Learning from Difficulty

The publicity given to Lord Browne’s autobiography ‘Beyond Business’ has focussed on how different he is from the ‘Sun King’ figure who once led BP. His very public resignation caused by revelations about his personal life, led to a period of public withdrawal, but now he is back. What is noticeable in his interviews is his recognition of the value of having faced difficulty and learned from it. He talks now of being happier than he has ever been and of his recognition that the person he had become was arrogant, and was hiding his loneliness in his work. Steve Jobs talking to Stanford graduates in 2005 made a similar admission when he spoke of the learning that came from being sacked from Apple: the company he had founded. While his instinct was to run away as a very public failure, he slowly began to realise that the most important thing was what he loved doing, and so he began again. From that new beginning emerged Pixar, which in turn was eventually purchased by Apple. He came back to where he had started. Except of course he didn’t. The person who re-entered was changed. As he said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”.
Among all the books that are written on careers, the attention is primarily on the skills for success – find your strengths, hone your brand. Very little is given to the importance of facing and learning from hardship. That hardship comes in many forms: career disappointment, challenging life events, burnout.
We create a career narrative for ourselves which drives the choices we make, the amount of ourselves we invest in work -so what do we do when that narrative is disrupted. We discover we give all we can but it does not deliver what we expect, we focus on work to the detriment of everything else in our lives and find we are overlooked, or we end up with our hours filled but a life that is empty.
When someone is able to face and acknowledge the narrative that has been created, and then can be helped to create one that is more connected to who they are, then career takes on a whole new meaning that is embedded into the person, rather than being a cloak which they wear.
Tim Casserley and David Megginson’s excellent book “Learning From Burnout” makes this argument powerfully in relation to young highflyers that soar and then crash, but I believe the same need exists in all of us at some time.
Career coaching at its best is as much about helping individuals to look at the story they have created and its limitations, as in supporting the creation of success.