‘Go! Reboot Your Career in 90 Days’ by Lisa Thee: Book Excerpt
Lisa Thee outlines a straight-forward way to reconsider and reboot your career in 90 days in this imminently readable, award-winning Book. In the excerpt below, read about Lisa’s approach to the first month in the three month journey.
The Career Reboot Process
For the first twenty years of my career, I had stable corporate jobs. At the same time, I volunteered with organizations that supported marginalized women and children to incorporate a sense of mission into my life. It was not something I could dedicate forty hours a week to, because I was in the career-building phase of my life, but I was able to balance both without dropping balls. However, when the responsibilities of life started to add up and my career progressed, it was no longer tenable to do both without negatively impacting everything else. My drive and my ability to influence people and get others on board with new ideas, combined with my Type A personality, can make a me a force of nature when I set my mind to something. It can also become my biggest liability when I bite off more than I can chew. But it also means I can stick to a process once it’s begun.
The next steps required to cleanse your career are something only you can define, but I have laid out some guidelines. I developed this process to take ninety days because it is the length of a typical medical leave of absence. For many of my clients and for me, it took a medical issue to prioritize redefining our career portfolios. The body keeps score.
Month 1: Stabilize
The goal of the first month of this process is to get out of your head and back into your body. To tune into your own inner wisdom, it is critical to tune out the noise of the world. After you achieve some success in your career, it becomes hard to separate your values from the values that are required to succeed at your job. In order to intentionally craft your career, it is important to return to what your dreams were for yourself, how they have evolved, and what skills you have developed. The things that got you your current success will not necessarily get you where you want to go next, so it is important to be intentional about slowing down and feeling your feelings. Here is a week-by-week journaling exercise that can help you with accountability about listening to what your body has been trying to tell you.
Week 1: Start an Energy Log
It is vital to start slowing down and not just keep pushing through your days in survival mode. The first step is awareness about how much energy you’re expending trying to survive. Take five minutes a day and create a data log of how your energy ebbs and flows as you move through your tasks for the day. Note what activities and interactions drain you and which energize you. I recommend taking a few minutes at lunchtime and another couple of minutes before bed to document your tasks and feelings. Making that distinction is key to creating a life you will enjoy living. Here are some prompts to help you observe your reactions to common scenarios:
Do you find interacting with groups of people draining or energizing?
Is there a meeting you dread or look forward to all week?
What is it about that interaction that you can learn from?
Do you feel like your interactions need to speed up or slow down?
Is there an age group that you enjoy more (children, seniors, peers; do you enjoy leading more junior or senior teams)?
Do you enjoy being the visionary or executing the vision as the operational leader?
What makes your heart rate beat a bit faster in anticipation?
What makes you want to crawl back into bed?
What times of day do you have the most creativity?
How many times did outside distractions take you off task?
What I noticed when I took the time to get out of my mind and back into my body was that procedural meetings with large groups of people drain my batteries quickly. I am more of a generalist than a specialist and don’t prefer tedious detailed work. I also noticed that when I was providing one-on-one mentoring to people coming up in their career or advising established leaders, I almost never left a meeting without being more energized than when I arrived. When I had to sit in a conference room for more than two hours at a time, I would get bored and fidgety even if the topic was interesting. I think fast, move fast, and get impatient when I can’t go at a comfortable speed. Finally, I noticed my creativity was highest in the morning and diminished as the day went on.
Week 2: Take Daily Walks—Without Your Phone
One of the most healing things we can do for ourselves is exposure to nature. I like to take the time to notice the blue of the sky and the tops of the trees. Over time, it is interesting to notice how the landscape changes with the seasons and how, even on stressful days, the birds are still flying, and the animals are still frolicking. It is important to remember our place in this world: we don’t keep it spinning. We are a small part of a much bigger system that will persist without us. This helps me to balance my instinct to over-function or take responsibility for things that I can’t control. I also function best with accountability, so I got a dog who needs exercise as much as I do in order to motivate myself to stay consistent with my thirty- to sixty-minute daily walk.
Week 3: Meditate
It is important to build a daily practice of quiet time to observe your thoughts. It can be challenging to build this muscle at first, but it is important to tune into your breathing and learn to observe your thoughts and feelings and notice how transient they are versus identifying with them. My journey toward meditation was facilitated by the Headspace app. As a Type A extrovert, I found guided meditation to be a good process to ease slowing down and learning to observe.
Five years later, I have meditated over a thousand times for an average of eleven minutes per session. When I am feeling stuck or anxious, it is usually when I have gotten lax on my daily practice. I am glad I always have a place to go back to when I slip into bad habits. Just like the gym, it is hardest when you are getting started, and, even if you take a break, it is easier to return.
In 2021, I added guided breathwork coaching to my practice to help me with releasing stress and trauma. Having a structured process with a coach also provides me with a means of accountability. In an article about the rising popularity of breathwork, Mark Hyman, head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine explains, “Breathwork has been shown to increase parasympathetic activity, heart rate variability, physiological flexibility, [and] is one of the greatest tools I have in my medical toolbox to help individuals manage stress, [which] has become an epidemic in our society.”
Some of my most creative breakthroughs have occurred after a breath-work session after weeks of feeling blocked.
Week 4: Identify a Unicorn Space
In Eve Rodsky’s 2022 book, Finding your Unicorn Space, she recommends that “finding creativity in a too busy world is an amazing resource for rediscovering the parts of you that may have taken a backseat as your responsibilities in life have piled on.” When I started reading Eve’s book, I found a good place to start was looking back to my childhood and remembering things that brought me joy.
Music, dance, art, writing, or returning to a dormant sport or hobby are all places that can be a source of unicorn space. You will negotiate dedicated time for that activity on a weekly basis so that you can immerse yourself in something that reminds you of who you are and that helps charge your batteries for the challenges of the week ahead. This is the antidote to exhaustion, doom scrolling, and Netflix binging. It is life-giving and only exists to remind you that joy and creative expression are part of your life’s journey. It is where you feel free.
As someone with a chronic illness, I have had to evolve my unicorn space over the years. Initially, it was figure skating. In my twenties, it evolved to downhill skiing and Zumba dance. Eve’s book encouraged me to dig deep and figure out what I could do today just for the sheer pleasure of it, which led me to start writing this book.
This excerpt is from Go! Reboot Your Career by Lisa Thee. Copyright © 2023 by the author. Reproduced with permission of GreenLeaf Book Group, Austin, Texas, and the author. D.C. Book cover and related images provided by author.
Cover photo by Damian Siodłak on Unsplash.
About the author:
Lisa Thee is a a thought leader for cyber safety for children, an experienced board member, consultant and angel investor who helps businesses scale and leads in a world where people are demanding more from companies. Learn more about her book and work at https://lisathee.com/go/
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