A step in the right direction: squiggly paths for wiggly minds
I had a book when I was a kid called ‘A Step in the Right Direction’. It was a light-hearted book gifted to me because I loved rhymes and daft poems. I loved the quirky and eclectic style of the absurd verses and whimsical illustrations. I kept coming back to leaf through the book during times of uncertainty, even in my teens and twenties.
Until a few years back, I’ve mostly viewed life as a series of stepping stones and tick boxes to check off, things I wanted to accomplish, places I wanted to work, the types of wine I wanted to drink, the countries I wanted to travel to.
But in 2017, I left a cosy government job with long-term job security to do something brave (or reckless, depending on which way your bread is buttered). I decided to become a communications and copywriting consultant (or freelancer, depending on how much you are brave enough to charge). Just like a salmon swimming frantically upstream, I chose to swim against the tide. I’m not sure in 2020 that I can say with confidence that I’ve reached my ‘destination’. I think I still have my armbands on. I’m not even sure if I’m a salmon.
I’d had some scary moments while working in Government that I was going to end up doing the same thing forever. There were some ‘on the inside’ who were very attracted to this prospect and no matter how many re-organisations or restructures they lived through, they just wanted to do the same thing in the same job over and over until it was time to wheel them out and dump them at the doors of Thornhill Crematorium.
The call of the wild
In 2017, I emerged blinking into the vast plains of the entrepreneurial startup community. The possibilities were endless. I started going to these business breakfast networking thingies and meeting lots of life coaches who all talked a lot about goals and life plans. People started to ask me what my long term goals were for my business (I still feel icky when people ask me this) and did I want to build an agency of some sort, you know…attempt global domination and that sort of thing.
The general idea is that those who want true mastery over their lives and feel like true commanders of their own destinies would have a daily routine, a business guru or leadership coach and a community/tribe behind them to hold them accountable for meeting their goals and achieving true happiness and enlightenment. Or something. I don’t know…I wasn’t always listening. One of the ‘mastery’ theories I encountered in these communities, I jokingly re-christened ‘The five pillars of wankery,’ such was my cynicism.
While I met some truly inspiring colleagues, friends and associates on my travels, I’ve always felt like the littlest hobo. I never really had a destination I was trying to get to and for this reason always assumed that my status as a cons-eelancer (I identify as both consultant and freelancer depending on the contract) was somehow fraudulent.
Apart from one fun business masterclass weekend where I nearly got trampled by cows, the rest of the leadership/coaching community made me feel a bit queasy. I could never quite get to the bottom of my own unease and I never fully trusted my own good fortune. Even though I was told repeatedly by business experts that ‘luck is when preparation meets opportunity’. Or something. I wasn’t always listening.
The joy of wandering off track
All my clients (but one) were referrals and contacts I made through other contracts. I was amazed to be this lucky. I did find myself in a bit of a chokehold constantly trying to measure whether what I was doing could have been much better, I could have done so much more, I should be a bit more hungry and bloodthirsty to build and be better and grow and well let’s be honest — earn more money! But I just couldn’t stomach it. I found it hard to even summon the appetite at times. I found that the isolation and lone-working from working independently actually made my occasional introversion much worse.
In 2018, I found myself in a spot of bother mentally which sent me down the rabbit hole for a while. Not exactly ‘A Step in the Right Direction.’ I lost one or two clients because I couldn’t depend on myself to stay fully present and attentive to their needs and keep functioning in other areas of my life. I’ve written about this before for World Mental Health Day.
Despite my ‘Step in the Direction’ book willing me on, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the thought of life on a single track with one destination felt a bit…overwhelming. So final. Pointless. While I was putting out a mental health fire with one hand and keeping the plates spinning with client work with another, I decided to do something I always wanted to do and started working with a university. I’d tried this on five separate occasions in the past but in 2019, I started working part time for an environmental project and the rest of the time with retainer clients.
I think this step proved to be part of my repair and recovery process. With a new work focus and social face-time with colleagues back on the menu, I started to find my rhythm again. I also came across a book called ‘squiggly careers’.
The concept is that life isn’t a linear process. Life, experiences and love all take you to new places, (if you let them) but many of us are caught on a treadmill of sorts, trying to tick all the boxes and scale career ladders without actually savouring and sampling what makes life interesting and colourful.
“The greatest goal for any 21st century professional is to have a squiggly career. The days of linear progression belong to history. The joys of trying new things, working it out and making it up are all of our working futures. Work is dead, long live the squiggly career!”
Sam Conniff Allende, author of Be More Pirate
In my three and a bit years of cons-eelancer adventures, I’ve worked for a global management consultancy firm, with life-coaches who had verbal diarrhea, two startup membership communities and a business owner so utterly obsessed with dogs that she built a whole tourism business around them. I’d hosted an official delegation from the Cayman Islands, hosted webinars about environmental science, posed for clients in internet adverts about debt and funerals and found myself at a sex party in Mayfair in the name of research. Some contracts are more enjoyable than others, let’s just leave it at that.
While I was doing all this, I travelled all over the UK (and popped over to Spain) to pet-sit for furry and feathery pets as part of a global pet-sitting community. This alone has been one of the top experiences of my squiggly life so far — and I didn’t make a single penny from it.
Which brings me to life in 2020. Did you ever imagine? Look, I know it’s becoming cliche to say it…but if you haven’t felt on a visceral level that this is life shaking you by the shoulders then when are you going to wake up? I haven’t STOPPED bloody thinking since March. I’m bloody knackered, quite frankly.
When the pandemic hit, I counted my lucky stars that as I lost one client, another one showed up at exactly the right time just as the university offered me more hours. It seemed too good to be true. Another example of a squiggly career (or preparation meeting opportunity?) in action.
I found the first few months of being cooped up extraordinarily difficult. Almost paralyzing. But again, I followed a squiggly line and found beauty in the everyday minutiae of life — planning meals and baking, reading and attending to my curiosity for the random. Then a month or two ago, long after we’d all stopped clapping for the NHS, my wiggly, restless mind took me down another path.
Relationships with impact
Learning about the therapy process as I was going through it was one of the most intellectually fascinating times of my life. I wondered if I could try on a different hat, as it were. Rather than existing to make others look and sound better in a communications and marketing sense, I wonder if I could be the kind of person who could be there for someone when they really needed it?
It occured to me that the very best features of my role in the communications industry are the times when you get to positively influence someone to make a better choice, demonstrate positivity in the world and support someone in the early stages of their career. It was these human, everyday encounters and opportunities to build impactful relationships that meant the most to me over the years.
The nuts and bolts and mechanics of the tools I use in my day job don’t always fascinate or drive me in the same way my relationships with my clients and team mates do. It’s with this in mind that I became curious about counselling and therapy — could it be something I might be good at? Am i SUCH a terrible interruptor (like my husband says) and if so, is it something I can learn to curb? Will my previous habit of not really listening get in the way of, you know — actual listening. ACTIVE listening?
Can I hold space for someone else going through the worst time of their lives? Away from the gloss and ‘always on show’ industry in which I work (where we do our best to frame organisations and people in the best possible light), can I handle the emotional fallout of seeing people at their worst? I’m a communications professional who has spent the last twelve years of my career actively bracing to respond and react. Deep listening isn’t something that tends to be trained on the floors of press offices.
Alongside my university role and my ad-hoc client work (which is, unsurprisingly quiet right now) I am now in training twice a week to potentially practice therapy as an additional career option. I don’t know where this will lead, if it will be a natural fit or if I’ll be any good at it. All I know is, my wiggly mind is thoroughly enjoying learning about the concepts and the practice, so far.
I meet with classmates twice a week and I have a few areas of interest I’d like to explore as the courses progress. Life is so uncertain right now and for the time-being there’s no ‘end point’ in sight. So for now, rather than trying to be the salmon in the river swimming frantically upstream, I am instead on the river bank…admiring the view and taking it all in.
Don’t ask me about myself
Or why I talk in stanzas,
For all the questions that you ask,
I haven’t got the answers
I may know why the world is flat
Or why the sea is sand
But elbow grease and trouser crease,
I cannot understand
So ask me of freshwater fish,
And famous ballet dancers,
But don’t ask me about myself,
I haven’t got the answers
Colin West, A Step in the Right Direction
