Assess Your Plot: an extract from Repotting Your Life
You don’t have to be religious or a recovering alcoholic to recognise the words and the wisdom of the ‘Serenity Prayer’:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this frequently referenced invocation distils the fundamental lesson that you need to learn to become a successful repotter: it’s about recognising the difference between what you can and what you simply cannot change. And just as a good garden designer will always assess a plot before undertaking any new planting, you need to start by taking careful stock of your life as it is right now.
One way to do this is to think of yourself as your own personal brand. Even nomads wandering in the Gobi Desert recognise such top global brands as Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon. These behemoths of business spend fortunes enhancing and fine-tuning the potent amalgam of effables, ineffables, tangibles and intangibles that, taken together, create recognition and value for their respective corporations. Whether you actively strive to create one or not, you also possess a personal brand that encapsulates the essence of who you are and the values you represent. It is more than just a CV trumpeting your qualifications and accomplishments; it is your core package of portable human skills, the requisite specialist skills that you’ve managed to assimilate and also the good reputation that you’ve conscientiously created over time.
“Even in today’s relatively enlightened environment, many individuals in the workplace feel awkward when called on to explain any gaps in the chronological listings of the conventional CV.”
Forward-looking and enlightened human resources professionals are beginning to realise that paper-based qualifications and assessments based on the traditional linear record of institutions attended, qualifications gained, and salaried positions held will not necessarily deliver the best candidate. Most approximately qualified people can be ‘skilled up’ to the requisite standards of a specific job, but no training programme can transform a fundamentally toxic character into a modern-day Mother Teresa or turn a congenital shyster into a shining beacon of ethical light. Just as there are no apps to track obnoxious, unacceptable or narcissistic behaviour, there are no formal institutions handing out certificates for valuable professional assets such as ethics, fairness, reliability, honesty, integrity and flexibility. Even in today’s relatively enlightened environment, many individuals in the workplace feel awkward when called on to explain any gaps in the chronological listings of the conventional CV. Classically, this issue has disproportionately affected women who have taken career breaks to have children or to care for sick or elderly relatives. The effects of the gig economy, however, have catapulted far more people into the same gap-riddled-CV situation. Future work models requiring increasingly frequent oscillations between paid work and professional or personal development will further add to the swelling numbers in this cohort. A personal brand that demonstrates the skills, characteristics, values and potential that you represent (as opposed to a blowby-blow account of every move you’ve ever made in your personal and professional life) will become an increasingly valuable asset for any repotter. This is particularly true for any individual who’s been made redundant, taken a career break or finds themselves at a crossroads wondering which direction to take. It’s easy to feel underqualified and, as a consequence, lacking in self-confidence if you’re missing out on the validation of an uninterrupted career in a conventional workplace. You may well have been engaged in performing equally valid or demanding activities other than paid employment, but you can’t help feeling that your own list of expertise and experience may look a trifle homespun or hand-knitted compared with others who’ve opted for a more recognised and conventionally rewarded career path. If you can learn how to present your intangible qualities as concrete assets and cite examples of equivalent competences gained in other, possibly unpaid, areas of endeavour, then you can enhance the value of your own personal brand and ease your repotting transition.
“When you’ve spent a few years with a baby in one arm, a toddler hanging on your skirt, trying to stir the peas, stuff the chicken, open the door and answer the phone, you have an excellent grounding in trying to deal with twenty people and a hundred problems all at once!”
So how do you go about achieving this – not solely for the benefit of external agencies but, more importantly, to bolster your own feelings of self-worth and validation? Many years ago, I interviewed a genuinely charismatic woman, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, Australia. When Sallyanne Atkinson first arrived in post, the state of Queensland was universally acknowledged as the last bastion of dyed-in-the-wool Aussie male chauvinism. She had shot to fame during her city’s bid to host the 1992 Olympics and, in the process, forged a name for herself as an exceedingly rare phenomenon in those benighted days: a woman of charm and with a lively sense of humour who could cut the political mustard in a heavily, indeed, almost totally male-dominated environment. This novel amalgam soon began to work wonders. Not only did Sallyanne kick-start an entire regeneration programme within the city itself, but she was also instrumental in repositioning the hitherto deeply conservative Queensland as a great place for the international community to do business. During the interview, I asked Sallyanne how she had managed to effect such transformational change in a state laughingly dismissed by fellow Aussies as a backwater full of ‘banana-benders’. (Don’t ask for a fuller explanation of this Aussie Strine expression but, take it from me, it’s not a compliment!) It seems to me that her answer is as relevant today to any individual repotter as it was to the Sleazy State successfully repotting itself as the Sunshine State over thirty years ago. Sallyanne had continued working professionally while bringing up five children and supporting her partner in his demanding career as a neurosurgeon, but the insights she shared on transference of skills still hold true for us all. ‘I only came into politics after I had raised a family and looked after a husband,’ she told me. ‘When you’ve spent a few years with a baby in one arm, a toddler hanging on your skirt, trying to stir the peas, stuff the chicken, open the door and answer the phone, you have an excellent grounding in trying to deal with twenty people and a hundred problems all at once!’
“...start teasing out your strengths and weaknesses and identify what your transferable and hitherto unsung skills might be.”
Sallyanne’s can-do reframe is a helpful place to start when you’re trying to move from who and where you currently are to who and what you’re capable of being and doing. Establish what excites and motivates you – and be honest about what doesn’t! There’s no shame in admitting if those debilitating years of sleepless nights and crying babies didn’t exactly float your boat. Or that the daily grind of office life and ghastly commute came close to driving you round the bend. From your own richly textured tapestry of responsibilities, challenges and problem-solving, start teasing out your strengths and weaknesses and identify what your transferable and hitherto unsung skills might be.