Meeting #2

My second meeting with CS was a phone meeting.  It had been an exhausting day and I wasn't quite sure how I was going to stay awake and focus on the phone - but it turned out okay.  It sort of helped that the previous week at work had been bad - really bad.  I have very few hours left to charge to shuttle for this fiscal year (until end of September) and didn't have another project to charge in the meantime.  So that means that I'm charging "CM" - effectively an internal overhead code that upper management does not like to see on your time card.  On top of that I hadn't really found anything to do with my CM time yet.  Therefore the week at work was spent largely being bored and irritated by condo issues, since I had no other distractions.  I don't do bored well.  Seriously - I have nightmares about having nothing to do. I fear boredom more than I fear being accosted by a praying mantis bearing mayonnaise and flip-flops.

Anyway - I managed to get my homework for the week done and the meeting fell into place from there.  While I do prefer a face-to-face, the phone went better than I had expected and felt productive.  The main topics were finding the themes in my achievement stories and talking about the rationale behind my value rankings.

CS and I seemed to pretty much agree on the achievement story themes.  One observation she made was that my desire to "help" others felt more genuine/altruistic to her from my stories than I had led her to believe in our first meeting.  I guess I've been seeing this trait as part of a need for external validation.  I don't simply enjoy helping others - I also enjoy the way it makes me feel to have had someone successfully follow my advice, etc.  It was nice to hear that perhaps there was something more to that trait then just stroking my own ego! It's certainly true that all of my achievement stories have a social theme to them.  I'm definitely not someone who could sit in a garage inventing something for years on my own and emerge 15 years later completely satisfied.  I need connection with others and social feedback.  I feel the best about my achievements when they are placed in the context of other people - not necessarily in a competitive way, but I need to feel that what I've done is somehow relevant to others.

These are the notes that CS took on the achievement themes:

Summary From 2^nd Meeting

Some of the themes that emerged from your achievements exercise are:

·        You like situations where there is a well defined beginning and end

·        You work best when you’re getting direct feedback from others

·        You like to achieve personally, but you also like it to have an impact on others – either socially, the team, the group you’re in

·        You like to bring people together to provide a value to the group

·        You like to make a difference/have an impact in what you’re doing

·        You like to document significant things in your life

·        You like to tell stories that capture significant things in your life

·        You like to take chaotic things and bring order to them

·        You like to be part of a team/group when working

The next topic was my value sorting and the top three values.  At first glance the top three don't seem particularly work-related, but there was no escaping that these are the things that matter most to my in my life right now.  Growth covers so many things really - and I feel if I can find a career in which I am growing, both personally and professionally, then many of the other top ten values will follow.  It's a little silly, but I remember the year that I learned how to both drive a car with a manual transmission and knit with such fondness.  I remember being really happy at the end of the year that I had these two tangible new skills.  It's been such a long time since I've felt like I've learned something and become competent at it.  Perhaps that's a side-effect of having two small children - I always feel like I'm behind the learning curve and have no idea what I'm doing! It would be so nice to have a job where I could grow and gain a little more confidence at some aspect of life.

The top 3 values at this point in your life are:

·        Growth [New training & learning, change & variety, personal development]

·        Serenity [Order (tranquility, stability), living in the present, simplicity, just having fun]

·        Balance Work & Life [Time flexibility]

Regarding some of the other values that are important to you (close family, self-esteem, team, recognition) - you believe those will be positively influenced by getting these 3 in line first.

We wrapped up the conversation by talking about potential jobs that might be better tuned toward my top values and the themes from my achievement stories.  I had just attended a meeting at work with my advisor regarding a project that we are funding him to do involving the search for Earth-like planets - hence the appearance of that in the list.  I'm sure I was babbling about planet-searching pretty incoherently. 

One other thing that came up was my leadership skills, or lack thereof.  It had been an interesting week in that my bosses at work kept talking about how they really saw me as a leader and someone who gets along will with others and who would be a good manager.  In direct contrast to that assessment, a situation at the condo completely blew up which resulted in me resigning as a trustee on our HOA board.  I was very upset by the whole thing (it had been brewing for a long time) and have a hard time not seeing it as a failure on my part in terms of dealing with difficult people.  Again, my confidence has been shaken.  Perhaps an area where I have potential, but need some development?

We talked a little about potential job situations or having a job that includes more of what is important to you. I’ll just document some of the ideas here so we have a record - I just want to capture the ideas for now without limiting other ideas. It’s not yet time to start evaluating these  - we want to keep open to all ideas at this point. Some initial ideas:

·        Academic teaching and advising in a non-research oriented school

·        Finding technical projects where you can have an impact and the problem interests you (vs. Navy nukes)

·        Working on finding planets (work your advisor is doing at Draper) (is it planets they’re looking for? I wasn’t sure)

·        Personal financial organizer

We also talked about your potential leadership capabilities and your concern about dealing with conflict in a constructive manner.

The conversation wrapped up with my homework assignments, of course.  We are going on a family cruise at the end of August, so the next meeting will be three weeks away.  CS also wants me to do the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).  I've taken these tests before on my own - but I'm interested to see how it turns out this time and to really explore what the results mean.  I'm hoping to gain insight, not only on what type of job might suit me best, but also on why I experience the difficulties I do with certain personality types.  Some pretty interesting things to think about!

HOMEWORK

1.      Write about 1 or 2 ideal jobs and talk about a day or other period of time in the life of this job. What do you do? Who do you work with? What do you accomplish? How do you feel? How does it fit with the rest of your life? How does it match with your values?

2.      Go through job postings (on Monster or other job boards) and find descriptions of jobs or parts of descriptions that appeal to you. Circle what appeals to you and note why that’s of interest. Try to find 5-10 job postings that have something that’s of interest to you.

Be sure to complete the MBTI on-line assessment before you leave on your vacation, so I will have the results before our next meeting.

Acheivement Stories

One of my homework assignments for my second coaching session is to write about my achievement stories

Achievement Stories: Identify stories from your life where you accomplished something or were involved in something that really made you feel good about what you did. Talk about why these were valuable to you. One example we discussed briefly is your work with undergraduates in your sorority. What about this work gives you a sense of value and why? What talents or skills are you using and how do you feel when doing this work?  You can reach back into your childhood, your schooling, volunteer work, professional work.   Don’t feel it has to be “significant” in a measurable way – it just needs to be something where your talents, interests, and results were aligned in a meaningful way to you.
If you have time, think about what themes emerge from this exercise.

I'm a bit nervous about this exercise because I rely so much on external validation.  I worry that it'll be hard to find things that *I* felt good about.  I tend to recognize more strongly the items that I was praised highly for etc.  See?  I'm already concerned about  not doing it "right".  I'm also excited about it too though as I think it's something I really do need to think about.  What are those things in life that make me feel truly happy or satisfied?  So I'm just going to get started and see what comes out!

•  Our yearly photobook: When Lily turned 1 in 2007 I put together a Blurb "Lily's First Year" book.  I put a lot of time and effort into it and was pretty proud of the result.  Since then I've done a "MasterWong" photo yearbook each year.  Gordon takes awesome photos, and it's been my job to go through them all, select the best ones, edit layouts, fill in text - basically tell the story of our year in pictures.  It's a ton of work and I stress out about it, but I really love it.  I get great satisfaction out of doing it and I love the finished product.  I love giving it to our parents as gifts every year.  I'm definitely not a "scrap-booker" in the modern sense of the word (think that scary aisle at Michael's.... shudder) - but I've always enjoyed organizing, cataloging and documenting.  In my undergraduate sorority days I was the archivist/historian and spent an entire summer putting together an archival scrapbook.  I did something similar with the memories of my paternal grandfather after he passed away.    I love these activities for the both the process of organizing, cataloging and bring order to these little bits of our life.  I also love it for the feeling of achievement when I hold the finished product and the joy they seem to bring to others.  Lately, with our family photo books I have enjoyed the artistic expression that comes with laying out the photos to tell a story.
• Speaking at high school graduation:  I'm iffy about this one, because I can't say that I really enjoyed the actual speech-giving.  But, the event brought me a little bit of fame in my home town and is something that I think of as a pretty major achievement.  I was salutatorian in high school and therefore was supposed to speak at graduation.  The hitch was that I have always had a pretty good stutter.  It comes and goes and generally doesn't affect me in everyday social life, but it definitely makes public speaking and reading aloud difficult.  Some folks believed I shouldn't give the speech - that I should step aside an let the person who was #3 give it instead.  I refused to do that.  I practiced, I worked hard on it.  The theme of the speech was to tackle obstacles head on and not to back down from challenges.  I don't think the content was all that spectacular, but the fact that I was up there giving it seemed to reach a lot of people.  There were newspaper articles afterward and interviews and folks recognizing me in the ice cream shop.  I definitely felt proud and accomplished.
• Advising Undergrads, R's Story: I spent a good portion of early adult-hood in school.  I did 10 years total at MIT with a year break in between spent living in Los Angeles.  During the post-undergrad time I served as finance adviser to undergraduate sorority women at both MIT and USC.  The USC experience was a complete disaster, but I had some really great moments advising at MIT.  I had close relationships with most of my advisees and loved seeing them succeed.  There was one woman, R, who I wasn't advising directly, but had spent time with due to her some financial hardship that made it difficult for her to pay her dues to the sorority. One day she ended up talking to me about some very serious issues in her life.  I listened to her and did my best to empathize.  Years later she sent me a wonderful card telling me how important that conversation had been to her.  That experience really touched me and is one that I think about with fondness when I remember the advising experiences.
• Advising Undergrads, Bexley: during the last two years of my PhD program I took a job as a Graduate Resident Tutor (GRT) at Bexley Hall.  The deal was that I lived in an undergrad dorm and served as a residential adviser to the students there.  My then boyfriend (now husband), Gordon, moved in with me about 6 months into it.  I had a great time living with the undergrads.  We cooked gigantic dinners for the entire dorm twice a year during finals weeks.  I loved doing that.  Gordon was the mastermind behind the dinners, but I loved the prep, the cooking, the serving - all of it.  It was basically throwing a very large party.  We'd have a team of friends helping - all under Gordon's expert direction.  I loved how much the "kids" enjoyed it.  I also loved just living there with them, getting to know them, helping them out with advice and support whenever they needed it.  When I look back on my years at MIT I think of Bexley more as a home, than the dorm that I spent four years in as an undergraduate.  I really felt comfortable in my skin in my role as GRT there.
• Reaction Wheels, my Master's Thesis:  I did both my masters and my PhD work in the Space System's Laboratory at MIT with Prof. Dave Miller.  My Masters thesis was on the modeling and validation of reaction wheel disturbance models.  There was nothing particularly amazing about the work that I did - but there was somewhat of a hole in the literature in this area and the work needed doing.  I did a nice, thorough job of it.  I definitely enjoyed my experience and felt very accomplished afterward.  I got a couple of conference papers and a journal paper out of the work.  I made a good impression on our customers and JPL and built some good professional relationships there.  I felt capable and confident in the work I was doing.  I felt like I was making a difference and having some impact.  I still get occasional emails about this work and I know the journal paper gets cited here and there.  The combination of confidence, challenge and success was just right in this endeavor.  It was challenging, yet I felt successful enough as I went along that I never really lost confidence.  I both enjoyed the work itself and also enjoyed all the external validation that came with it. I have much fonder feelings towards my Masters thesis than to my PhD.
• Entertaining:  while not a major achievement per se, I do really enjoy throwing parties.  Gordon and I love to entertain and while it's gotten a bit harder logistically with children we still have a good time with it.  Before kids we threw numerous dinner parties, wine tastings, birthday bashes etc and always enjoyed them.  I like the planning, the execution, and the talk of what a great time it was later.  Our wedding was the biggest party we ever thew and it was a blast.  More recently I planned a surprise 40th birthday party for Gordon at a local restaurant that went off really well.  G was completely surprised and had a great time.  It was also a nice way to get friends from all different phases/parts of our lives in one place.  I really enjoy helping people make connections and creating a fun social environment.  Now that we're parents, we throw pretty big "happy hour playgroups" at our house about 2x/year that attract a ton of people.  For me, the joy of party-throwing isn't in the details (like elaborate favors or themes) but in creating a fun atmosphere and getting lots of people socializing in one place. 

Value Sort

 The first activity that CS asked me to do was a value sort.  Here are her instructions from before our first meeting.

Values Sort:

Cut out the boxes of values and identify the top ten values for you in your life right now – both related to your personal life and your work life. These top ten should be what you want your life to be like, not necessarily what it is right now. You can do this exercise by eliminating those that aren’t important to you and then prioritizing the most important to you. Try to get as close to 10 values as you can. If you have time, place the 10 in priority order.

 Along with her email came a word document with just over a 125 values formatted in boxes.  I cut them all out, put them in a little gift bag and started sorting while we were driving up to NH for a family camping trip.

It was daunting, at first, to imagine getting down to only ten values from all of them in the bag.  For the first pass I read them all and threw out anything that I just KNEW wouldn't make the top 10.  That got rid of about 34 or so:   

travel to see world, being visionary, adventure, detachment (work at work), great leisure life, democracy, safety/protection, work under pressure, privacy, purity, competition, fast-paced work, sports, working alone, reaching the top, religion group, arts, reverence for life, humility, sophistication, financial gain, financial independence, power and authority, owning a house, beauty, physical challenge, traveling, public service, becoming an entrepreneur, wealth, following my bliss, good nutrition, interesting retirement, fame.

Some of the first-pass rejects are things that I flat out don't value, like "work under pressure", while others are things that I just know I can't rank in the top ten at this point in my life, like "traveling". 

When we returned from the camping trip I took the remaining hundred or so values, spread them out on my bed and picked out the ones that really jumped out at me.  After that exercise I was left holding only 31 values - still three times more than I was supposed to have!

On the day that CS and I were meeting to discuss them I had planned to go from 31 down to 10 during Lily and Quinn's naptime.  And of course they both decided not to do a whole lot of sleeping that day - it's just always the way.  So, I decided to make the value sort into a little art project.  I spread the remaining values out on the table and began to notice that they fell quite nicely into categories.  I started doing what I do best - organizing and sorting.  Pretty soon I had managed to pull out 10 main values, some with supporting sub-values.  I made sure that I was happy with the "big" value in each category and then pulled out construction paper and some mounting tabs.  After a little while Lily and I had made these:

Although I did the sorting weeks ago it wasn't until last night that I had a chance to sit down and do the ranking.  CS and I had already talked through the values and why I chose them, so ranking them was not that difficult.  Here's the final order and a little bit on why these ten values called out to me.

1. Growth [New Training & Learning, Change & Variety, personal Development]
2. Serenity [Order (tranquility, stability), Living in the Present, Simplicity, Just Having Fun]
3. Balance Work and Life [Time Flexibility]
4. Being a Close Family [Parenting with Wisdom and Love]
5. Meaningful Work [Quality of what I take part in, Invovlement]
6. Self Esteem [Decisiveness, Using my Abilities, Living Courageously]
7. Helping Other People [Influencing Others, Making a Difference, Community]
8. Economic Security
9. Working with a Team [Being with Open and Honest People]
10. Recognition [Reputation, Achievement, Intellectual Status]

Meeting #1

Time to blog about the actual coaching meetings.  Sadly I'm writing this weeks after the meeting occurred so I'll need to rely on memory a little.  But! one of my favorite things about CS so far is that she's so completely organized and after each meeting sends me an email with a recap of what we talked about and my homework assignment.  She's really great like that.

Our first meeting was spent talking about the coaching process and our commitments, gathering information and reviewing the results of my values sorting.  I expected to do a lot of talking at this meeting since CS had to get to know me in order to figure out what I was looking for.  So I talked a lot.  She and I talked about what I was hoping to get out of the coaching process so that we could be sure to stay on the same page in terms of expectations.  Here's what we came up with (taken from CS notes):

Expected Outcome of Coaching Process

We talked about what you’d like to accomplish over the next 3-4 months of working together and this is what I heard from you:

·       You’d like to be on the road to your next step professionally. You defined this as having clear options defined in terms of the type of position(s) and organizations/companies you’d like to be contacting.

·       You also said you would like an action plan that you are implementing that involves whatever networking you need to do, organizations you might join, knowledge you may need to gain, or other actionable steps you need to take in order to accomplish a better professional situation.

·       You acknowledged that you probably won’t be in a new position by the end of this time, but you should be clear about what options you most want to pursue and have a clear idea of what actions you need to take to get there.

       You would like to have a general idea of what you might do longer term (~5 years).

In preparation I had sorted my values, but hadn't had a chance to rank them yet.  So I also got a couple of homework assignments:

Homework for Next Meeting

1.     Values: You’ve done a nice job grouping your top 10 values into clumps of values that are important to you at this point in your career and eliminating those that are not very important. I’d like you to narrow to the top three value groups you definitely want to focus on for your next professional situation – what’s most important to you and why. We will still consider other values, but it would be beneficial to have a closer focus.

2.     Achievement Stories: Identify stories from your life where you accomplished something or were involved in something that really made you feel good about what you did. Talk about why these were valuable to you. 

One example we discussed briefly is your work with undergraduates in your sorority. What about this work gives you a sense of value and why? What talents or skills are you using and how do you feel when doing this work? 

You can reach back into your childhood, your schooling, volunteer work, professional work. Don’t feel it has to be “significant” in a measurable way – it just needs to be something where your talents, interests, and results were aligned in a meaningful way to you. 

If you have time, think about what themes emerge from this exercise.

       
All in all the first meeting went very well.  I easily became comfortable with CS and enjoyed talking with her.  She seems smart and perceptive and took care to listen to what I was saying.  I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the process.  Our next meeting is a phone meeting since she will be away on vacation for a few weeks.

What Am I Doing Here?

It turns out that a totally blank new blog is kind of intimidating.  I've been keeping up our family blog, The LilyPad, for so long now that I take for granted the ease of posting something there.  I wasn't ready to be faced with the emptiness that was the "create a blog" dialog.

So what's this new blog about?  The short answer is that after 10 years of education and 5 years at an aerospace research lab I'm no longer sure that I want to be in aerospace engineering.  I've held this suspicion for some time, but until now have been successful in ignoring my discontent or finding something to blame it on (this job, this project, this team, this environment, etc).  In the past I have had enough "good periods" at work to get me through the overall malaise.  But lately that mojo has been wearing off.

I suspect that the big change that brought my work unhappiness to full scrutiny was having children.  There are a few ways that being a Mom has forever altered my work experience.  The first is the obvious effect on my time.  Since I returned to work 6 months after my daughter's birth I have been working 3 9-hour days instead of 5 8-hour days.  I took another 6 months off when my son was born last spring and am now back to my part time schedule.  In many ways its wonderful and I feel very lucky.  I am home with my children 2 days a week, but I still get to go to work 3 days and "use my brain".  I have been working on flight control certification and design for space shuttle missions to the ISS for the last five years and it's a wonderful part-time gig.  I get to be part of some pretty exciting stuff, yet the work is pretty well-defined and I have ample time to get it done.  My team respects my schedule and we work together well to make sure that my reduced hours have minimal effect on the work getting done.  My boss and teammates are all very supportive.

OK so you're probably asking - what the hell is my problem?  Well there are a couple of issues with my job that I could tolerate before, but am having a harder time dealing with now.  One is the loneliness and isolation that can come with being an engineer.  I spend many hours a day at my desk with my computer.  A number of the people at work are nice, but not super social.  There are a lot of folks who never really leave their offices.  This problem is amplified by the fact that my entire team is based in Houston.  So all of my "meetings" are by telephone.  I have few chances to see the folks I work with face to face.  There aren't many offices I can walk into and start brainstorming on a problem.  I tend to lean towards extrovert and my work environment is not great for that.  I think this was less of a problem before I had kids because I got a lot of adult socializing time outside of work.  Now - not so much.

I recently attended a woman's lunchtime talk at work where the guest speaker was a woman who's been at my company for awhile and has made it all the way to head of a directorate.  I think she's the first woman to do that.  I'm pretty fascinated by her as she has three children, has taken longer than normal maternity leaves, worked part-time here and there and has still managed to do really well at a company with a technical staff that is at best 10% female.  She said one thing during that meeting that really struck a chord with me.  She said that when you're trying to balance a busy family life and work that you have to be sure that you're doing what you love.  Because if you're not... well it's just not worth all the effort.  I swear when she said that I almost started to cry - it describes exactly how I feel.  At times, I like my job, but I really don't love it - not even close.  And lately the daily dance of juggling two children, household tasks and a job that fails to fire me up is starting to wear on me.

So that's why I'm here - to get on the path to doing something I love. But first I have to figure out what that might be!