Sharon Belden Castonguay: 0:00

It's absolutely incredibly important to recognize what comes easily to you and to be leveraging that, really leaning in on the things that you're uniquely good at, because that's what's going to differentiate you in any market, within any profession.

Joe Miller: 0:16

Sharon, I'm so glad to have you on Titans of Transition. I saw your TED Talk and really resonated with the points you made. Saw your TED Talk and really resonated with the points you made. I really am interested in the whole process of people becoming fulfilled in their choice of their career direction and that whole journey people get on. In your TED Talk you talked about how messy that process can be and you also brought in the whole idea of identity and how we form those identities and how they're not static. I just thought, wow, this is a great talk, really added a lot to my understanding. So I wanted to have you on so we could unpack that. So again, welcome.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 0:59

so much for having me. It's been really gratifying to see over the years how the talk has resonated with so many.

Joe Miller: 1:06

I've had like three careers and I see that you've made some kind of major shifts as well, and we'll definitely want to touch on those. I thought maybe another twist we might want to take at this, or another approach, is that we would bring in some of those key lessons earlier in our discussion. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now and how you landed on that.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 1:43

Well, so what I do now is I'm the executive director of the Career Center at Wesleyan University, which is a highly selective, small liberal arts college in Connecticut, and I attended a small liberal arts college as well. So in some ways it was coming full circle and even though I had spent most of my career development career working with folks who were older so graduate students, jds, mbas, people who were often a lot in their 20s but I also worked with plenty of people who were in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, getting close to retirement, and I had an interest in going back to working with undergraduates, in part because I remembered keenly what my own experience was like transitioning from a liberal arts college into the work world, and at the time I graduated, during a terrible economy when everybody was struggling, my dad was a banker and that was something that appealed to me. So I thought what are the options for someone coming out of this type of institution? And I knew I didn't want to be in New York, so that cut off a huge part of the sector, right? So you're not going to do the kind of big Wall Street finance if you don't want to be in New York. I was looking at Boston and just the job market was terrible.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 3:06

And I ended up landing in an advertising agency, in part because I had kind of creative bent and I thought that might be an interesting thing to do. I was interested in copywriting. There was another Smith grad, someone who graduated a year ahead of me, who was already at the agency, who spoke highly of it and you know, long story short, it was a complete disaster. I mean, I lasted eight months in the position but there was a lot of lessons learned from that and you know, one of them was sort of thinking about how much experimentation do you sometimes need to do after you graduate from college? So to answer your question, you know how did I get involved in this kind of work? It was because by the time I was in my late 20s I had already had several careers and got interested in working with people on those career transitions and that eventually ended up coming full circle to what I'm doing now.

Joe Miller: 4:13

So it's kind of like a matter or a process of trying things on. I mean, you do the best you can to sort of discern the path that's best for you, either the role or the nature of what you will be doing, but until you really try it on, you don't really know. And I think there's a process or something people go through where they try to hang on to things that aren't particularly a good fit for quite a while, and then there's this sort of friction or I call this dissonance that goes on. And then there's this sort of friction or I call this dissonance that goes on and you know they feel almost like they should be. There's something wrong with them or something wrong with you. If you're in the middle of this, because you think, well, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, why am I not enjoying it? Why do I feel exhausted? Why, you know why am I unfulfilled? Why do I feel exhausted? Why, you know why am I unfulfilled?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 5:13

Kind of what I got from your talk and is you know, this is kind of a natural process, right, and you have to keep in mind that how society is set up and I don't even just mean American society, you know, how we as humans, you know, have set up our society in terms of training young people to enter the work world is often at odds with how we're actually experiencing that process and healthy for us to do in terms of figuring out what is a good fit For most of human history. People did what their parents did. You know, if your father was a farmer and you were male, you went into farming and women kept up whatever that home looked like. That kind of thing is still true in many parts of the world. And when you start looking at, ok, now we're moving to an industrial society, people might not be doing exactly what their parents did. You were still going to be highly influenced by what they were doing, if not literally by their profession and following in someone's footsteps, but by all of the societal roles that you've now been plugged into by virtue of your social class, your gender, where you live. There's all of these factors, right, that play into that and the way.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 6:27

Even now, like you know, fast forward to now when people talk about you know, how do we get young people prepared for the work world? It's getting them to okay. Well, they need to set goals. They need to set goals early so that they're on the right educational paths or they're taking the right classes, they're getting the right training so that they can enter something that is going to be fulfilling for them and what society actually needs. And there's two big problems with it that are often not quite captured right. One is that what society needs is a constantly moving target. I often tell, like incoming first-year students I don't know what the jobs are going to be when you graduate. Nobody does. I've been doing this for decades. Right, so that constantly needing to adapt and be prepared to be constantly changing whatever it is you're doing, so that's a huge piece of it that is constantly a problem. The other problem that is, in a certain way, if we do it right, fixed by the first one, is that people don't know what they want to do until they start doing it. So you know, if you're asking people to think about when they're in middle school, you know my daughter just finished middle school. People are already asking her what are you going to do? What are you going to focus on in high school? Cause you got to get ready for college. You know she's like how should I know? 13 years old.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 7:47

And there are some countries and I think this is why my talk has resonated around the world I hear frequently from people in countries where they're being forced by their educational systems to be making decisions fairly early on on what educational tracks they're going to take in ways that may feel like they make sense for that local society, that local culture, the local government in terms of making sure that positions are filled. But if you're asking someone at an early age to make decisions that are effectively going to dictate what they're doing 10, 20 years later, that can cause a lot of dissatisfaction once somebody's in their 20s and is actually starting to work in these positions, especially if they're feeling trapped Like I've been educated in this one thing and I don't have an easy way of re-educating myself in something else. So I think that if you have the privilege of the free society and specifically, am I getting what I need to be getting out of what I'm doing now? And if I'm not, what do I need to be learning to shift to something else and how can I?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 8:47

be constantly thinking about that.

Joe Miller: 8:49

I think, as well-intentioned parents want to try to identify the path or help your child identify their path. Because it's so highly competitive, that decision point seems to be moved further and further in. So now there's a whole phase of optimizing the preparation process before you even get out of high school, to make sure that you've had obviously all the right coursework but also all the other factors that would be considered if you want to get into a specific college, to keep you on track for a specific career, that sort of thing. So not enough time for experimentation. The experimentation process tends to happen after the commit process quite a bit.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 9:34

True in some respects. I think that one thing that's important to keep in mind is there's only a relatively small slice of American universities that are really so selective that you need to be really you know, at the top of everything you're trying to do when you're in high school to get in, and Wesleyan, the school I work for, is one of those institutions. Right, we admit fewer than 20% of students in a typical year and the students who we do admit are very, very high achieving Right, but it's not that we're expecting them to sign on the dotted line that they're all specific on something like a specific type of engineering.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 10:28

There's some outlier examples where that would be more true, but in general, what we're really looking for is an academic prowess and interest, rather than a narrow career interest. I'm not saying there aren't, but I think that like if I were talking to my daughter, who is just starting high school, unless you are really specifically I am. So I've always been fascinated by airplanes. I want to major in aerospace engineering. I have never questioned that path. I absolutely know that's what I want. Well then, yeah, guiding yourself through a high school path that's going to get you to that college path, get you to that career path, that makes sense. I find that that kind of certainty, even in one's 20s, is very rare.

Joe Miller: 11:15

It is.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 11:16

I mean the talking. The talk is not rare. You talk to a lot of high school students, a lot of college students who are able to say all the right things because they've been kind of trained and taught and acculturated that that's what they're supposed to do. Someone asks you what do you want to do when you grow up? You give a really fancy answer I want to be a surgeon. And then you get really positive feedback from adults that you want to be a surgeon. So you continue to say you want to be a surgeon and then suddenly you're a junior in college and you're going through the motions.

Joe Miller: 11:52

You have no idea.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 11:52

If you want to be a surgeon, right, yeah, you know when we're working with students now our health professions advisor. If there's a student who wants to be a surgeon, okay. Well, have you gotten EMT training? Go be an EMT for a while. Do you really like blood and guts?

Joe Miller: 12:03

You don't know until you know, right Right right and you don't have a sort of full knowledge set of what that really is. The idea of it's a little separated from the reality of it. So we've been talking quite a bit right now about sort of the external factors, if you will, or influences maybe might be a better word. You talked about historically going way back. You did what your father did or your family did. Even names, like my name is Miller, although it actually was Mueller and changed to German, but there are people who expect you to be involved with milling grain or something which is interesting.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 12:49

Well, why Smith is the most popular last name Black.

Joe Miller: 12:52

Smith Like a.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 12:53

Smith, you were doing something right?

Joe Miller: 12:55

Yes, exactly, but there's also, I think, other things that come into play. You mentioned lawyer or surgeon or doctor, picking things that have that moniker of success financial independence that everyone would want to have. So it's almost like you have all these different things you're trying to optimize for, and sometimes those things get weighted differently depending upon your upbringing or your influences.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 13:29

Well, there's upbringing and influences, and there's also visibility.

Joe Miller: 13:32

Tell me more about that, yeah.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 13:34

So one of the reasons why medicine and law are perennially popular are because people know, or they think they know, what a lawyer does, because they watch lawyers on TV, even if they don't have one in the family or something. Right, they feel like they know what a lawyer does and typically they've been to the doctor at some point, so they understand what a doctor does or they think they understand, right At least maybe, what a pediatrician or a primary care physician you know. They have a sense of what that day-to-day is. And it's why teaching is also often popular, right, because you've had teachers and you have a sense of what a teacher does. So things that are visible are always popular because people feel like, well, I know what that is and that's something I can see myself doing, which is great up to a point.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 14:32

The problem is that you don't really know what all types of doctors do, what all types of lawyers do. You don't know what everybody else does, so most people you're not going to see what all of these other things are. So, like somebody who works in cybersecurity, right, what exactly does that involve? Like, I can see a doctor, I can see a teacher, I can't see a cybersecurity specialist, let's say but I'm reading in the media that I'll always have a job if I go into that. So then you do get actually things that become popular because it seems safe and secure. And I think that's an important other layer here, because law and medicine remain popular because they feel safe and stable and prestigious, and those don't kind of go together. So the problem being that that's all kind of falling apart, that in you know now there is no such thing as safe and stable.

Joe Miller: 15:20

Yeah, so that's, that's trying to chase that.

Joe Miller: 15:23

Yeah, that's a good one. So I mean, you kind of touched on we touched on the significance kind of view of things, where certain things that you see that are visible, have that maybe we didn't unpack that too much but societal sort of affirmation of those careers, of those careers. So there's the significance factor this is really getting pop psychology here and then there's the security and those two things kind of bouncing back and forth and trying to get both at the same time. You know, might be one way of looking at this. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is the overall journey of this and, as you said, you engage a lot with people who are starting out, but quite a bit of people who are well into their careers, that are well into their journey, that need clarity and it's interesting.

Joe Miller: 16:20

I'd like to unpack that a little bit. And maybe there's examples from the transitions you've gone through too. Let's say, someone had done the best they can to pick a career path, they've gone through an educational track and maybe they've gotten a degree, they've gotten out and gotten their first job or so, but now they're kind of questioning or they're thinking about a change. So talk a little bit about that and your experience with that and how you've helped others through that process.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 16:50

Yeah, yeah, with somebody who is starting on that process of thinking about a change, a lot of what I'm doing in that conversation it's almost like a physician doing a diagnostic, you know, getting a sense of what their whole history has been with decision making. You know, how did they go about making that choice of, say, where to go to school, how they got into the first job, the second job, the third job and the extent to which that they were following a path of least resistance versus making really conscious choices, and to what extent I see a pattern in their ability to really reflect on, during the course of their career, how they were making those transitions. They've already made. And this was something I saw a lot when I was actually doing my dissertation research, that I went out and interviewed a bunch of people who were all very. They were successful on paper, they went to good schools, they had good jobs, they were all. They looked successful.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 17:54

But when you actually started talking to them there was a subset who really had never gotten off the path of least resistance. You know they had maybe taken the first job because mom knew somebody at the company and then they were good at it and even though they didn't particularly like it. They kept getting raises and promotions and then suddenly they had a mortgage and two kids and there was never a point where things got so bad that they felt like they had to leave. But they've never been particularly satisfied either.

Joe Miller: 18:27

So things were sort of comfortable, but they hadn't had a major challenge to get them into that sort of mindset of.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 18:37

Right Of really having, and I find that the people who really were satisfied with their careers are the ones who really never let themselves fall into that path of least resistance. They may have taken jobs here and there because they needed to pay off the loans or, you know, for whatever reason, but even if they were in a position that was not a good fit, they were actively trying to work their way out of it. So, for instance, it was common back at the time that these folks graduated from college to tempt for a while where they were trying to find a full-time position, particularly if they just moved to a new city. But were they using that time as a temp, trying to meet people around the organization and get a sense of what those other roles were and how they might fit into them, and trying to build those professional connections? Because that ability to understand that you need to constantly be building that professional network and constantly be getting input from others and unpacking yourself.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 19:33

If I'm hearing what this person does all day, is that something I would want to do as well? Could I see myself doing what this person is doing and why? And if not, why not? Can I keep going deep into my own reactions about what I'm doing, how I'm feeling about it. I mean, I'll go back to a specific example of an early job that I had. Where was I overall happy? No, I was not. And I had to sit down and figure out well, how much of this is the job itself, the day-to-day? Am I in the right career path? And I figured out okay, I'm really happy with that. You know, what I'm doing day-to-day is something that's really fulfilling to me.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 20:13

So then I had to go another layer and say, okay, well, does it have something to do with my boss? There's this common thing, right, people don't leave bosses. And I realized sort of. But what was really happening was that my boss was under a lot of pressure from hires up to do things that didn't make sense, and that was pushing downward pressure on the rest of us to be doing things that didn't make sense. And that was pushing downward pressure on the rest of us to be doing things that didn't make sense. And I ended up writing a whole paper about this in graduate school, about this whole dynamic and how it was playing out and everything else for an organizational behavior class.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 20:48

But I think one of the things I'm doing when I'm meeting with someone who feels stuck is trying to parse are you in the wrong career or are you in the wrong organization? Are you in the wrong functional area? Are you simply working for the wrong person? Are you getting bad direction? So there's a lot of different ways that people can be unhappy, and what can happen is, if you get really unhappy, you kind of go on a downward spiral where it becomes really hard to parse all of these things, and what I've seen often in advising is that people will look to something that is the polar opposite of what they're doing in the moment.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 21:29

So I'll go back to a personal example. I mentioned that I worked for an ad agency right after college and it was a disaster, right. So I was so unhappy and so inexperienced I was 21. So I started looking at things okay, if I hate every single thing about my life, what is the opposite of this? So I started interviewing for a campsite in Maine where I was going to be living alone in a trailer for most of the year and then running a family camp in Maine where I was going to be living alone in a trailer for most of the year and then running a family camp in the summer.

Joe Miller: 22:00

You like to test the boundary conditions?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 22:02

Oh, it was like yeah, and I mean I had been a camp counselor in college. So I thought I'm going to double down on the exact opposite of what I'm doing and I remember my father sitting me down like we need to talk about this, like really You're going to live with a trailer 20 minutes from the nearest post office, by yourself, in the middle of winter, like it sounds like a Stephen King novel.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 22:20

I did not end up doing that, I just switched jobs in Boston. But I'm glad I had that experience only because I've identified it so many times over the years. Working with, in particular, like early to mid-career clients who come to me and say you know, I'm working with, in particular, early to mid-career clients who come to me and say I'm doing this thing now and this is what I want to be doing. And if I see that what I want to be doing is in every way the opposite of what they're doing now, we're going to really unpack what's going on.

Joe Miller: 22:50

Well, it reminds me of a coaching framework question that I ask often, and that is do you feel like you're moving away from something in this change you're thinking about, or do you feel like you're moving towards something?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 23:07

It's a way of it doesn't get to all the specificity you're referring to, but it does get to sort of the motivational aspect to, but it does get to sort of the motivational aspect Well, and not only that, but it's not uncommon in job interviews for interviewers to get really at that exact question. You know, when I'm coaching people, sometimes if they're really desperate to get out of what they're doing, they'll start pushing back on some of the more counseling aspects of these conversations. Just tell me how to apply, just tell me how to get through the interview. One of the things I always have to point out is, if you don't have all this stuff sorted out in advance, you're never going to make it through a high level behavioral interview with employers, because what they really started looking at is not only are you a good fit for us, but are we a good fit for you?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 23:53

Because retention is an issue for everybody. You know there's a war for talent. We want to be able to get the best workers, retain the best workers, and part of that is knowing that this is a well thought out decision on your part. And if you're applying to us because you're reacting against something that's happening in your current job, that's going to be a problem. So being able to really articulate, not just to me, the career advisor, but to an interviewer this isn't about why I want to leave my current employer. It's about why I want to be with you. This is a really well thought out decision on my part to move into this new area. That's what's going to land the job.

Joe Miller: 24:32

Sometimes people just go with the flow and picking their direction. So there's just kind of tying into that is agency and intention, intentionality and awareness and they kind of go together. And that was a reminder of those words as you were going through that thinking process, because it's very common for people to go with the flow. It's very difficult in coaching situations, which I do a fair amount of when you ask a person what they want, they have never even thought about it and it seems, and at first blush you think, well, they just need help going through a process. Well, that may help, but there's layers and layers below that about a lot of different things.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 25:28

But we've built a society around that I mean to be. You know, what are you going to major in? What are you going to do after graduation? What do you do for a living? You know, these are things that are kind of baked into the ether and I think we need to own that too and recognize that it actually takes some work to push past.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 25:46

That major does not really need to dictate what I'm doing at 40. Right, you know that most people are going to be switching careers. They're going to be switching jobs and the constant. It's really more of a set of habits of mind, so that, regardless of what is happening in the moment, you're constantly able to reflect back on is what I'm doing now, working for me? And if not, why not? And that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to cut the cord immediately and move on to something else, but you're going to have really strategic reasons for staying where you are. So I'm not really happy in my job, but I understand that the money I'm making now I need to be here for at least another year before I pay off this student loan.

Joe Miller: 26:43

Right.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 26:43

But I know that that's the case and I have a timeline for it and I have an exit strategy, right?

Joe Miller: 26:49

Right.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 26:50

And if I'm not clear on what the next step is, I'm going to take some time to figure out. Okay, what's not working for me and how can I course correct. So maybe I love my organization but this particular role isn't working for me, so I'm going to take the time to go out and understand and learn, meet other people around my organization, understand what they do, understand what the career paths might be. And if I don't see a way forward, I'm going to figure out where can I get what I like about this? Someplace else.

Joe Miller: 27:21

Yeah.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 27:22

I'm not going to keep following the path of least resistance, but it does take a certain amount of mental energy to go through that.

Joe Miller: 27:29

It does need to take a willingness for self-reflection, and that can be hard.

Joe Miller: 27:33

It can be especially hard when someone is in the middle of a deficit that mental energy because of the situation. Absolutely, the thing I wanted to chat with you about was I believe that we focus so much on jobs types or career paths by name lawyer, doctor, whatever and then, once we get out into the workforce, we focus so much on job titles that it seems like we don't talk a lot about attributes that are part of those paths or those titles. And I have a belief that there's certain innate well strengths that an individual has been given gifts, strengths, whatever you want to call it and fulfillment part of being fulfilled in your career and your life is really identifying that or that constellation of things and trying to spend most of your energy and time in alignment with that and those constellation of gifts, if you will, could be valuable to a whole list of different careers or jobs. Absolutely, sometimes the other thing that happens you talked about kind of what we have done to ourselves a little bit from a society standpoint, making this difficult for people but the other thing happens is there's certain expectations when you're in a job that certain things have to be done in a certain way.

Joe Miller: 29:07

I used to trick myself a little story. I hated budgeting. I was a CIO, a chief information officer, and budgeting was a big part of that job, but I hated it. I'm more of an improviser.

Joe Miller: 29:19

A quick start, I'm terrible at doing prolonged detail work and that's kind of the budgeting and it took me well into my career a third through, maybe halfway until I realized that actually I could look around on my team and identify someone who got off on doing that, just got energized by doing that kind of work and said here I will give it to you and I will lump all kinds of praise on you. I will. Overall, I'll become more successful because I'm going to lean into the things that I'm really good at and avoid it, but I can still do the job and I think that can be a factor because you can be in the middle of a job where it's not a fit. If you understand those gifts, you can see where they might be. What's your reaction to that?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 30:11

I think it's absolutely, incredibly important to recognize what comes easily to you and to be leveraging that, really leaning in on the things that not only do not come naturally to you but that are a real struggle and things that are going to be really hard to overcome, because everybody has those too. And I'll tell a personal story as well For me, that's memorization and this was something I didn't realize how hard that was for me until relatively late in the game. I didn't realize how hard that was for me until relatively late in the game. And you know, I actually went to college with the intention of studying art history and, unbeknownst to me, one of the first things you have to do when you decide on that major is or at least that I had to do is memorize just massive amounts of the famous works of art. We had something called the Art Study Room room and it was this massive hallway and they basically had put up like this is pre-internet, right. They had postcards basically of different like famous works of art. So you know, statue painting.

Joe Miller: 31:26

Different periods. You know Different periods. Who are the people in this impressionistic period?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 31:31

Massive survey quarters, and, you know, before exams, you were expected to go in and just memorize them. I couldn't do it. I mean, I simply couldn't do it, and one of my takeaways from that, though, was not only maybe this isn't the best major for me and I did, in fact, not major in art history but I also realized, by extension, that going to medical school or law school neither of those things really interested in me when I was an undergraduate, but they also would have been logical given the type of institution I was at and where a lot of what my friends were headed and everything, but I was like well, if I can't do this, I'm never going to pass the bar.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 32:06

You know if I I'm never going to be able to memorize everything you need to memorize organic chemistry or something like that I was going to use that example. I mean, there's just no way.

Joe Miller: 32:15

Yeah.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 32:16

Well, the earlier you figure out the things that are never going to work for you and then look at the things that do work for you. So you know I figured out OK where are my skills. You know, writing, presenting, being able to take a lot of disparate ideas from different fields and bring them together, which is a lot when I did, like an interdisciplinary doctoral program, like it's not that I was useless right, I had other strengths I could be playing upon. But knowing kind of what these core weaknesses were as well as core strengths, I think the core strengths are easier to identify. It really did take me a long time to figure out exactly how bad I was at memorization.

Joe Miller: 32:57

I just have to go back to that one, because and you said organic chemistry my first career was an analytic analochemist.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 33:04

My husband's a computational chemist by training.

Joe Miller: 33:06

Oh, okay, I know what that is. I spent 10 years as an analytical chemist Organic chemistry is all memorizing those key 25, I think it is equations, reactions, yeah, yeah, so, but that's good, I mean that's, I think, a good tool to help someone to get clarity around. What's a good fit is to identify those things that are just inordinately hard to do. As an individual, you can develop skills and do things that are difficult. We don't want to take away that people shouldn't be willing to put out effort and work to become more skilled, but what we're talking about doesn't fall into that category.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 33:51

No, and that's exactly right, because I think the other thing and this is why it's hard right I'm not saying that these are easy things You're just going to be able to sit down and do a quick list and be done. It really takes some paying attention to how you have experienced different classes, different job experiences, to be able to unpack this. So another personal example I didn't have great experiences with math and science when I was in high school. I chose a college in part because it wasn't going to make me take those classes, and when I realized that I was going to need to kind of circle back on some quantitative stuff in order to take the graduate exams, I knew I'd need to take down the road. I went ahead and I took calculus my senior year in college, but we covered everything I covered in high school within the first few weeks of the college class.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 34:39

One of the reasons I put off taking it was it was known as being a really, really difficult course. They had gotten a big grant to work with another university to teach it in a very specific way that involved computer programming. People who took it were exhausted and crying and said it was horrible. Well, I was like all right, I'm going to suck it up and take it. And it was one of the easiest classes that I took at Smith. For me because it happened to come easily for me and because I always had it in my head that I didn't have great experiences in high school and it was something I didn't like, I didn't choose to engage with it until it was too late to do anything with it. But take that one course. It was a real learning experience. That's something I clearly should have taken freshman year because I could have avoided taking some classes that involved a lot of memorization that I didn't do as well in, whereas if you just want me to sit down and calculate stuff or type up some code to help calculate some stuff, I can do that.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 35:39

So when it kind of goes to, you don't know really what come naturally to you until you really delve into some of these subjects and this is why I get frustrated when people talk about you know. Okay, well, when you start college, you know the stakes are really high, tuition is really high. You need to set clear goals and stick with them. I understand why that messaging is there, given how we fund higher education in this country and how deeply problematic it can be. The flip side is, until you really get your hands dirty with different types of classes that really push you in new ways and get you really thinking about well, how do you know what your interests are and how do you know what you're good at? Until you do start doing things at a higher level and get exposed to things at a higher level.

Joe Miller: 36:28

Right.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 36:28

And the same is, then, true for when you start in the work world, you know how you think about making these transitions down the road. It's not about making a dramatic shift from art history to banking right. It's about what are some of those subtler changes, those transition changes that you can kind of kick the tires on. Well, what is it about this that isn't working for me, and what about that new thing that could be?

Joe Miller: 36:56

There's a lot there, and you reminded me of this kind of the journey aspect of this whole topic and how it isn't like one linear path from start to finish. Well, let me just say that I think there's at least three phases in my experience. People go through, and they go through it multiple different times and many times, and, rather than a line, maybe it's a circle, and you start out with some kind of a clarification phase or a discovery phase of. This is what I think I want to do. Whether it's at the very beginning you're in high school or whatever you take your best shot at it from all different sources and then you go into an execution process where you've launched out, You're investing time, energy, dollars and you're going down that path and you go through this execution phase for a good while. Then you're starting to look and say, okay, I'm getting sort of into an intermediate skill level of what I'm doing, and then you start moving into what I call the mastery phase, where you're starting to really get advanced.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 38:06

Right.

Joe Miller: 38:07

And that sort of. Somewhere in that advanced period you're starting to say to yourself what's next and so you go around the loop back into I want to clarify what I want to do next. Or you know, this was all great but I want more. I often talk to people who are kind of in the middle part. You know they've reached some challenges in the execution, moving into mastery phase. They're not seeing rewards, either intrinsically or from the outside validation of what they've done or their contribution, not feeling like they're really flourishing. Now they're starting to just go into sort of a discovery phase again and people can go around that period. But you're not a failure and we laugh. But sometimes people feel like even having a thought of changing a direction is like the worst possible thing.

Joe Miller: 39:06

Then I must have made a mistake, right.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 39:08

Yeah, I'm actually teaching a course next year called Success and Failure, and one of the takeaways that I hope students take is you know something that is a small scale failure you don't do well in a course or you realize that you've always said you were going to be a doctor and now you're realizing that's not a path you want to take or should take or can't take because you failed organic M or whatever. This doesn't mean you personally are a failure, can't take because you failed organic M or whatever. This doesn't mean you personally are a failure.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 39:38

Life is just these ebb and flows of things that are going to go your way and things that are not.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 39:42

And it's your ability to be resilient and it's your ability to unpack, okay, what happened here and what is under my control it was that agency piece and what is not and how can I navigate my way through it. You know these are life skills, right, that everybody has to learn, and I think that if you've been sort of successfully on a path of least resistance and what I mean by that is there's been no kind of external force that's pushed you off of that then it may be, you know, you might be doing this at 45 instead of 25. And you know I like to say you're going to have to do the work sometimes and you know, a big part of the reason I went back to working with undergraduates is to try to let's nip it in the bud now. If you can force students to do it before they do, they're less likely to wake up when they have a mortgage and two kids in college with a realization that they're feeling stuck and unhappy.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 40:39

But that also it goes to the habits of mind, because what you're identifying as well is people can be happy and fulfilled for a certain period of time and then realize that they're not right Because they're bored. They've been doing the same thing for a while and needing to kind of hit the restart button in new ways. But I think if you, early on or at some point along the line, have developed those habits of mind to be constantly taking your own temperature, when you get to that point where you're starting to get bored and you're starting to think this isn't really working for me anymore, you have those tools at your disposal to be really thinking through. Okay, well, if I want to think about other options, what might those be? Who do I need to talk to to get more information? What is realistic given my current family situation, financial situation, particularly if you're looking at doing this at midlife and you're able to kind of weather that storm more easily, you've poured a stronger foundation.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 41:40

So when the hurricane hits the whole house isn't going away.

Joe Miller: 41:43

Built on the rock.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 41:43

I grew up on an island, so I use the hurricane analogy For those who have gone along with that path of least resistance. Well, both my parents were doctors so I became a doctor and it was fine. I didn't have problems with organic chemistry and I got through medical school and I was fine seeing my patients. But now I'm incredibly bored. I'm going through the motions. I think my patients are starting to see that. But now I have a successful practice and I hate getting up in the morning but I don't know what to do.

Joe Miller: 42:14

That's hard keep getting up in the morning but I don't know what to do. That's hard and, as we talked about early on, things change in the external world and what it used to be like to be a doctor and what the healthcare the way it is these days. I probably have five or six doctors that I know who have left conventional medicine because it is a rat race, Absolutely, and you have to shrink the amount of time you spend with your patients. All those things we all know about.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 42:44

Well, and the debt that you know if we're working with now that are looking at medical school.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 42:48

You know the level of debt that you're coming out with. Medical school is really extreme and I think you know this is where I talk to students a lot about when they're focusing on these kind of historically prestigious careers and unpacking where that interest is coming from. And, to be clear with some students, it is actually very well thought out and they know exactly why they want to do it and they've shadowed people in the specialties that they're interested in, in both law and medicine or engineering or what have you, and it is a well-thought out decision. I'm not saying this is universal. I'm not trying to badmouth the profession, sure, but what I do find interesting is sometimes it's the student whose parents are like well, both my parents are doctors. They're telling me not to be a doctor, they're telling me not to be a lawyer because they've seen what these changes are, because they've seen what these changes are right Influence that's coming into that decision. It's based on outdated information.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 43:40

I was actually having this conversation relatively recently with a student who was interested in coming in saying I want to go to law school. So we started talking about that and what came out was that a parent had felt really strongly that this was a good, solid, stable profession where she could make money and support herself without having to rely on a spouse down the road, and that was a core value for that parent. And I said I understand that I'm a parent. I completely appreciate that.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 44:08

Let me explain why law is probably not the best way to accomplish that. You know the average law school debt is six figures. You know the average salary for a lawyer is not. If you really start unpacking all of the data, I said no. If you decide that you know you do all of the work in terms of figuring out exactly what this is, what's the path forward. You know the courses that you're going to want to take to get some exposure. You're going to talk to some attorneys, you're going to work as a paralegal or in some other role right after graduation and you decide this is what you want to do. Yes, our institution has a really strong history of getting students into top law schools who then make really good salaries, but let's make sure that's really what you want first, because this is a very unstable profession in a way that it was not.

Joe Miller: 45:00

Well, maybe your parents were coming up, yeah, and we picked a couple different careers that are very well known. I often advise people to, if they have a thought that they might want to make a change, that they line up informational interviews at least as an early start, to have a conversation, to check their assumptions on what things are like and establish relationships as well and the network. But it gets back to that agency and back to that taking things really seriously and intentionally and really working at getting that clarity. That's a key piece. Really working at getting that clarity, that's a key piece. Well, so I think we've talked about a number of different things, but if you were to kind of summarize and I know this can be difficult because there's so many different factors of some key lessons learned, some key concepts that you would want to sort of highlight, what would those items be key?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 45:57

concepts that you would want to sort of highlight. What would those items be? Well, just to recognize that this is a skill learning the habits of mind that you need to have to be able to navigate a turbulent job market, regardless of your chosen profession or industry, of your chosen profession or industry that is a skill in of itself. So, in other words, just choosing something and trying to follow it along as a career path isn't enough anymore. It's really important to learn how to be thinking about. What is my exit strategy? What is my plan B? What might be the next thing I'm going to want to do?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 46:37

Am I taking my temperature on how this is working for me? Am I also taking the temperature on my industry so I can think about? Am I likely to get laid off in the next six months? These are all habits of mind, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that I think are really important to navigate and manage one's career, regardless of what that profession or industry is. So that is what I hope would be. A big takeaway from this is that this is something else that's important for not only for students, yes, but for everybody to learn and that can be learned.

Joe Miller: 47:12

And where do people go to folks like you? I mean, you're not available to the entire country or world, but money off of it.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 47:18

We put it out there under the Wesleyan name. It's a massive, open online course so anybody can take it all over the world, and it's really designed not as a writing a resume or going on a job interview it's not practical in that sense, but it's a deeper dive into helping people figure out. You know, who am I? What do I want out of life, what is working for me, what is not? How can I unpack all of those influences that are affecting my decision-making?

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 47:58

I think of it as kind of a flipped classroom on an advising process, so if you go through all of the exercises in the course, you may find that you know what I think I got this. I don't necessarily need to sit down with a professional counselor to work these things out. If you happen to be in the States and have attended college here, though, and you're looking for the one-on-one, I do encourage people to go back to their alma maters, because you might be pleasantly surprised that a lot of universities do offer either discounted or free sessions through their career centers or through outside providers that they've contracted with to provide lower cost career advising for alumni.

Joe Miller: 48:40

That's great. Well, I have to say this has been a real pleasure and I wanted to thank you for coming on my podcast YouTube channel. For those listening or watching, I will put information in the show notes that Sharon referred to for this online course, information in the show notes that Sharon referred to for this online course, and I will encourage you to go to her talks on TEDx and check them out. It was really really good material and, I think, very inspiring in many ways. So thanks again, sharon, for being on the show.

Sharon Belden Castonguay: 49:11

Thank you very much for having me.

Joe Miller: 49:13

Okay, hey, thanks for joining me today on Titans of Transition. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please check the show notes for additional information.