While in a leadership training session, Higgins began to focus on the parts of her job that she found rewarding. "If I had to be honest with myself, I had to say it wasn't about the technology; it was about the people," she says. She realized that she enjoyed managing projects, setting goals, and motivating workers to achieve them.
Over the next year-and-a-half, Higgins set about experimenting with possible new careers that would be more people-focused. She took graduate courses in organizational development to learn the skills that she would need. She signed up for a conference led by organizational learning guru Peter Senge and discovered that she liked the field and felt instant rapport with the people in attendance. Feeling more confident, she finally quit her job at Commerce One and took part-time software consulting gigs while getting her new business up and running. That let her keep one foot in her more secure past. Still, the transition wasn't easy, and it wasn't fast. "The hardest part was leaving the old job and not having the new thing be clear," she says. "I thought about it as a leap of faith, believing that if I jumped off the cliff, the universe would throw out a safety net for me."
Eventually, she found a way to blend her previous business experience with the more people-centered work that she had come to love. She now has her own practice as an executive coach for high-tech companies, with an impressive and growing client list. "I have credibility in high tech because I can speak the language, and I know all the challenges because I have the scars to show from similar battles," she says. "Plus, I'm now making as good a living doing what I love as when I was doing what I hated."
New connections spark big ideas
If Sandra Comas were to cast her life story as a myth, she'd be the female version of Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, whose two faces look in opposite directions. Comas, holder of four master's degrees and a PhD in literature, spent 10 years teaching humanities with a specialization in Latin America, most recently at an Ivy League university. She's now in her third year as a financial consultant at a top Wall Street firm. It's hard to imagine two more-disparate cultures. To make the transition from one world to another, Comas knew that she needed a totally new network.
Her leap was neither logical nor easy. Disillusioned with academic politics and wages, she thought her skill as an amateur investor might indicate an aptitude for business. She began sampling courses at her university's management school. "I got excited all over again," she says from her office in Wilton, Connecticut. "I felt like I had at the outset of my academic career." She excelled in class, but she was savvy enough to know that this leap required contacts even more than it demanded a facility with financial instruments. While at the business school, Comas took advantage of the opportunities offered to MBA students to land interviews with Wall Street firms. "Mobility in your career is often related to your contacts and your ability to enlist them to find out about possibilities and get in the door," Ibarra says.
Comas, who confesses that she still misses her former intellectual life, "as you miss your best friend," is now seeking a way to connect her two careers. An acquaintance at a college reunion recently told her of his job investing in Latin American companies. She was instantly intrigued. Now she's exploring ways to work with nonprofit organizations that raise money for similar programs. "How cool would that be?" she says. "I could do something I love, believe in, and have a facility for. It would engage all my interests."
Making sense of a career choice yet again
After 15 years in a medical specialty that had become increasingly frustrating, Juan Sanchez, a cardiac surgeon in Bridgeport, Connecticut, seriously considered throwing away his hard-won career. Feeling burned out, he spent a year pursuing a master's degree in public administration, eager to see if the switch would engage him more.
After a year with fellow students and professors, Sanchez discovered that the stresses he had been feeling were not so different from what others were experiencing. As the year drew to a close, Sanchez just couldn't imagine himself really leaving medicine. In Ibarra's terms, the story of his transition just didn't ring true. "A story should connect who you used to be with the person you want to be in the future in a way that has continuity," she says. But, Sanchez realized, he already was who he wanted to be.
As he wrote in an email one evening, "My one year 'time-out' was a sort of refuel-ing station to reenergize and refocus. I wanted to be sure there wasn't something else I'd rather do. There isn't. For all its difficulties and obstacles, the satisfaction of saving lives and making people feel better still beats anything else. How could I have thought otherwise?"
The story Sanchez tells himself and others about his odyssey now has logic: He's tested his calling and returned to his profession with a renewed passion for the career he chose as a young man. "I've validated my original decision," he says.
Linda Tischler (ltischler@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.
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