Do you have an unhealthy relationship with your career?

illustration of an unhappy young woman with a poor relationship with her career sitting at an office desk surrounded by piles of paperwork. Light illuminates her from a single window.Recently, I had a thought-provoking conversation with association maven and friend KiKi L’Italien. She said she had worked hard to avoid replicating in her marriage some unhealthy dynamics she experienced in her family while growing up. And she felt she’d been successful. But recently, she realized that she had incorporated these unhealthy dynamics into her relationship with her career.

Like me, KiKi’s had a rich and complex professional life. She has switched several times between working as an employee and as an independent consultant in the association field. KiKi told me that some aspects of her behavior working as an independent mirrored the dysfunction of her growing up. Though this was one of several factors leading to the decision, KiKi decided to embrace working as an employee once more for big red M, a company that is a good match for her passions and expertise.

This is the latest step along KiKi‘s journey. I admire the honesty, energy, commitment, and smarts that she brings to her life and work. I want to thank KiKi for her frank sharing that inspired the core of this post. Namely: we need to look not only at our family relationships but also our relationships with our career.

My relationship with my career

Each person’s past experiences and situations are unique. I, like KiKi, work to disentangle myself from what I was taught to believe when I was young. I also notice and review how I work and my relationships with my clients. Doing this reduces the effects of learned dysfunction on my day-to-day life.

For example, when I first started consulting I was scared of disappointing my clients. I (falsely) believed that if I didn’t do a perfect job I would fail in some way. Since I’m not perfect, this led me not to feel good about myself. So, in those early days, I put up with what I now know were unreasonable requests from clients. It took some years before I felt confident in saying no to some of these requests. Eventually, that progressed to breaking up with clients who ignored or did not want to accept my boundaries for a working relationship.

At times, KiKi and I have both chosen to work independently rather than being employed by an organization. This is a big, complicated decision.

I sometimes envy folks embedded inside organizations. They usually have access to resources that I could never have as an independent. As a consultant, I have less authority to effect change in an organization than anyone who works there. And, as an independent, I’ve sometimes felt nervous about the lack of a regular paycheck.

Then I remember that, as an independent, I have the freedom to choose:

  • whom I work with;
  • the kind of work I do and the way I do that work;
  • the power to determine my schedule; and
  • my ability to take breaks and time off when it’s best for me, not my employer.

Your relationship with your career

An unhealthy relationship with your career is different from an unhealthy relationship with your work. The former means your dysfunctional behaviors may affect:

  • the kinds of work you choose;
  • the quality of your work relationships at every job; and
  • your career path.

You have almost certainly experienced unpleasant situations at work. Some of them are caused by circumstances completely out of your control. But in some of them, you have played a part. Having an unhealthy relationship with your career means that you repeat dysfunctional patterns as you move or make decisions about moving from one work opportunity to another.

An analogy would be someone who is a “bad picker” of relationship partners. Over and over again this person chooses to have relationships with people. with whom they are not compatible for one or more reasons that ultimately sabotage each relationship. The same dysfunctional patterns repeat again and again inside each relationship because bad pickers are drawn to relationships that fulfill what their dysfunctional aspects need rather than what their authentic self requires and deserves.

Similarly, you may be drawn to work situations that feed your dysfunctional aspects, leading to repeated eventual dissatisfaction with each new work situation.

There’s no single “right” relationship

Exploring your relationship with your career can have a profound long-term effect on your life.

For example, noticing and responding to our relationship with our work and our careers influence how Kiki and I choose to work as an independent or employee. There is no single right choice for everyone. Although I haven’t received a paycheck for over 30 years, from 1983 to 1993 I was a part-time college professor drawing a salary while simultaneously pursuing independent consulting work. My friend, veteran event producer and educator Brandt Krueger, has a similar story to tell. Employed for twenty years, he eventually struck out as an independent for eight years, only recently returning to employment as a senior event producer at a large company.

What is best for KiKi, Brandt, and me is different. And that’s OK, and as it should be.

What’s important is to keep looking at our experience with everyone who is part of our world. That includes our family, friends, colleagues, working environment, and our career.

We need to keep noticing what’s happening, what’s working, and what isn’t in all these components of our lives. This crucial work allows us to reduce the distance between who we are and how we show up in the world. In the process, you’ll be working to minimize the unhealthy aspects of your relationship with your career.

Connection, attachment, and meetings

John Singer Sargent's painting, A Street in Venice. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute. A man looks at a woman in a Venetian alleyway. Is there connection or attachment between them?A teacher recently advised our daily meditation group to seek “connection free from attachment”. This is a wise practice for me. But what does it mean in the context of meetings? Surely we sometimes become attached to people we meet? Isn’t creating and strengthening attachments one of the desirable functions of meetings? So what is the relationship between connection and attachment when people come together?

Last week I was exploring paintings at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts when this work by John Singer Sargent caught my attention.

Although Sargent is chiefly known as “a portrait painter who evoked Edwardian-era luxury“, this painting of Venice shows something different. Instead of “focusing on iconic views of Venice”, Sargent “offers a glimpse into everyday life”.

I see this painting as a depiction of an event about to happen: two people meeting, a foreshadowing of connection. I could be wrong because what we see is ambiguous. It’s possible that the man will turn away and continue his walk. But perhaps the woman is about to turn towards the man looking at her; they will connect in the alleyway. Perhaps they are about to enter the wine cellar and connect there.

My fanciful, though perhaps plausible, interpretations of Sargent’s painting illuminate how I think about the relationship between connection, attachment, and meetings.

Connection and attachment

Connection is something that happens in the moment. As another meditation teacher put it: “Nothing to get. Nothing to get rid of. Just this.”

In contrast, attachment is a description of a complex fusion of past, present, and future connections. It’s a historical construct. Even if we connect with a person once, that only creates attachment through our continued memory of the experience of the moment. Attachment is about our relationship with others. Our attachment to people is created and strengthened by one or more moments of connection with them over time.

Traditional meetings and connection

At meetings, as in life, connection happens with another person or, sometimes, in small groups. Not while someone is lecturing in a room full of people.

At traditional meetings, connection happens almost exclusively outside the formal lecture-style sessions. It’s inefficient and random. Even if someone asks a question at the end of a session and you want to talk to them more about it, you have to hunt them down in the hallways or socials.

Traditional meetings offer minimal opportunities for connection, attachment, and ensuing relationships.

Luckily, we can do better.

Creating connection and attachment at meetings

For decades, one of my core goals for participant-driven and participation-rich meetings has been to facilitate connection around relevant content. In our meetings, we need to provide plenty of opportunities and support for moment-to-moment connections around relevant learning. The resulting connections lead to attachments, and to valuable relationships between meeting participants that endure into the future.

On our different responses to adversity

responses to adversity: black and white photograph of two elderly men hugging in an airport loungeWe all have different responses to adversity, and none of them are “wrong”.

I write this post a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, sparked by the personal experience of an old friend, psychotherapist, and author Nancy Leach. She shared the following:

This was the journey

I thought I had successfully managed my emotional wellbeing through almost a year and a half separation from my daughter and grandson, who live in California. I was deeply sad at times, but phone calls, texting and FaceTime usually took the edge off and so I carried on. I was grateful that I and my Toronto family were safe and well, and that I not only love my husband but like him and enjoy his company. The addition of an 8-week-old puppy just before Christmas kept us both incredibly busy and provided many moments of unbridled joy.

Then there was an emergency in the extended California family and in response I hopped on a plane. Twelve hours and two flights later, my daughter and I fell into each other’s arms. I was not surprised to feel a tsunami of love and relief; I was well aware that I was suffering without physical proximity. But I expected the pain of the past year to resolve itself quickly. I’m someone who feels intensely, and I tend to mine feeling for insight, so I figured I was pretty-much in touch with my inner state.

It therefore took me by surprise, when a few days later we stopped on the road to talk over the fence with a neighbour. “You must be so happy to be together after all this time” said she. A lump suddenly appeared in my throat and tears came to my eyes. “How was it to be in airports?” she asked, to which I replied, “It was a little crazy, but I didn’t care…” Deep breath as I struggled to let the grief move through me. “I would have walked here.” Sheltered in the soft and deep silence of a redwood forest and in the company of the two I had missed so much, my very cells were releasing the cumulative sadness of more than a year.

It wasn’t until at least a week later that I felt I had fully “metabolized” the loss of a pandemic shutdown. My daughter is of very similar sensibility and often conceptualizes and better articulates an experience we share. She commented that it was almost as if she had been gaslighting herself, telling herself she was okay when she was not.

Of course, we need to “carry on” even when conditions are far from optimal. But I’m sharing this because I wonder how many of us have convinced ourselves that because no family member has been incapacitated with Covid or we haven’t lost our job or aren’t devastated at the impact on a vulnerable child we are doing okay. My “suffering” was but a small fraction of what so many people have endured, and I simply didn’t realize how much ground I had lost.

Well, what is ground but an illusion? The deeper message is one that is always with us, but we don’t always want to acknowledge. When we investigate the nuances of our suffering, we come face to face with the reality that any certainty we feel about life is an illusion. Throughout our lives, our hopes, dreams, plans, even parts of us that identify with a certain narrative or condition must die. In these small deaths is a reminder of the fragility of the “self” we have so painstakingly built over this lifetime – and the reality of the impermanence of all things.

We don’t like to be reminded of our death and despite the passing of each moment, sadness or joy, we cling to all vestiges of what seems to endure. But in the end, we cannot change the law of impermanence; we can only strive to make peace with it. As the worst of the pandemic restrictions ease, I hope I won’t be too quick to put that insight behind me.

This was the journey

“I thought I had successfully managed my emotional wellbeing through almost a year and a half separation from my daughter and grandson, who live in California. I was deeply sad at times, but phone calls, texting and FaceTime usually took the edge off and so I carried on. I was grateful that I and my Toronto family were safe and well, and that I not only love my husband but like him and enjoy his company. The addition of an 8-week-old puppy just before Christmas kept us both incredibly busy and provided many moments of unbridled joy.

Then there was an emergency in the extended California family and in response I hopped on a plane. Twelve hours and two flights later, my daughter and I fell into each other’s arms. I was not surprised to feel a tsunami of love and relief; I was well aware that I was suffering without physical proximity. But I expected the pain of the past year to resolve itself quickly. I’m someone who feels intensely, and I tend to mine feeling for insight, so I figured I was pretty-much in touch with my inner state.

It therefore took me by surprise, when a few days later we stopped on the road to talk over the fence with a neighbour. “You must be so happy to be together after all this time” said she. A lump suddenly appeared in my throat and tears came to my eyes. “How was it to be in airports?” she asked, to which I replied, “It was a little crazy, but I didn’t care…” Deep breath as I struggled to let the grief move through me. “I would have walked here.” Sheltered in the soft and deep silence of a redwood forest and in the company of the two I had missed so much, my very cells were releasing the cumulative sadness of more than a year.

It wasn’t until at least a week later that I felt I had fully “metabolized” the loss of a pandemic shutdown. My daughter is of very similar sensibility and often conceptualizes and better articulates an experience we share. She commented that it was almost as if she had been gaslighting herself, telling herself she was okay when she was not.

Of course, we need to “carry on” even when conditions are far from optimal. But I’m sharing this because I wonder how many of us have convinced ourselves that because no family member has been incapacitated with Covid or we haven’t lost our job or aren’t devastated at the impact on a vulnerable child we are doing okay. My “suffering” was but a small fraction of what so many people have endured, and I simply didn’t realize how much ground I had lost.

Well, what is ground but an illusion? The deeper message is one that is always with us, but we don’t always want to acknowledge. When we investigate the nuances of our suffering, we come face to face with the reality that any certainty we feel about life is an illusion. Throughout our lives, our hopes, dreams, plans, even parts of us that identify with a certain narrative or condition must die. In these small deaths is a reminder of the fragility of the “self” we have so painstakingly built over this lifetime – and the reality of the impermanence of all things.

We don’t like to be reminded of our death and despite the passing of each moment, sadness or joy, we cling to all vestiges of what seems to endure. But in the end, we cannot change the law of impermanence; we can only strive to make peace with it. As the worst of the pandemic restrictions ease, I hope I won’t be too quick to put that insight behind me.”

Responses to adversity

Nancy’s experience resonated with me. Over the previous couple of weeks, I’d noticed feeling sad in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. After all, I was about to be fully vaccinated, and the future of our pandemic-beset world seemed a little brighter. Why was I now feeling sadder than during much of 2020?

Nancy’s post helped me understand that I, too, had delayed getting fully in touch with how I had been feeling about the effects of the pandemic.

I shared Nancy’s post and my reaction with my wife, Celia. We had a good discussion that illuminated for me our different responses to adversity. Throughout our 50 years together, Celia tends to respond emotionally more in the moment. While I, like Nancy perhaps, tend to bottle up feelings to some extent until some triggering experience brings them up.

Different responses can strengthen a relationship

Interestingly, Celia and I find that our different responses to adversity strengthen our relationship.

How? Well, I am better able to support her when something upsetting happens and she feels upset right away. And she is in a better place to support me when I am eventually able to fully experience feelings I’ve denied for a while.

In my experience, people often process their experiences unconsciously over time. I certainly do, as I shared in It wasn’t the lobster. We are more likely to remember the moment when we become conscious of our processing than in the preceding weeks or months.

We all process experiences differently. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to do this, certainly regarding when we do the processing. Though, of course, if we never process a significant experience, its effect on our health and well-being may stay hidden, sometimes to our long-term detriment.

My response to Nancy

I wanted to thank Nancy and let her know how her post had affected me. Here’s what I wrote:

“Dear Nancy,

Thank you. You helped me focus on and understand better some of the sadness welling up in me recently. Like your daughter, I had been telling myself I was OK when I was not.

I read your eloquent post to Celia, and we talked about how each of us has different responses to adversity. She responds to it more as it happens, and sometimes feels guilty about sharing her feelings about it, while I am trying to reassure her (and, to some extent, myself). You and I are similar, perhaps, in telling ourselves “This too will pass” and, perhaps, only allowing ourselves to fully get in touch with how we feel if or when it seems a respite or a less fraught future is on the way.

I’m moved to write a post about dealing with adversity that quotes your piece. Would that be OK with you?”

To which Nancy replied:

“I’m touched that you were so moved and of course you may quote freely! As I’ve read through some of these responses it just affirms how much each of us is carrying, individually and ultimately as a culture or even a world. A lot to get one’s heart around!! Love to you both…”

Thank you Nancy for helping me, and letting me share what you wrote with others.

Readers, if the spirit moves you, check out the other comments on Nancy’s Facebook post.

Image attribution: Government Press Office (Israel)

Conversations => Relationships => Value (Part 2)

Conversations => Relationships => Value. A photograph of two conference attendees sitting on steps and talking to each other.

Conversations => Relationships => Value

In Part 1 of this post, I introduced this core component of Conference 2.0.

Here’s why this sequence is an important consideration for modern meeting design, and how it’s enhanced by Conference 2.0 designs.

Why should customers buy from you?

Sometimes, business value grows out of the barrel of a gun. When you have a monopoly on a product or service, you can charge as much as the market will bear. But when competition exists, you must use different strategies. For example, you can play race-to-the-bottom: squeezing your suppliers for rock bottom costs that, hopefully, are lower than your competitors. Or, you can differentiate what you offer in many other ways: better service, more options, faster delivery, longer warranties, superior customer support, etc. Thousands of books have been written about how to profitably and consistently market and sell. And, except perhaps for the most cutthroat commodity markets, the ability to build and maintain good relationships with your customers is a key component of most techniques.
This ability is even more crucial in today’s markets, because of four factors:

  • The increased complexity of products and services.
  • The increased variety of products and services.
  • The increased speed of product and service development.
  • The increased transparency in many marketplaces caused by online customer reviews and feedback.

The first three factors make it harder for potential customers to evaluate whether a specific product or service is a desirable fit for their needs. The last amplifies any deficiencies (perceived or otherwise) that may exist, any of which could prove fatal to sales.

In this new business environment, creating and maintaining good, trustworthy relationships with your customers becomes crucial.

Relationships are the new impressions

In the good old days, the more people heard about your product through broadcast marketing (impressions), the greater your sales. Today, business value, especially for non-commodity products and services, is becoming increasingly linked to the strength and quality of buyer-seller relationships. Traditional marketing can’t manufacture relationships, which are built through conversations between you and potential customers. Some of your conversations will turn into relationships, and some of those relationships will lead to value for your business.

Not all meetings are alike

Meetings provide wonderful opportunities for conversations. But, for two reasons, some meeting environments provide better opportunities than others.

First, for all but very small meetings, the number of conversations doesn’t scale with event size. For example, at a one-day, two-hundred-attendee event you can’t have more ten-minute conversations than you can with a hundred in attendance. In fact, at a large conference it’s often harder to find the people you really want to talk to than at a smaller, more focused event.

Second, Conference 1.0 sessions don’t foster conversations. Conversations only take place during breaks and socials. Compare this with Conference 2.0 designs, which excel at providing opportunities for relevant conversations

How Conference 2.0 designs support conversations

I’ve quoted Howard Givner before and I’ll quote him again. (Why? Because he made this highly positive remark about one of my conferences 😀.)

I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.

Why is Howard’s experience a common one at Conference 2.0? Let’s take Conferences That Work as an example. This conference design starts with initial roundtables that not only provide a structured forum for attendees to meet and learn about each other’s affiliations, interests, experience, and expertise but also effectively uncover the topics that people want to discuss and share. Within a couple of hours, every attendee has the initial introductions and information necessary to go out and start the right conversations about the right topics with the right people. Other Conference 2.0 designs encourage fruitful conversations by giving attendees the ability to meet around topics that they choose during the event.

The bottom line: Conference 2.0 formats routinely lead to more meaningful conversations, which in turn lead to more relationships, which in turn lead to more business value.

Does Conversations => Relationships => Value make sense to you?

What airline miles can teach us about relationships

airline miles and relationships: world map with a web of airline routes overlaid in green

Airline miles and relationships have something in common.

Recently I needed to fly to a conference. I reviewed my airline miles to see if I could snag a free flight. The spreadsheet I use to track my miles said I had plenty on American Airlines, but when I logged on to redeem an award the miles had vanished. Somehow, twenty months had gone by without flying AA, and the 80,000 miles I’d accrued were lost for good. I checked my email and, yes, there they were, the ignored warnings of upcoming expiring miles. An opportunity lost.

In the same way, human relationships we’ve built up over time will eventually disappear without renewal. Unfortunately, maintaining a relationship doesn’t come with an official eighteen-month activity requirement, and you don’t get reminder emails. Maintenance requires conscious activity to regularly reconnect and add relationship miles to my account. Living in rural Vermont, physically distant from most of my personal and professional friends, sometimes it’s hard for me to make the effort, and my lack of action puts at risk the kinship we’ve developed.

The good news is that relationships, unlike airline miles, have no fixed expiration date. There’s always the possibility that we can revive relationships by reaching out and making contact. If we can’t meet face-to-face, telephone calls, and online contact will help, though I believe that without occasional face-to-face meetings, all but our most intense relationships will slowly fade.

My lesson of lost miles reminds me to continue to work on my relationships. I don’t want to lose them too.

Are some of your treasured relationships fading? What are you going to do about it?

Photo attribution: Jpatokal from Wikipedia Commons

Conversations → Relationships → Value Part 1

I admit it
I do not have a good reaction when someone talks about the return on investment (ROI) from attending an event.

My initial internal response is a rant:

Do we ask for the ROI when we buy tickets to a concert?

How can you evaluate the ROI for learning something new or seeing something in a new way?

And my favorite: So, what is the ROI on a wedding? (Please don’t respond with an analysis of the average value of wedding gifts versus the cost of the wedding. I’d probably argue diminished responsibility at the subsequent trial.)

Conversations Relationships Value part 1: a photograph of a large iced cake. The icing on the top shows the Mastercard logo and the word "Priceless".In some ways, my reaction is alarmingly similar to the message of the brilliant formula for the MasterCard advertisement:

[List of mundane items with $ assigned]
[Intangible item – Priceless!]

The delicious subtext: Forget the money, whip out the credit card, and go to the event anyway!

The morning after
OK, it’s strong black coffee time. Whether the benefits are intangible or concrete, we all know that there is some kind of calculation that goes on when a potential attendee decides whether to attend an event. I’ve written about how existing event ROI methodologies are a noble attempt to quantify this calculation and give it as much respectability and logic as we can. So, enough on ROI; here’s a core component of Conference 2.0.

Conversations => Relationships => Value

In Part 2 of this post, I explain why this sequence is now an important driver of modern meeting design, and how it’s enhanced by Conference 2.0 designs.

Photo attribution: Flickr user alanchan

How participant-driven events can improve event ROI

improve event ROI: photograph of a skeptical male boss with glasses and a white beard. Photo attribution: Flickr user andyi.“Why do you want to go to this conference?” is a question that a boss has probably asked you at some point. The real question is, of course, Is it worth the money and time invested in having you attend? It can be a hard question to answer. Especially when the event in question has no or few predetermined sessions, like the peer conferences I design and facilitate. So how can we measure and improve event ROI?

Improving Event ROI

Probably the most exhaustive methodology for planning and evaluating event ROI has been developed by Jack Phillips and Elling Hamso. It’s long and comprehensive, and here’s a summary of it.

According to this methodology, one of the components involved in evaluating Event ROI is the degree of Relationship Learning, which Elling defines as follows:

“Relationship learning refers to the building of affinity between people, getting to know others, trust and liking. All forms of peer learning benefit from the strength of personal relationships, it is the foundation for subsequent information, skills and attitude learning in the peer relationship. Relationship learning may be measured in much the same manner as other forms of learning. At the most detailed level, individual relationships of trust and liking, for example, may be scored on a scale from very low to very high, or more general reports of relationship learning may be collected.”

How peer conferences improve event ROI

Well, this is exactly the kind of learning experience at which peer conference designs like Conferences That Work excel! Here’s how Howard Givner described a peer conference he attended:

“…one of the most innovative and eye-opening professional experiences I’ve had. Aside from coming back with lots of new tips and ideas, I easily established triple the number of new contacts, and formed stronger relationships with them, than at any other conference I’ve been to.”
—Howard Givner article: The Un-Conference: Participant-Driven Agenda + Mashup Networking = Relationship Building on Steroids

Conversations, and subsequent relationships, are very important. Doc Searls, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote a great article about their pivotal role: Building a Relationship Economy. Well-designed peer conferences provide an environment that encourages and supports a rich abundance of the initial components of the following sequence:

Conversations => Relationships => Value

“Value” here means the kind of business worth your boss is thinking about. More prospects, new sales, increased customer satisfaction, etc. All the things that translate into funding for your paycheck, profit for your company, and a happy boss.

So, when your boss next asks you The Question about the participant-driven conference you want to attend, take a deep breath. Tell them you expect to make many more business relationships at this event than you would at a conventional conference. Relationships that will turn into solid business value for your organization. Communicate exactly why you want to go. Explain that participant-driven conferences improve event ROI because they are much better than traditional meetings at building sessions around the content that attendees actually want. Good luck!

Photo attribution: Flickr user andyi