As I was getting ready for a meeting this week, I showed off my new jacket to my husband. He looked at it closely and said, “didn’t you have one just like that?” What?! It was a brand-new jacket. Upon closer inspection, it did very closely resemble a jacket I had bought over 20 years ago when I was working in my first job out of graduate school. Needless to say, that jacket had found its way out of my closet many years ago only to make room for a very similar replacement now.
That got me thinking about how we can sometimes come full circle in our careers, our families, and our lives. One of the speakers at the Harvard Medical School Conference on Coaching and Leadership last month, Whitney Johnson, spoke about the changes we experience in our lives. The big idea that stuck with me was her explanation of how we move through an “S” curve of experience.
We start low on the expertise scale so our work takes us longer. Then, as we gain mastery, we improve speed and expertise and move up the curve. Sooner or later, though, we “max out.” We can get bored because we’ve mastered the task or we can get anxious because we are running ever faster in our efforts to stay at the top. We know the time for change has come.
If we don’t make the change ourselves, the change will happen to us.
Once we make the change, we are back at the beginning of a new curve. Instead of starting our new curve where we left off, we sometimes fall back a few rungs on the imaginary ladder.
We crouch down to spring forward.
So, enjoy “falling back” and getting an extra hour of sleep. And, remember, crouching down or falling back or starting over isn’t bad.
Not bad at all.
If you’re looking for ways to enjoy that extra hour, you can check out:
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Or, you can remember 25 years ago…
And we all had big hair.
What were you doing 25 years ago? Drop me a note or leave a comment.