by Kevin Winge
I don’t know when I began disliking my work. For ten years I had strived to establish my business, to identify clients, to carve out my niche. By 1995 I had more work than I could handle and was making more money than many of my early years combined. I had identified my skills and successfully marketed them to my clients. I had achieved a part of the American dream, I was self-employed. I was also miserable.
I didn’t wake up one day hating my job. The process was more gradual than that. I noticed I was no longer bounding out of bed in the morning eager to begin working. I began letting messages go into voice mail instead of answering the telephone. Vacations became more frequent and adventuresome to make up for the general malaise which I felt at work. I knew I was ready for a change, but I didn’t know what.
During this time, life’s snooze alarm began going off for me. Life’s snooze alarm is different than life’s wake-up call. A wake-up call is a sudden change in your life which jars you out of complacency. Most of us have had a wake-up call: the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, the death of a loved one. Life’s snooze alarm is more subtle. The alarm goes off but you know you have more time so you push the snooze button and go back to sleep, avoiding, for now, whatever it is that life is trying to draw your attention to.
For me life’s snooze alarm was knowing that a close friend was in the final stages of AIDS. Each visit and every phone call to him, as he became sicker and sicker, was a little alarm warning me to be prepared. Still, I choose to keep pressing the snooze button, convincing myself that I would deal with the situation when it became necessary. I should have dealt with it when my friend died, by that time, however, another friend was also dying. I continued to press the snooze button until he too was dead from AIDS.
Meanwhile, work had not improved and I had begun pushing the snooze button on my career as well. I continued to accept projects which didn’t interest me; working with clients I neither trusted nor liked. Sometime during the slumber that was 1996 for me, I received my issue of Inventure’s On Purpose journal. On the back page was a seemingly nonthreatening exercise, “Creating Work Vitality”, which asked the reader to identify what percentage of time you experienced the following in your work:
- I use my knowledge in my area/field.
- I use my most enjoyed talents.
- I feel like I’m participating in the critical decisions about my work.
- I feel passionate about my work.
- I feel a personal sense of purpose in my work.
- I feel like I’m growing and developing my talents.
- I feel like I’m relating well with my leader or manager.
- I feel like I’m relating well with the team/people I work with.
- I feel genuinely motivated to get up and go to work.
- I feel I have a healthy future in this organization.
It took just seconds for me to complete the questionnaire. To the first item I answered 50% of the time. On all of the rest, except one, the answer was 0%. Although I knew I was unfulfilled at work, the results of this profile – now before me in black and white – left me stunned. I realized, for the first time, the depth of my dissatisfaction. I was in a deadend job which did not use my talents, working with people I could not relate to. I didn’t need to improve one or two areas of my work, I needed to change everything. Luckily, there was a glimmer of hope in the questionnaire and it was a significant one. To #6, what percentage of time did I feel I was participating in the critical decisions about my work, I answered 100%. I had always felt in control of my life and, in spite of everything, I still did. I stared at my handwritten percentages and remembered one of my mother’s adages: “You got yourself into this mess, now get yourself out”.
I began to extricate myself from this “mess ” by evaluating what it was I did for a living and who I did it with. I realized that my talents were in working with people, yet most of my work was with computers. It is essential for me to have good relationships yet I neither trusted nor enjoyed most of the people I did work with. I need to know that I am contributing to a “greater good” but all I was contributing to was the bottom line of my clients. The only reward in my work was coming from my paycheck and that was no longer enough for me. I stopped pressing the snooze button.
I did not know what I was going to do, but I knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to continue working with people I didn’t respect. I wasn’t going to continue to accept projects which didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t going to make decisions about my professional life based solely on how much money I could generate.
I decided to do what I did when I first started my business: trust my gut, take a chance, risk it. I formulated a single question to guide me through this transition, “what’s the worst that could happen?”. For me the worst that could happen would be that I would lose the material things I had worked for and I would have to start over. Is that too much to risk for a chance to lead a more satisfying and fulfilling life? I had watched two friends die. My career struggles paled in comparison.
I created my personal mission statement: “to do work that matters with people I like”. I began terminating relationships with clients which did not fit this vision. I still didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was headed in the right direction. Within weeks of setting my course I learned that Open Arms of Minnesota, a non-profit, social service organization which prepares and delivers food to people with HIV and AIDS, was searching for an administrative director. Their search seemed to mirror my search and I submitted a resume. A preliminary telephone interview followed a few days later and, by the end of that conversation, I not only knew that I wanted the job, I was convinced that I was supposed to do this work. Never in my professional life had I been more sure of anything.
One of my friends who died from AIDS loved great food, drink and conversation. Dinners with him were events which could go on for hours. I believe this is what kept him relatively healthy for much of the first decade of his infection. Now, a year after his death, I was in a position to assist an organization which prepares and delivers over 45,000 meals a year to people with HIV/AIDS and their families. It was as though all of my professional and personal experiences had been pushing me towards this job, at this time, in this place.
I went into my interview with Open Arms with a portfolio of skills to do the job, though I sensed there were other candidates more qualified than me. Those basic skills got me the interview; a passionate desire to make a contribution in the lives of people with AIDS got me the job.
The challenges of Open Arms, like any non-profit organization, are daunting. There is money and awareness which must be raised. Volunteers to be recruited and organized and, most importantly, there are people who must receive meals. Like any job there are stressful days, but those days seem more manageable when your job is also your mission. The other morning I woke up before my alarm went off. I think that’s a good sign.
Kevin Winge is administrative director of Open Arms of Minnesota. He may be reached at 612/331-3640 or at kevinwinge@aol.com.
