Big Change Incoming
Hi folks! If you are receiving this letter, it’s because you’ve expressed an interest in either my new career direction, my (impending) move to Spain, or both. My goal is to send out 12 of these over the next year as I execute the move and get my life and new business set up. It is a newsletter and you were added without your explicit consent, so feel free to unsubscribe at any time with absolutely no hard feelings (at the bottom of the email).
In July I will be relocating my life from the United States, where I have lived for the past two decades, to Spain, where I have never lived before. For those of you who know me, you know I’ve been talking about this for a while now. I do not speak Spanish (yet). I do not have family or close friends in Spain (yet). I am not moving for work... well, not in the same sense that people mean when they say they are moving for work. If you are reading this it's because you've asked me at least two of the following questions: 1) How did you decide to leave your challenging and rewarding job? 2) What steps are you taking to make your relocation work? 3) Is your partner coming with you?
I promise to answer at least two of those questions exhaustively. Stick around to figure out which ones.
One of the best things about the work I now do - career consulting - is that I get to be around some of the smartest and most dynamic people I've ever met. While we were evaluating a job offer together, a client said to me, “I want to make sure that I am running towards an opportunity rather than running away from where I am right now.” This is the closest I could come to summing up what it is that I do now. I help people understand what it is that they want to run towards and help them craft the path to get there. It is precisely how I made the decision to leave my compelling, interesting, highly-rewarded career to strike it out on my own in a different country.
The first time I realized the power of running towards an opportunity was, oddly enough, when I took my last corporate job. I had just completed the first phase of the career consulting process that I now take my clients through. It was the first time that I had an objective evaluation criteria for assessing the opportunity and the first time that I knew precisely what trade-offs I was making by taking the job; a job I proceeded to stay at for 4 years and with zero doubt in my mind that I had made the right choice in picking it.
When I made the decision to leave that job I had the most supportive bosses I have ever had in my career, major transformative initiatives that I had kicked off were starting to bear fruit, I was earning the most I have ever earned. When I made the decision to leave New York, I was living in my dream apartment in a building I had fantasized about living in for 10 (!) years, I was (and am) dating an amazing man, and my social life in New York was full of people like you: smart, talented, and ambitious friends and colleagues from undergrad and graduate school, teammates from projects I managed as a consultant, artists, drag queens, and intellectuals.
I am starting to realize that there is a hidden truth in my client's simple, sophisticated statement: grief is the price to pay for running towards opportunities rather than away from situations. That is because when you aren't running away from something, you are choosing between (at least) two perfectly viable futures. There is a world where I know I will have been content in my home city for the last 20 years and in a challenging and interesting job with good people. Choosing to leave all this has not been easy, but I know that I am running towards something exciting. And this will always be the measure of whether I, or my clients, are doing it right. Tough decisions like this are how we know that we have created good and fulfilling options for ourselves. It is perfectly possible that I am not going to like Spain; and even if that happens, I know will not have made a poor decision.
Most people who go through my career consulting process will not end up making the magnitude and quantity of changes that I am willing and able to make. But dramatic change is not the point of the work I do; the work is to help people develop the skills they need to identify and run enthusiastically towards opportunities that are meaningful for them. Sometimes that means they stay in their roles but with renewed focus on the parts of their work that make them satisfied, sometimes they leave for new roles, sometimes they go back to school, and sometimes they make change directions in ways that look counter-intuitive to the people who know them. In my next letter, I will actually write about my specific criteria for how I evaluated my career options and how I used them to decide to do what I am about to do now - I fly to Madrid next Thursday, Ojala!
If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. If you have friends that need to read this, please forward it to them or point them to my site (www.matkacareers.com). I’m in the process of migrating websites, so your experience of this newsletter will be a little different next month, but all of this is what I am learning is part of the texture of starting a small business. Thank you all for your patience, generosity and goodwill as my transformation takes momentum.
