And as she told it, she’d successfully kept her underlying depression at bay for years. But 18 months of unemployment— which were the busiest months of her life as she attempted to generate both a new job or a profitable idea—- were taking their toll. She was burning out. Exhausted, she felt her efforts had been fruitless.

She called it “career anxiety” and she was correct: her despair had roots both in her anxieties and in her side-tracked career. Self-doubt was gnawing into self-esteem. And the family’s spending was exhausting what was once retirement and college saving.

She likened it to having been speeding down a highway which was suddenly closed down.

We began cautiously, building upon what was firm and secure. We would arrive at the destination traveling on what for her, had been back roads.

“Is it necessary?” (Yes it is)

“I’ve never worked harder in my life” (Probably true)

“Is there a “There” there?” (Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course…)

Questions and answers between clients and psychologist: reporting back on the work necessary to create the successful transition between “what was” before unemployment, underemployment, the current savings-account spend-down and a future “There”.

The word “career” means “to veer wildly”; and sometimes, in our times, it does.

Career management, more than anything requires a control of the personal chaos we often feel— from overly hopeful hope (often dashed in the rejection after the interview) to that insidious sense of self-disregard (REMEMBER: keep thinking positively! There are moments when CBT is extraordinarily useful).

The central transition is not in letting go, but in holding firm to self-worth and capability. As compass points, these are what see us through difficult transitions.

Some thoughts:

• plentiful and current over-supplies of information, facilitated by technology, allow market participants to react more quickly (also helped by technology) than ever before

• while we react to momentary market shifts—for example, (1) our reactions in the plunge post-Lehmann, (2)  in the bubbling up last March, and (3) last week in the steep correction—we rarely step back in attempting to discern larger systemic patterns. We are too gripped by the immediacy of our own financial positions.

• It benefits us to consider what is going on when we reach a position of calm.

Hypothetical Takeaway:

Talking with clients about changes in our global linkages with markets— often felt as we react to them rather than recognized clearly and considered coolly— most agreed that we have embarked on an era of significant turbulence.

However, while most clients focused initially on systemic threats, a general consensus emerged over time: there appears to be a silver lining. A pattern, characterized by a bursting bubble, presents market participants with a momentary choice of repair or rupture.

While the verdict is hardly in: Greece after all, is followed by Spain and Portugal…..media murmurings about the EU as white knight suggest a moment of global repair.

For some of us, that’s worth a sigh of relief. For others, it means profit as equities return to test former highs.

Recently, a client informed me that I was an Executive Life Coach. She of course, was the executive. And it was her life that I was coaching.

She recognized too, that while she might otherwise call our work psychotherapy, she felt it was coaching. And since she was comfortable with that, coaching it remained. Though, to be generous to me— she chose to link my professional qualifications to the executive life coach functioning I provided: hence, I became a professional executive life coach.

How was it different from what I called it? The work had begun in twice weekly psychotherapy. It had evolved into less frequent coaching sessions, focused on her executive role. And when she’d been downsized, we’d reoriented to her management of the new challenges in late mid-life, of consolidating what she knew and experienced with an eye to marketing her skills in a new way, while managing the anxieties of under-employment.

And so I became a professional executive life coach. The title is fine by me, because I’m doing my job.

At the Accord Advisory Group, we have extended SWOT analysis to another dimension.

We have found it useful in orienting both in psychotherapy and in executive coaching as a tool that orients the individual within his/her world as he/she looks out at the primary organizations and people that characterize his/her life.

The reoriented SWOT extends from 2 domains to 4:

1) The individual’s psychological functioning

2) The individual’s view of significant organizations of work and family.

3) The strengths and weaknesses of these organizations

4) The threats and opportunities of the larger world in which the person functions, within personally significant organizations.

If I fork over $125,000 for every $100,000 I want to borrow from my neighborhood bank (owned by a still-solvent international bank), they will give me a 10 year CD earning 1.5%!!!! Then, they will extend their $100,000 to me (really my $100,000 while they hold onto my $25,000) as a 10 year loan at 6%. Net loss for me to secure the loan is about 4.5 % plus lending the bank $125000!

This is comedy!

I asked her if I could offer the bank the same deal, in reverse. She laughed.

Beyond the certain, highly probable, and probable, we enter a complex and chaotic future. Based on the trends we’ve seen over the last weeks, we have a sense of where the S&P 500 will be tomorrow. But forecasting 6 months ahead is highly uncertain, especially in volatile markets. Still, 7 months from now, the situation that looks so uncertain today will have returned, in retrospect, to certainty.

We make sense of uncertainty by constructing mental maps which define our interests, desires, strengths, and weaknesses. Casually or formally, we generate scenarios of possibility— usually highly influenced by the kinds of results we expect to see. Often, we construct our maps without notice. We recognize successful former patterns in the events we see; and base our plans on our skill at imposing what has worked before upon what comes next. We bridge uncertainty through learned inattentions and shortcuts; and convince ourselves that we have tamed its dangers.

A discussion with a client provides an example. She still had her job when she had explained to me that her career path had taken her to the height of her profession.  “No”, she said. She was not interested in considering how her work skills might be employed more productively— how her future might be determined more by her than by market forces.  She was certain.

Some months later, after her lay-off, she presented with a new  dilemma. Quite rationally, she explained the corporation’s reasoning: her salary and benefits had been too high; and younger colleagues, while not at her level, understood enough to maintain the division as a going concern. She had decided to begin a consultancy; but it was not going well. She believed that the envy of her former employees prevented them from hiring her. Yet again, she had rejected uncertainty for certainty: her consulting venture had been designed to fail. However, it had two plusses: it allowed her to speak her anger and frustration at her unemployment; and it demonstrated that she had “tried”; she was now resolved to wait for a new corporate opening.

These examples of unproductive certainty reflect a turning from reality. Our second discussion examined working knowledge. My client’s clarity about her former subordinates’ envy was striking. It was clear that the business planning for her consultancy was based on her own disregard for her working knowledge. Their envy was not simply a hunch: she had worked together with them as a team and had recognized it for a long time.

Then why base a business on such a failing proposition?  Her certainty here was of failure. It mirrored her real despair in the crashing and burning of a lifetime’s work. And it was only from examining her new working assumptions relative to her working knowledge that this emotional blockage emerged. She had needed someone to blame; and her business idea had simply recycled the worst part of a team dynamic she knew. Its yield? 100% productivity in blaming; 0 business productivity. In one sense it had completely eliminated uncertainty. In another, left the future completely at risk.

The time has come for invention and innovation: especially if you’re over 50!

The Working Knowledge Initiative approaches entrepreneurship under a very different mindset: that the assets and capabilities of productive work-lives represent a storehouse of entrepreneurial potential;  but that the mid-life professional is reluctant to begin the entrepreneurial journey. As a hiring manager recently told me, “given a 35 year old and a 45 year old with the same skill-set, well… let’s just say the younger guy still has that ‘fire in his belly’.”

The hiring manager’s stereotype applies to conventional entrepreneurial programs as well: its attendees begin with fire in their bellies, motivated by their desire to transform dreams to realities.  Whether experientially rich or poor, their passion is a powerful engine — motoring over adversity and pushing forward toward success.

Mid-life entrepreneurship is an entirely different situation. The excitement remains— though the physical belly-fire has morphed to a more cognitive kind of wisdom. Both success and loss over the life course ( with familial responsibilities added, as well as diminishing retirement savings….) both temper impulsivity and add their measures of anxiety.

Mid-life entrepreneurship must begin in solid refusals: NO, THIS IS NOT WHO I AM. NO, I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE SKILLS AND PRACTICES OF NEW BUSINESS FORMATION. NO, I ONLY KNOW MY OWN FIELD. NO, I SHALL WAIT FOR A SUITABLE POSITION TO OPEN UP—EVEN IF I MUST HIDE MY FORMER JOB RESPONSIBILITES AND SALARY LEVEL TO OBTAIN IT.

Mid-life entrepreneurship begins in fear. This is the entry-point of reluctant entrepreneurship.

The Working Knowledge Initiative addresses the psychological situation of the reluctant entrepreneur while building entrepreneurial resiliency through recognitions that work-experience has provided the fundamental building blocks of entrepreneurial success.

Our mindfulness —of the reluctance of the reluctant entrepreneur—and on the needs necessary to bridge the gap between anxiety and successful revenue streams— is the Working Knowledge Initiative’s difference.

On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that community works is by reciprocity: individuals support the commons from which they derive benefit. Categorical refusal to “use” the commons– to stand apart as if community were somehow disengaged from its utility to its members—is counter-productive. Were all members to avoid the benefits of communal membership, the very idea of their “common”  link would fall apart.

My client was fixed on the hurtful potential of exploitation: of deceitful, one-sided gain rather than its more general productive  meaning  “making use” of a resource. This utilization means that the entrepreneur makes use of a very specific situation— the focal “need” which solves the customer’s situational dilemma— whether for a product or service.

Successful entrepreneurship is about productive, living use of the commons. Indeed, the success of this reciprocity is not decided by the entrepreneur herself, but judged by what the commons requires and how well that requirement is satisfied by the entrepreneur.