Get a Life

Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face - literally. At the beginning of her career at Ernst & Young, Annette Phillips was meeting with an HR staffer when she faced the most dreaded of interview questions: What do you want to be doing in five years? Her honest answer (which she kept to herself): "I want to be doing what you're doing."

Indeed, it took Phillips about five years to move from her original path - the conventional road to partner - to the more rewarding path that she's on now. And as Deborah Lee would point out, it required some direct action. Phillips stayed close to the people in HR and kept dropping hints that she liked what she saw in the department. Then came the break she had been looking for. HR needed a stand-in for an ill staffer who was scheduled to make an important recruiting trip. Phillips volunteered, and did well. She was sent on more recruiting trips. Eventually everyone agreed that she had a chance to be a star in HR.

"Today I'm able to match what I want to do with what I'm good at, in an organization I want to be part of," Phillips says. "I'm doing what I love to do, rather than what I'm 'supposed' to do."

Unfortunately, most answers aren't that apparent. So how do you find them? One way, simple as it sounds, is to ask the people who know you best. That's what Don Hutcheson did. Eight years ago, Hutcheson was running a $60 million advertising agency and enjoying a degree of professional success that he had worked his entire career to achieve. "I felt blessed," he says. "I had always done what I thought was the right thing, and I had managed to get where I wanted to go. But when I got there, it didn't feel like enough."

Hutcheson, now 51, just wasn't enjoying his work as much as he thought he would. He launched a personal initiative to rethink his career priorities. He even gave it a name: Project New Vision. "I had a little freedom and a little money, so I took the opportunity to figure out what I really wanted."

First, as Larry Smith would suggest, he interrogated himself. He wrote a set of personal guidelines - 11 qualities that described the kind of work he wanted to do. "Balance was a big one," he says. "I wanted an enterprise where I didn't have to be the interface with clients all the time. I wanted to work with really bright people. And I wanted my work to be something that gave back some of my learning and experience, that made the world a little better."

Then Hutcheson invited half a dozen of his closest friends to a series of dinners. He asked them to help him refine his goals. "I wanted to get feedback from people who cared about me," he says. "I already had an internal perspective. Now I wanted an external perspective."

Deborah Lee endorses this approach. "It's really important to talk to other people," she says. "That's the only way to find out which issues are internal - which ones are you - and which are the influences and distractions around you that make it tough to figure out what you want. It's great when you discover that issues you thought were unique to you are shared by lots of the people around you. It validates your feelings."

That's what happened to Hutcheson. One of the friends he brought into Project New Vision was psychologist and counselor Bob McDonald. The two men had known each other since their days in the army, where they had worked as Russian linguists. Hutcheson's search started McDonald, now 51, on one of his own. Eventually the friends joined forces. Hutcheson sold his agency, and he and McDonald cofounded the Highlands Program, based in Atlanta. Highlands is a career-counseling service that - surprise! - helps people discover what they want to do with their lives. Almost 7,000 people - from blue-chip companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Northwestern Mutual Life - have been through the program. Hutcheson and McDonald have also written a book, The Lemming Conspiracy: How to Redirect Your Life from Stress to Balance (Longstreet Press, 1997).

"Without some kind of personal vision, you have no direction," Hutcheson says. "You follow the herd. And you may not find out until it's too late that the herd is leading you right off a cliff."