Traethiad

How do you plan for a major shift in life and career? How do you chart a course through an unknown and perilous environment?

Over a decade ago now, I was working as a business lecturer in Beijing. It was a college associated with one of China’s leading universities, and I was doing well.

I’d drawn on my past experience as an internet developer to lead a team which moved our teaching from literal chalk-and-blackboard lectures delivered to large numbers of students sitting on benches and passively listening to an online, Moodle-based learning system in which small groups of students worked their way through structured, cross-subject tutorials written collectively by teams of faculty members.

The results were outstanding. Students could self-pace their work. Peer-based learning rose dramatically. Lecturers were now free to help explain specific problems to those who needed help, rather than reciting the same old lecture material.

Not all of the lecturers liked this; they’d been quite comfortable with the old model. I learned a lot, very quickly about change management. Others did, though. The students responded very well, and the school’s management were really happy. In addition – and this was crucial in a school which charged high fees – the students’ parents were pleased.

My star was rising. This was when I resigned.

It was for the best of reasons. A few years previously my mother had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and had declined quite dramatically. My father was caring for her, but I could see in our weekly Skype calls that he was struggling to manage.

Eventually the day came when he broke down, and told me that he couldn’t cope any more.

By a remarkable stroke of chance, a vacancy for a lecturer in management was open in a university very close to my parents’ home. It was a permanent position with a very good salary for south Wales, and would be a natural next-step career-wise. I saw the advert literally hours before the closing time for applications and managed to submit mine. Even more remarkably, I was successful and left China a few months later to return to Wales, where I would be able to help my parents.

Let’s just say that nothing went as I’d hoped. The school I’d joined was in turmoil and, within months, everybody in my management chain had resigned. I wouldn’t have a manager for the next two years. I was assigned a completely unmanageable workload, impossible to fulfil even as I put in more and more hours. Eventually I was working late every single evening as well as on weekends, and I still couldn’t clear everything.

All of this, of course, meant that I couldn’t give my parents the time I’d hoped – although I can console myself that I did make a positive difference to their final years. Plus of course, you can’t beat a terminal illness. No matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, decline and ultimate death are inevitable.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have either the time or the energy to build up social networks. I couldn’t meet new people, make friends, or go on dates.

It all built up until it became too much. I couldn’t cope any more. I began to suffer from heart palpitations and panic attacks. I couldn’t sleep. I became depressed. My fight-or-flight response went into overdrive because of the constant stress, so that I over-reacted angrily to any perceived threat or criticism. I made really bad financial decisions. I catastrophised, imagining the worst possible outcome to any situation and believing that was the reality.  

In the end, I couldn’t work any more: standing in front of a lecture hall full of students triggered too much anxiety. I began every day just hoping that I would get through to the end of it.

I couldn’t help my parents get better. I couldn’t do my job.

Small wonder that I came to believe that I was a failure. Useless. Incompetent.

These aren’t popular things to say in public. It was absolutely unthinkable when I was younger. Though things are better now, it’s still not easy for a man to admit to these kinds of problems.

They need to be said, though, because – as Blur sang over thirty years ago – “Modern life is rubbish”. In the UK today, millions of people are suffering from work-related stress. Covid made a bad situation worse. It’s also true that my experience of horrendous overwork is pretty much normal now and it’s killing us in our hundreds of thousands every year. It’s particularly bad for professional workers, but low pay and insecurity for millions is also a reality.

Add to this that more and more people are going to have to care for aged relatives while help from social services and the NHS becomes scarcer.

My experience is actually pretty common, it turns out.

So what can you do? What did I do?

Talking to a CBT therapist/counsellor really helped me begin to heal. That process helped me to understand what was happening to me, and to understand that I needed to break away from the toxic environment that was probably going to kill me if I stayed.

Talking, though, didn’t do anything about the limiting beliefs I’d acquired. It didn’t stop the constant chorus of inner voices telling me that I was useless, that I couldn’t do anything properly. The thoughts that just wouldn’t stop in the early hours and prevented me from sleeping. When these become established, it’s very difficult to reason them away by thinking logically.

What did eventually stop them, some years later, was hypnotherapy, which used trance to work with my unconscious mind, undermine the limiting beliefs which had become deeply embedded, and trigger a reset to more healthy mode of thinking.

Getting out of a frustrating, dead-end or potentially harmful job or life situation is where you need the logical mind. Unless it’s an emergency, you naturally have to think it through. Make a reasoned evaluation of your current situation and the opportunities which are either available or which you believe you can create. This is a task of rational thinking. You can make plans, critique them, and either shelve them or start on implementing them. This is going to be a bespoke, personalised exercise, because everyone’s situation is different. Any good coach, though, is going to have a selection of tools and frameworks to help you clarify your thinking and your goals.

Plotting a new and more rewarding course for the future, then, may simply be a left-brain task which needs analysis, evaluation, and planning. It may be a right-brain task, using imagery and trance to remove the deeply-entrenched limiting beliefs which make you your own worst enemy and hold you back. It may be – and often is – a combination of the two.

This really matters right now. For many reasons, we are living through a career crisis. In the UK, politicians, academics and senior managers are raising the alarm that we’re not productive enough as a nation. As a workforce, we understand that this means we’re going to be asked to work longer hours, see less of our families and friends, be more stressed – and we know that we’re probably not going to see any of the benefits.

As the mis-match between what we want out of a career and what employers want from employees grows into a chasm, we’re all going to have to be smarter about the way we work.

Employers, quite simply, are going to have to do better at helping employees reconcile personal goals and the organisation’s needs – or lose their best people.

Employees are going to have be more proactive about protecting their health, and making sure that all their hard work is actually benefitting their own life, wellbeing and career aspirations – not just their employer’s quarterly profits.

So do you know the direction you want to go in? Have you got a plan to chart a course in unknown territory? How will you get to a place where modern life isn’t rubbish?

It’s not too much to ask.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash