And as Dr Butler said, you can find out more about his book and the ideas it explores at his website, www.careerleader.com/gettingunstuck. And of course there are plenty of tools to help you move forward in a new direction at mindtools.com.

I'll be back next month with another expert interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.