A New Mission

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Roy Cohen knows all about a lightbulb moment. The career coach and author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide was a career counsellor for Goldman Sachs, with one office at the bank and another at the World Trade Center; he was there, and a fire warden for the floor, when the 9/11 attacks took place. “That was a defining moment and caused me to make a decision about how I envisaged the next chapter of my career,” he says. He realised that “I was quite successful, but I didn’t feel like I had found my voice: I was moving along professionally in a passive kind of way.” The shock of 9/11, and his awful proximity to it, prompted some decisions. “I realised that if we don’t fulfil our potential we have no-one to direct our attention to but ourselves. We can’t use anyone else as an excuse for what we don’t try as hard as possible to fulfil. That’s what I discovered: a lightbulb that went on, and there was really no turning back.”

Naturally not everyone is jolted by such a terrible shock, and others instead have a general sense that all is not well. “Triggers don’t have to be so dramatic,” says Cohen. “Sometimes we are aware of the turning points, other times they may be a little more subliminal. They may be cumulative over time.” But they happen to many of us. “I have worked with thousands of folks over the years who have wanted to make a change in their careers.”

That sense is perhaps particularly profound in financial services today, with the banking sector worldwide facing either scrutiny, decline or often both. “Not everyone on Wall Street is enormously wealthy,” says Cohen. “There are large numbers of folks who are doing OK but didn’t hit the home run they were expecting to. Combine that with the lack of stability on Wall Street now on both the buy and the sell side, the fact is it’s a rocky landscape which has led to a lot of dissatisfaction.”

Kim Ann Curtin is an executive performance coach and the author of Transforming Wall Street: A Conscious Path for a New Future. A lot of what she deals with revolves around the sense of self-worth and fulfilment, which often goes missing in the middle of a career. “You get to 40 or 50 and you’re no longer willing to tolerate your lack of engagement” with a job or career, she says. “You finally say: what about me?” People may have taken jobs initially to help out family, to feed the kids, to pay off student debt. “There are so many reasons people find themselves in careers that don’t really meet their needs. There’s a reassessment that happens halfway through life.”

Both Cohen and Curtin insist that financial services isn’t inherently more likely to create this feeling than other professions: both say they have worked with countless professionals who are, as Curtin says, “in it because they love it,” rather than simply because of an idea to pursue the maximum amount of wealth in the shortest possible period of time and then get out. Nevertheless, finance jobs can mean long hours and high stress, which can lead to other problems. Curtin talks often of people needing to “get their basic needs met,” including compassion, security and connection; if two partners, for example, are both doing crazy hours, “by the time they get home, nobody’s getting their needs met. You end up in a spiral of dragging yourselves out of bed every day. And apathy is what happens: just a feeling of being neither here nor there. Companies are filled right now with people that feel that way.” She recalls one survey saying that 50% of American workers are unengaged; another says 67%.

Cohen fears that the CFA community is particularly prone to this drift. “I wish there were a polite way to say this,” he says, being impeccably polite as he says it, “but CFAs tend to be information gatherers. And when they gather, there is often an inability to make a decision and get off the fence.” CFAs as a community, he says, tend not to be self-promoting or natural candidates to lead, and can be distant from emerging trends because of “a head in the sand kind of approach to managing their careers. Along with that there tends to be some reluctance to embrace technology as well as change.”

Fine: most of us are listless and drifting and unsure what to do about it. So what’s the answer?

Cohen and Curtin take different approaches to this, Cohen practical, Curtin more introspective and even spiritual. Cohen notes that, if someone wants to change career or at least direction, “you have to have a community that knows who you are and how good you are,” which basically means putting effort into networking in the space you want to move in to. He also suggests creating a rewards system “for people stretching themselves, rather than looking at it as a sign of weakness or inefficiency that they can’t do something already.” So, for taking a risk or moving outside their comfort zone, someone might reward themselves with a trip to a conference or subscribing to a publication.

“We have to learn to embrace change rather than fear it,” Cohen adds. “Whether or not we find it disruptive and unpleasant, it’s going to happen anyway. The goal has to be to understand its application and make it part of your vocabulary, part of your story, rather than feeling like it implies failure.”

Cohen also counsels against being brand-obsessed. “There are plenty of other great firms besides Blackrock and Goldman Sachs,” he says. Failing to realise this is limiting. “Small may be better for some individuals. It might be the right environment, allowing you to achieve more.

“There is a belief sometimes that when you are invited to meet with an institution like Goldman Sachs or Blackrock, you’re being invited to meet with the Pope. Well, it’s a great honour, but that doesn’t mean you should change your religion.”

Curtin’s advice starts with self-acceptance and an understanding of what’s going on inside. She talks about acknowledgement and emphasis – “acknowledging that what they’re experiencing is valid and appropriate, sometimes with a certain amount of grieving, anger and resentment.” She encourages people to understand that they have a right to feel that way about being trapped in a job or situation they don’t like, and then to work out just what it is that they need and aren’t currently getting. “Everything we experience in our life can be transformed if we do internal development,” she says.

This can be useful for someone stuck in a job they can’t really leave – perhaps because there aren’t other options, perhaps because they’re entrepreneurs. “Then they need to be part of what transforms the way the organisation does business,” she says. She talks about a school janitor who held himself with such self-respect that it became upwardly infectious to others, despite his status on one of the lower rungs of school employment; one of the interviewees in her book tells a similar story about a car park attendant who sings opera to customers as they depart. “How can individuals do the same in firms? It’s in the way you write an email or interact with the receptionist. This is how you tell people who you are and how you operate.”

Entrepreneurs who do sell and get out have a whole other challenge: working out what to do next. “We’re going to see more and more of this as time goes on,” says Curtin. “It’s critical to find a place that makes you become alive, that makes you think: the world needs me.”

“What gets you out of bed in the morning?” she asks. “If you can find those contributions that are easy for you to make, and if you can match those up with great needs, that’s when the whole world changes. What this world is in need of is people who are fully alive.” And that, she says, is not the same as making a lot of money.

Cohen, while not dismissing dissatisfaction or a yearning for change, does encourage people to be realistic. “Work, for virtually everyone, has some element of dissatisfaction, even if your work is your great passion,” he says. He hates invoicing and administration, for example, but recognizes that it is part and parcel of an existence that he loves.  “The first step is making sure you are regularly evaluating how you feel about what you’re doing. Have a series of questions you ask yourself, to get a pulse read on what’s going on. Do these questions tell you you have a high level of satisfaction, and if not, what’s causing the dissatisfaction?

“Our experience is never static,” he adds, “which means that we need to be aware of how our needs and moods may be changing over time. We may once have loved what we do, but we are perfectly entitled to be able to explore new directions.”

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Real-life stories remind us that no two situations are alike, but nevertheless offer some interesting lessons.

Take Gayle Buff, for example. While it sounds radical to have gone from being a psychiatric nurse to an investment manager, in fact it involved a series of incremental and practical steps. When she realised that she wanted to know more about business, she enrolled upon an MBA course without giving up the nursing. “The nice thing about being a nurse is you can work odd hours to mesh with an MBA programme,” she says. Having done that, she thought at first that she would launch a business based on her hobby of antique buying, but, lacking capital and being financially conservative by nature, she needed another path and heard about the CFA qualification.

Having decided she liked the sound of financial planning, she set up a small business and started out with teaching and consulting with a client base she knew: hospitals. “I said, why don’t you give me your benefit package to look at and I’ll do classes for your personnel to help them make good choices.”

After a time her financial planning clients began to ask her to do investing for them directly, and this in turn led her to becoming an investment manager. So, while it sounds a drastic shift of career, in fact it took place over many years.

“When you read about someone’s life, it seems disjointed,” she says. “If you look at my life, on paper it would look like that. Not everyone goes from psychiatric nursing to business. I didn’t have a career programme in mind.” There is a sense of things falling into place rather than a drastic decision one day, and for many of this can be how a career takes shape and direction.

Buff is also interesting for another lesson: just because you have changed direction doesn’t mean you abandon everything you knew before. “Financial planning interested me because I was familiar with the one-on-one counselling relationship,” she says. “I decided to meld the two: counselling in finance.”

We can also learn plenty from Amy Ils, now a financial analyst at Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch in Geneva, Switzerland, but for many years an engineer and scientist. In her case, the change of career came not because she was unhappy with the way she was going but because the right opportunity came at the right time. She had worked at NASA, Fairchild and eventually for nine years as a staff scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, a technical university, when in 2000 she was approached by a friend. “It was the tech bubble, and a lot of banks were looking for people of technical background,” she says. “A friend who was working at a bank at the time told me they were looking for someone, gave them my CV, and that’s it! They took me.” She went first to Pictet & Cie, then Juilius Baer, Sal Oppenheim, and finally Lombard Odier.

So unlike others, Ils wasn’t driven by a sense of drift or misplaced talent, but more by seizing an opportunity she hadn’t previously considered.

“As a scientist the research I was doing was very interesting,” she says. “I was happy there.” Instead, she was driven by more pragmatic matters of job security and money. “In science, it is very project based and you’re never sure you’re going to get the next project. A lot of the time you feel insecure, that you only have a job and a project for two years.” Additionally, at that time the money was a whole lot better in finance, though she says the gap has narrowed a lot since then.

Ils, like Buff, knew how to use her skills from her previous existence in her new one. In science, she had been used to hard data, facts, testing a model; the shift to financial analysis, which is at its heart about forecasting, was difficult. “In the beginning I felt very insecure about my forecasts because they were not based on real data,” she says. To get comfortable with it, she turned back to science. “I told myself I should just take it as game theory, about probability: the probability of this company having these revenues or margins in the future.” That helped. And even if there were doubts, she forced herself to be realistic about her previous life. “Sometimes, like in 2008 when the markets were not great, I would think: what am I doing, I could have done great things,” she says. “But a lot of the times in applied science you are sitting there in a lab being frustrated. Once I spent three years trying to improve a process, and it didn’t work. There are positives and negatives to both professions.”

Clearly, confidence is helpful when striking out, and both Buff and Ils seem to have it in abundance. “I never thought I couldn’t do it, which was helpful,” says Buff. “I’m not sure why I thought that. I was going into a world I knew nothing about. But it never occurred to me that I couldn’t learn and master it.” And this s an important point: any change requires a willingness to learn, often from scratch, which not everyone is willing or able to do. “I think it’s healthy to learn new skills,” Buff says. “It keeps you alive. It keeps your brain working.

“I’m a very conservative person but I’ve always been open to risk, and those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. “

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Some people have change forced upon them, rather than seeking it out themselves. There is no shortage of misfortune in the corporate world, and finding positivity from a negative experience is challenging.

One of the nastier agents of change is unexpected redundancy, which for some people can be truly debilitating. “A lot of unfairness happens in this world, especially in the corporate environment, and you’re sometimes going to get a raw deal,” says Curtin. “The people who struggle less in working out what is next for them are clear on what their values are.”

And if the loss of the job has been a consequence of a mistake they made, “they’re going to need to learn to forgive themselves, and that comes back to their ability for self-compassion.”

“Our identity can be deeply enmeshed within the larger identity of the institution,” says Cohen. “If you have drunk the kool-aid and suddenly the organisation you have embraced and believe in decides they no longer want you, that can shatter one’s sense of self. A lot of people have defined who they are in the world by who they have worked for.”

In this situation, Cohen says, “the first thing to do is to take a step back and take a breath. The tendency is often for folks to want to do something immediately. I tell people to take a little time: not to worry about being viewed as less valuable.

“There is a view on Wall Street that you have a date stamp on you if you have been out of work for a while, an expiration date. But none of that is true if you’re confident in yourself.”

Whether overcoming a job loss or just taking the next step, in trying to move forward Curtin recommends “seeing yourself as a hero of your own story: as someone who has much more going for themselves than they realize.”

Chris Wright is the author of No More Worlds to Conquer, published by HarperCollins

BOX: Celebrity and change

Alan Bean was at an impasse. A true pioneer of space exploration, Bean had become the fourth man to set foot on the Moon on Apollo 12 in November 1969, and had then set an endurance record when he spent 59 days aloft on Skylab in 1973. He was all set to train for the new Space Shuttle programme, but something didn’t feel right.

He had a feeling that he was neglecting his true passion: painting. And he also sensed that he was in a truly fortunate position.

“When I was training to fly, I began to say: wait a minute,” he says from his studio in Houston. “There’s young men and women here who can do this, but I’m the only guy who’s interested in art, who cares about art, who can celebrate this great human achievement in paintings.

“I said: if I can learn to paint better, that’s what I need to do. They’re not going to miss me at NASA. The other astronauts are as good, or better. But if I don’t do this other job, it isn’t going to be done.”

And so he quit NASA, and became a painter. But in the almost half a century that has followed, Bean has only ever painted one thing: astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

Bean’s change in life has, for him, been enormously lucrative, financially and emotionally. Mixing moon dust from his mission patches in with the paint, and using a cast of his moon boot to add texture, his paintings are so irrefutably unique that they sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. It has allowed him to feel fulfilled about a passion that continues to drive him in his 80s; it makes him feel that he has made a timeless contribution to the commemoration of the Apollo era; and it has made him rich, which is by no means a certainty among Apollo alumni. But all the same, one can’t help at smile at the decision to make an absolute change in life, only to remain happily anchored in the memories of his previous existence. Making a change in your life can take many different paths.

I interviewed Bean for my book No More Worlds to Conquer, which sought out people who will always be known for a defining moment and asks them what they did to move on from it. So I asked Nadia Comaneci, who scored the first perfect 10 in Olympic competition at the age of 14, how one finds direction when the event she will always be known for took place before she reached puberty. I heard from Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders – who was on the first mission to leave Earth orbit and travel to another world, orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 – about how transition was easy for him, so much so that he considers his subsequent corporate career as CEO of General Dynamics far more significant than his space-hopping days. I heard from Al Haynes and Jan Brown, the captain and the chief flight attendant respectively on the United 232 air crash in July 1989, about how they had managed to rebuild their lives by finding positives amid the trauma, Haynes by delivering a talk about the incident more than 2,000 times, Brown by devoting the rest of her days to seeking child seatbelt reform. And former Lebanon hostage John McCarthy, incarcerated with Terry Anderson and others for five and a half years, explained how far from reviling the Middle East, he instead built a career in journalism through the unique understanding of its complexities that had been forced upon him while chained to a wall.

Many of the people in No More Worlds to Conquer were not trying to process a moment of achievement, but of tragedy or misfortune; one of the most impressive things about them was their ability to creative positives out of absolute darkness. I interviewed Russ Ewin, who is thought to be the last man alive who was ever held in Sandakan, perhaps the most notorious Japanese prisoner of war camp of them all in World War Two. Incarcerated for years, the prisoners taught each other what they knew: he, an accountant, taught chicken farmers how to do the books, and they in turn taught him to raise chickens. Lawyers, farmers; everyone enriched the knowledge of the man next to him.

All of them were bonded by something that has lessons for the corporate world: the sense that life and career are long and need not be defined by a moment or even a single path. Although each of them will always be best known for one thing, the diversity of their later lives should give encouragement to all of us that there is scope to do more than one thing with a career.