After the Mothership

Gary Vee is speaking tonight. He’s an internet star, a serial entrepreneur, an authentic presence, a force of nature. And he swears a lot because, man, this is f*!<ing important! He’s that kinda guy.

Gary says you gotta hustle. Gary is big on hustling, he says you won’t get anywhere if you don’t hustle. If you want to build a great business and be a successful as him and you aren’t hustling, well, you are just dreaming. Get off your ass and hustle, man!

I used to read Gary’s blogs and Medium posts because they had some good insights. And they were short. That was probably a big reason. But I stopped reading Gary’s posts because, well, I don’t hustle.

I’m actually anti-hustle. I hate being hustled. If you try to hustle me, you are qualifying yourself out, I will never buy from you. I won’t meet you for coffee, I won’t read your blogs, I won’t be open to anything you do. I just want you to go away.

And I don’t know how to hustle, I am not equipped to hustle and I have no inclination to learn how.  Even if my life depended on it, I’m not sure I would be able to hustle. I could no more hustle than balance the Tower of London on my nose (although that would be way cooler).

So I had to say goodbye to Gary Vee because Gary Vee says you HAVE to hustle. There’s no point in listening to someone who tells you to do something you are not going to do, it’s just depressing. And it feels a bit like bullying.

Of course, I want my business to be successful and I want people to know about what I do and I want to create relationships with people who I can work with and all that stuff.

But Gary Vee says I have to hustle to do that and, well, that’s just not my style. And I don’t agree with him. That’s the way that HE makes that stuff happen, that’s his dance. It’s not mine. There are other ways that are more aligned with who I am.

You can copy someone else’s dance but you will never copy their passion and connection with the music, you’ll never get their flow. You will always be a pale imitation, slightly behind the beat, self-conscious and awkward. And difficult to watch.

You have to dance to your own tune, work with the music in your soul and and create your own moves. You can be inspired by others but you have to connect with your own rhythm, you have to follow the song in your heart. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

And no hustling. Unless you’ve got the flares for it.

I’ve been ‘let go’ three times in my career.  Only once was it an actual redundancy but in each case my role was terminated and I wasn’t needed any more. I thought I was probably a bit unlucky but not particularly exceptional. I mean, it’s just a fact of business life, isn’t it?

I didn’t make a fuss. I just picked myself up, dusted myself down and carried on as best I could. That’s what we do, isn’t it. Of course it hurt, I felt rejected but, stiff upper lip and all that, no time to wallow in self pity and blame. After all, nobody likes a cry-baby.

Besides, we’ve all heard those stories where someone tells you that, although it was horrible at the time, on reflection it turned out to be the best thing ever happened to them. Everyone assumes you’ve banked the redundancy money and gone straight into a better job. Or that, now you’re out of the corporate rat race, you are following your dreams. Of course, it’s not really like that but, hey, no-one wants to hear how miserable and upset you are.

So you put on a brave face, nod and smile when they say how much they envy you lying in bed and missing the daily commute and laugh along at their jokes about working in your pyjamas all day and forgetting how to tie your shoes up.

Then you carry on as best you can.

The thing is, being ‘let go’ is a major psychological event. Redundancy is like going through a divorce. Leaving corporate life is like moving to a foreign country. This is a big deal.

This is not something we should be trivialising, ignoring, trying to brush off. That’s not down-playing it, that’s denying it. As a Brit, I love our sense of understatement and talent for self-deprecation but it is not appropriate in this case. This is deadly serious stuff that needs an equally serious response.

Only I didn’t do that. I ignored it, made jokes about it, pretended it wasn’t a big deal. Like most people do.

“It’s just a flesh wound” says the Black Knight in Monty Python’s film “The Holy Grail” after King Arthur has chopped both his arms off, and then proceeds to call Arthur a chicken because he’s stopped fighting. The absurdity of someone suffering such wounds just to support their ego and ridiculous sense of machismo makes us laugh (well, it makes me laugh every time I watch it). Of course, we don’t behave like that when we’re ‘let go’, do we?

“I’ve ‘ad worse” is his response when his first arm is chopped off earlier in the sketch. Imagine if, after being made redundant, we tried shrug it off by saying something like “It could have been worse”? How ridiculous would that be?

When you have a shock, you feel it physically, emotionally, mentally and even spiritually. If that shock was obviously physical, like breaking a leg, would you try and laugh it off? No, you’d get treatment, you’d take time for rest and recuperation, you would learn exercises to rehabilitate yourself. But because this shock is firstly psychological, we consider it less serious and fail to treat it. How does that work?

So let’s stop being like the Black Knight about this. It’s not ‘only a flesh wound’, it’s a serious trauma, so let’s give it the attention it deserves and get the help and support we need.

Laughter is great medicine, so start you treatment here by watching the sketch:

If you’ve seen a tame elephant you might have wondered how it is that this, the strongest of animals, can be constrained by a flimsy rope tied to a stake. It could easily tear the stake out of the ground, or break the rope just by walking away, but it stands there, calm and docile.

It’s because there was a time when the rope was a real constraint, when the elephant was a baby and lacked the strength to break the tether. The baby elephant came to associate the rope around its leg with being unable to escape and so accepted its fate. Even though it grows bigger and stronger, it keeps that belief that the rope and stake cannot be escaped and so it never tries. It has learnt to be helpless.

Even when the rope is removed, the elephant is is often reluctant to move away and explore new territory. It prefers the comfort of staying where it is.

We can feel like this when we have left the Mothership. We are so used to having decisions made for us, having out priorities and targets given to us, having our calendar filled by obligations and our time and mood dictated by the flood of emails, texts and other messages, we find we are unused to the freedom that we now have.

Like the elephant, we feel more comfortable with the rope around our leg, constraining our possibilities but making us feel safe. We look for someone to set our priorities for us, so we let our emails drive our actions and fill our time with aimless meetings and ‘busy work’. This is our learned helplessness, conditioning from several years of being at the whim and caprice of our managers and the organisations we worked for.

It’s not surprising that we feel uncomfortable when we find ourselves free to decide what we do and when we do it. We now have an unlimited number of choices, of possibilities, of options and we simply do not know how to cope with it. In fact, though an effect known as the Paradox of Choice, it makes us anxious. More than a few choices causes us distress, which rises as the number choices increase. Having unlimited choice can max out our  anxiety.

Freedom. It’s bloody terrifying. Well, they didn’t tell us that when we were tied down to our day jobs, did they? Now we have escaped the treadmill we are stressed and anxious because, well, we’ve escaped the treadmill. Marvellous.

The good news is that this fear of freedom is temporary. Once you have become clear on what your Post-Executive self and lifestyle is going to be, then you will naturally develop your own goals, make you own priorities, and move into action.

Some of us can be paralysed by this freedom, however, and get stuck for a while. It’s a good idea, therefore, to create some temporary structure and goals to keep you occupied whilst you sort yourself out. Getting yourself fit, starting a creative project, learning a new skill; these types of short-term goals create commitments that put some boundaries around your choices and stop you being overwhelmed by them. That, in turn, dials down the anxiety and gives you the mental space to work out what your Post-executive future is going to be.

When you leave the Mothership you can find yourself bobbing around in some pretty stormy waters. You’re splashing around, trying to keep your head above water and figure out which direction to start swimming in and it feel rather dangerous. But that’s not all because, whether you’ve realised or not, there are sharks in water and they are starting to take an interest in you.

You see, you are just what they are looking for. You’ve got plenty of meat on you, with that nice redundancy package and those savings you’ve built up. You’re probably not in great shape, either, battered and bruised from the way you left the Mothership and emotionally fragile. You’re not going to put up much of a fight. Easy pickings.

So, who are these sharks, then? You can’t see any.

It’s the outplacement company that want you to pay them few thousand for a programme that won’t meet your needs but will give you an amazing cv that nobody will read.

It’s the ‘consultants network’ of ‘director level people’ that will sign you up for ten thousand or so and put you in touch with other ‘like minds’. They won’t actually deliver any business to you but you will have an accreditation that no-one recognises and some nice events to go to.

It’s the company that will licence their ‘technology’ to you for ten to twenty thousand and train you to deliver something you could put together yourself off of the internet. It’s not bad material, it’s just that not many companies actually want to buy it. Only they don’t mention that, or the fact that they have flooded the market in your area because, well, their business is selling licences, not making their licensees successful.

It’s the franchise company that will sign you up to their system that *can* deliver you six-figure annual earnings – if you do exactly as they say for the next 5 years. Starting with paying them tens of thousands of pounds for the franchise, which makes you a sales person with revenue targets that they have set. Only they didn’t quite put it like that when they were telling you what a great life it was going to give you and you didn’t read the small print very closely. If, and often when, you fail to hit target, they terminate your franchise without a refund – but if you are lucky, they’ll release you from the ongoing payments.

And, worst of all, are the ‘get rich quick’ boys, the ‘millionaire entrepreneur’ clubs, the ‘billionaire business’ schemes. They lure you in with free weekends and then upsell you an unrealisable dream that’s always just one more product away. “If only you came to the all week intensive in Bali, only 25,000 pounds”. These are the vampire sharks, once they’ve got their teeth into you then they’ll bleed you dry.

“Don’t worry”, you say, “they won’t get me. I can spot them a mile off and I can swim away”.

Only the thing about sharks is that they have such big smiles. And not many people are smiling at you at the moment. So you think, “well, maybe they’re friendly, maybe they’ll be nice to me” because you are all alone in this big, stormy sea and you desperately want someone to be nice to you.

And they are nice, for a while. Just until you have let them get close enough to bite you.

Think I’m being cynical? Well, I’ve got the bite marks that prove differently.

Swimming with sharks is dangerous. Keep as far away from them as you can.

Did your career run on autopilot? When you were on the Mothership, you may well have been  following a career progression and had a rough idea where you were headed in the next year or two, or perhaps even longer. Even if it wasn’t particularly structured, there was an expectation that you would move up the hierarchy and you could have some estimationas to when you could reach each level.

Your annual reviews would include a discussion about this and you may have been involved in succession planning. Of course, you could move around and you influenced where you went, and by hard work or politics or luck you could increase your velocity. At the least, you had a perception of where you were going and a desire to progress at a certain speed.

Whilst I certainly influenced where I went and what I worked on in my career, it was in the context of this broader structure and how I was moving through the hierarchy. When I left BT, the fact that I had been stuck at one level for some time and had reached the upper limit of that pay band was an influencing factor in my decision.

When you leave the Mothership, there is no longer an autopilot on your career (or your life, for that matter). You have full agency over what you do, when you do it, how much you do and where you go next. There is no hierarchy to navigate your way through, there aren’t any levels of success to achieve. In fact, success is entirely what you define it to be and you can shoot for as much or as little as you want.

This can be overwhelming. On the Mothership we are encouraged to let the organisation determine  our career to some degree. When I first joined BT, it was very much the case that the organisation would look after you and develop you. Although this changed and people were encouraged to take moe responsibility for their own careers, there was still an ‘organisational flow’ that carried you along. You were expected to progress and to do so in certain ways. You were expected to grow into roles that suited the organisation, there were square holes to fit yourself into regardless of the shape you wanted to be.

When it is entirely up to you, it can be hard to find the right reference points. You may not know any other people who do what you want to do or have been through the same transition. You may not have any role models, there may not be a path that you can follow or at least learn from. You can feel totally exposed and in the dark, which is very disconcerting after the certainties of the Mothership.

This contributes to the confusion and uncertainty that you experience in the Neutral zone, as you transform from corporate life the new, re-imagined you.

You’ve got hold of the controls now, it’s up to you to decide where you want to fly the plane.

When you leave corporate life you have a wealth of experience, skills, abilities and knowledge and you start out with the certainty that these will stand you in good stead in whatever you do next. It’s not an unreasonable assumption, it just happens to be wrong.

What you find out is that much of what you know is irrelevant, and some of it can be positively harmful. It’s like trying to work on a new car with a set of trusty old spanners. You find your spanners don’t fit because they’ve changed the nuts to different shapes and sizes. The trouble is, well, all you’ve got is your old set of spanners, so you have go anyway. Not only do the nuts remain stubbornly unloosened, you’ve now burred the edges and even the right spanners won’t work.

You end up hot, angry and frustrated, and are going to have to pay someone a lot of money to sort out the mess. (Believe me, I speak from experience).

This pattern has played itself out in my experience since leaving the Mothership.

One of the things that I tried to do was to replicate my old working routine. I really struggled when I was at home so I ‘went to work’ and travelled up to London for meetings on a regular basis, working in coffee bars or coworking spaces. This felt like how I used to make connections and start relationships back on the Mothership. Walking around and hanging about has been my favoured modus operandi.

The problem was that I was replicating the appearance but not the substance. I thought it was enough to be hanging out with people in business-like spaces but it didn’t work because often they weren’t the right people. They were perfectly lovely but  without the shared purpose, values and culture of a large organisation it was difficult build meaningful relationships. I wasn’t loosening the nut of networking or getting things done.

I eventually realised that working at home was part of my new lifestyle and so I consciously changed my attitude and behaviours. Now I am quite happy working at home 2 or 3 days a week and limiting my meetings and trips to London. I am no longer playing ‘lucky dip’ when I meet people and I only meet those where I feel those meaningful relationships could develop.

A second example is my behaviour from corporate life to ‘make things happen’. I would create a vision of what I wanted to happen, such as a new product line or a marketing programme, gather the team together and then drive it through. I didn’t manage most of the people in the teams so I had to persuade them to do what I wanted rather than tell them.

I was good at working like this and mostly got what I wanted. Although my approach was gentle, I  knew that, ultimately, people had responsibilities that they couldn’t avoid and I could pin them down with logic or wear them down with persistent pleading. A steel hand in a velvet glove, I could force the outcome that I wanted.

It did not work well, however, when I tried to collaborate with other people and help them develop their business idea. On the Mothership, my forcing behaviour created a pressure that tended to highlight our shared objectives and pull people together. Now, it made my would-be collaborators feel uncomfortable and highlighted our differences, pushing us apart and causing them to disengage. It was proving counter-productive, sabotaging the relationships I had established and choking off opportunities.

It’s taken me a long time to realise this, so ingrained was this forcing behaviour into my way of doing things. I was unable to see the impact on others and that I was allowing my needs to trample over theirs, quite the opposite to how I believed I was behaving. Instead of loosening the collaboration nut, I was burring the head and jamming it on tighter than before.

Of course, some of the tools you have do fit and do work in the world outside the Mothership and others can be modified and still be effective. Some, however, are going to have to be chucked and replaced with new ones. You have to gather a set of tools that are fit for purpose, fit for what you are working on now.

The trick is to be aware and check first. Like with your spanners, offer it up and see if it fits first. Apply it gently, don’t just use brute strength. And ask around to see if anyone else has the tools that you need or knows where you can get them. It will take time and a lot of trial and error but you will eventually assemble the right tools for the job in the situation you are now in.

“There’s something wrong with my new phone” said my wife exasperatedly, “it keeps running out of power. I have to plug it in wherever I go, it’s ridiculous!

This was a bit of a problem as she was one of the leaders of a school trip on the Isle of Wight and responsible for large numbers of very excited Year 6 children. If her phone went dead it wasn’t just inconvenient, it compromised safety.

The phone had been working fine since she’d got it the weekend before and I couldn’t work out what was wrong, so it would have to wait until she got home. So, lacking any other solutions, my wife navigated the Isle of Wight from electricity socket to electricity socket.

The problem, it turned out, was that the phone had every connection option switched on for almost every app. There was a constant stream of checks, messages and updates going between the phone and the network. This does put extra demand on the battery but that’s not normally too much of a problem – as long as you are connected to the network.

Now, the mobile network on the Isle of Wight is not as dense and robust as it is where we live. Added to that, she was in a coach driving around the island for large parts of the day as they ferried the children from one activity to another. As a result, the phone was continually moving in and out of signal, which meant it was continually polling, looking for a network it could connect to. It was this, continually searching for a signal, that was killing the battery. Once we had switched off notifications on most of the apps, the problem disappeared.

This is what it is like when you leave the Mothership and are working on your own. When you are part of an organisation and you have a role to fulfil, it’s like you are always in signal. Much of what you do, many of your meeting and your tasks just unfold before you. The amount of time you have for discretionary activities is probably quite small (and certainly much smaller than you would like!).

When you are outside the Mothership, it’s completely flipped. Almost everything you do is discretionary and you have an almost endless and bewildering array of options. It is like you are out of signal most of the time and you are continually searching for a connection, mulling all the options over in your mind and seeking a decision. And, like the mobile phone, this kills your batteries. Choice, you quickly discover, drains your energy.

So how do you make sure you are ‘in signal’ more often? Creating a structure to your work is important and having regular commitments puts in place some anchors that you can organise around. Of course, these have to serve your purpose and help you implement your plan. You can also create your own network, a network of people, to stay connected to and to get help from with ideas, feedback, accountability and encouragement.

We actually spend most of our time doing things automatically in order to save brainpower and energy. We are not designed to make decisions about everything so it’s important to make sure you automate as much of your activity as possible so that you can focus your energy on the things that really matter.

Establishing a routine or a framework keeps us ‘in signal’ and stops our batteries running out.

Belonging is one of our fundamental needs, just above food, safety and shelter. We are social creatures and we have come together in groups since our cavemen days. We belong to many different groups at the same time, and these change over time, but one of the most significant is the organisation that we work for. If we have been there for several years, it’s probably one of the more enduring relationships.

Our sense of belonging to our organisation is strengthened by the number of hours we spend working in it, the number of personal relationships we build through being part of it, and the degree of alignment between the organisations value and goals and our own.

It seems obvious then that when we leave the Mothership, we no longer belong to the organisation. It is also obvious, therefore, that there will be some sense of loss. What isn’t so obvious, however, is how big that loss can be and the impact it can have have upon us.

I remember speaking to a colleague of mine who took redundancy from BT, having joined as a graduate after 30 years earlier. Although it was voluntary on his part, he had been told that he should consider it equivalent to going through a divorce, such was the emotional and lifestyle impact.

He was part of BT’s “Project Sovereign” staff reduction programme and received a generous settlement as well as a support programme to help him transition. Today, less care and attention is lavished upon those who are leaving organisations. It is treated more as ‘business as usual’ and people are expected to take it on the chin and get on with it.

All too often, people leave the Mothership and find themselves sitting alone at home, becoming depressed and demotivated. The feel they are not supposed to complain, that it’s ‘normal’ and they should just cope.

This is wrong. The loss of that association, the lack of belonging, hits right at the core of our being. It leaves a huge hole in our lives and we must not ignore it. This is a serious matter and we must take steps to address it.

Finding new groups to being to is part of re-imagining ourselves, finding out about ourselves and deciding what our new identity, our real identity is.

We are compelled to belong to things, so when we leave the Mothership we need to build new associations to replace it. It’s good sense and is simply part of looking after ourselves and creating a platform for our future success.

I called this blog ‘After the Mothership’ because it is about what you go through after a significant event, namely the end of your corporate career. It is about that transition, not about the change that caused it or the thing future you have yet to realise, but the process that you go through to bridge between the two.

I’ve been working my way through this process for some time and the mental model I like to use is the one first described by William Bridges in his excellent book “Transitions”. He was one of the first to write about this back in the 1980s and, whilst many others have addressed this subject since, I like the elegant simplicity of his 3-stage model.

Bridges starts with an important distinction between change and transition. Change is the thing that happens to you, whereas transition is the internal process you go through to come to terms with a change, to let go of things from the past and re-orientate yourself to the new circumstances.

Change, such as re-organisation, redundancy, moving jobs, is given. Transition, however, is not. Each person’s  path and experience is unique and can vary widely in duration. Some do not achieve transition at all and will seem to repeat certain events in their lives, like having a string of personal relationships that fail for the same reason, or a series of jobs that follow the same pattern.

Bridges goes on to explain that there are three stages to transition:

Ending is about letting go of the past, giving up on attachments and emotions connected to the previous situation. This can be extremely difficult, particularly if the change was not your choice. However, if you don’t let go you can never complete the transition because the emotional connections to the past will hold you back.

The Neutral Zone is a period of confusion and anxiety, but also innovation and creativity. You have to figure out how fit in this new world, what you have to unlearn from your past and what you have to add. It’s a period of re-invention and it is very challenging. This period can be quite short or may take several years, it really depends on you.

Finally, you re-orientate yourself and see the new possibilities and opportunities. This is your New Beginning, which you approach with energy and enthusiasm.

All too often we get stuck in one of these phases. We fail to let go of the past because we are unwilling or unskilled at exploring out emotions, so we ignore them and continue with our previous behaviours. Or we find the neutral zone to uncomfortable, we are unable to tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty. the anxiety and confusion is just too much for us. We cut short the process and instead plunge straight into a new job, a new venture or relationship.

However, because we have not internally processed what has happened to us (the change) and have not learnt from it and changed our mindset or behaviours, we make the same errors and mistakes in the new situation. Added to that, we now have the emotional baggage from the incomplete transition dragging us down as well.

It’s not to hard to see work out that after a few cycles of failed transitions, we are weighed down with so much emotional baggage that we are practically immobile. We are stuck, often in the very uncertainty and emotional turmoil we were seeking to avoid.

Well, who knew? I certainly didn’t because no-one had ever told me about these things. No-one ever spoke of the hard emotional labour that is needed to work through these transitions.

Quite often I was actually in denial that I was in a transition, that a phase of my life was ending. As for the Neutral Zone and staying is a state of uncertainty and ambiguity, that was to be avoided like the plague. I had been taught to deal in certainties and clarity, no good would come of confusion.

These are common, if unhelpful, reactions, driven by society’s beliefs and pressure to stay the same. However, now I know that once the process of transition has been started it is vital that we complete it and internally process out emotions. These transitions offer us the opportunity for recovery and renewal, to expand our sense of reality and deepen our purpose. This enrichment ourselves and our lives is one of the gifts that is to be granted to us at the end of the process.

That process is seldom easy and there are not any short-cuts and but it is an essential part of re-imagining yourself so that you can move towards a better future.

A star has gone out in the sky with the passing of David Bowie, a rare talent and modern-day icon. Alongside his musical brilliance he will be remembered for his numerous re-inventions, moving from one persona to the next as part of his artistic renewal.

Bowie was an absolute genius at re-imagining himself and had a shape-shifting quality that has been copied but never equalled. He showed us all that it is possible to change everything and retain your integrity, to be completely different and yet remain the same. He showed us that there aren’t any boundaries except those that are in the mind, our own and others.

So, for us Post Executives who need to re-imagine ourselves after leaving the Mothership, it’s simple. Be like Bowie! He’s showed us the way, we just have to follow.

Well, simple is not the same as easy, is it? That sort of change and transition is hard work, challenging and frightening and dangerous. It’s OK, you don’t have to wear make up and outlandish costumes (although if you want to, that’s absolutely fine too. Channel your inner drama queen and all that) but you do have to put in the emotional effort to explore the possibilities and to take some risks and experiment.

It probably not something you’ve done before or even contemplated. It certainly wasn’t on my life plan, such as it was. I joined a large corporate and expected to see out my career there, either with that business or in that environment. By the time I hit my forties I had a family and a mortgage and I was not looking for any big changes.

In fact, when I started work the expectation was very much that you were ‘set in your ways’ by then. Middle age, middle management, middle of the road, that was the norm. It was still the scientific view that you had probably learnt all you could by then and would stay the same until you retired. The adage was that “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

We now know that the mind has plasticity and we can not only learn new things throughout our life but change the way our mind operates, creating new neural pathways and patterns of thought. It wasn’t until as recently as 2012 that Carol Dweck wrote about the concept of a growth mindset, that our qualities were not fixed but could be developed by us.

Although seeing Bowie go through his transformations and prove it as possible to re-imagine ourselves, we thought “not for us”, such is the drag of these earlier ideas about personality and qualities and life patterns. But now, it yes, for us. Change is not only possible, it’s essential. It’s not a threat, it’s glorious opportunity. And with the right knowledge, help and support, you can grasp it.

Go on, admit it. You’ve always wanted to be a bit like Bowie. Now you can be.