By Jerry Fultz, a.k.a. “Reggie”
What follows may be the story of a prodigal, or that of a pilgrim. Maybe a putz. You’ll have to decide for yourself. Personally, I think it could be any of the three…
I’ve never had to interview much for the positions I have held throughout my career. My first corporate job (an internal auditor) was pretty much secured by my mother at the Fortune 500 company she worked for. The job relocated my wife Lisa & I to Denver, and we set up shop as newlyweds in a new town, ready for the adventure. A couple of years later I jumped briefly to a different corporate gig, and from there I was able to launch out on my first real opportunity – small business ownership.
A retiring friend had tapped me on the shoulder, curious about my interest in acquiring his business. Lisa & I did the due diligence and took the dive into business ownership a few months later. Revenues grew year over year, and I took a lot of satisfaction in the knowledge that we had beaten the life expectancy of most small businesses. Lisa & I faced all the common challenges confronting business owners as we launched, maintained, and grew the company. We sacrificed many things along the way and, ultimately, were blessed to have a 12-year run at it. But a new opportunity came calling, so we made the decision to sell the company and launch out in a completely new direction – local church leadership.
Our church was looking to do a building expansion to accommodate the growth we were experiencing. They tapped me to join the team in a fundraising and project leadership capacity. Always up for an adventure, I jumped at the chance to learn and grow into new areas of leadership. The position – Director of Development – came with a decent salary, but as I soon discovered, it afforded something unanticipated and vastly more profound – a real taste of vocational calling. I learned that a person can derive deep meaning from one’s work, and it’s possible to experience a daily, palpable, deep and transcendental sense that work can be purpose driven.
Frederick Buechner defines vocation as “the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I can now bear witness to the fact that this level of vocational significance is addictive in every sense of that word. It’s better than ice cream & chocolate, Scotch & cigars, the day you were married & the day your first child was born. It’s better than those good drugs they give you when you’re having outpatient surgery. I was living, feeling and breathing this “calling” every day.
Work = joy.
Each day was a high – even when the project change orders started flying, budgets had to be revamped and the neighbors were complaining about the noise. It all added up to fun and deep relevance. 2 ½ years later, when the entire process from concept to completion was finished, there was a foundational and moving sense of satisfaction. In its wake, the project had permanently reframed my vocational DNA around the elusive, ambiguous and transcendental concept of significance. From that point forward, salary, benefits, achievements and all the other career markers would now be subservient to significance. I had been forever changed. The next thing worth doing needed to be worth doing.
The French have this word. It’s ennui. It means a feeling of listlessness & dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement.
Once the building project ended, the vocational high I had been experiencing started to wane. I hung around for a while in a programming role that was graciously extended to me, but there came a point where I knew I had to start looking for my next thing. Ennui was metastasizing.
But then, almost providentially, there it was again. The shoulder tap.
A vendor had heard that I was looking, we had a conversation and soon I was joining a nonprofit in a fractional leadership role (translation: part-time development role leading to a permanent senior leadership role). The part-time thing didn’t concern me. I was able to fill in those gaps with other work, including a stint in the corporate IT world. The important thing was that this was a return path to significance.
And again the shoulder tap proved beneficial. Revenues grew significantly as we dedicated my time and energy to locating new opportunities for growth. In hindsight, it seemed like it took very little time at all to move into a full-time position, then into a VP role and ultimately to serve as an interim CEO.
Spoiler alert – “interim.”
In actuality it took seven years. We operated informally on many of the LEAN principles that are now so familiar in the workplace. We tried a lot of cool things, failed at many, reloaded and ultimately gained some really decent traction with our mission. I had great rapport with board of directors, and was honored to step into the interim CEO role while our founder took a much needed sabbatical at the 20 year mark of our organization.
But here my story melds with so many others. Changes on our board led to new directions for the organization. Past understandings were revisited and I was let go from my position.
The details leading up to this somewhat unexpected turn of events are not important, although they have kept me up many, many nights in a futile attempt to come to terms with them. What IS important, however, is that there has been no shoulder tap. 4 years. No tapping. My “significance” turned out to be a house of cards that was easily blown away in the winds of organizational change.
Anthropology has this word. It’s liminality. It means the ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a right of passage. It’s the wayfinding that occurs between the “no longer” and the “not yet.”
I’ve been doing a lot of liminality. A lot of figuring out what happened and what’s next.
So I started this post by asking: Prodigal? Pilgrim? Putz? You don’t have enough information yet to make a determination. It could be, however, that these ideas of ennui, liminality and significance resonate with you. If so, I’d invite you to come back next week to get a better view of how I have navigated these topics.
Thanks, Mark, for the bandwidth.
Photo Credit: Giuseppe Famiani at Unsplash
