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Career Change: Switching Status for Substance
by Karen West

Karen Summerville had it all. She was a successful commercial litigator and the only female partner in a downtown Seattle law firm. There was only one problem: She dreaded the grueling 16-hour days and the bulldog mentality that came with her prestigious career.

Not to mention the spilt personality she developed in the adversarial courtroom environment. By day, she was an aggressive type A, taking charge of her clients’ crises. By night, she was a nurturing mother whose schedule revolved around her newborn baby.

“It felt like I was being assaulted,” she says of her litigation days at Betts, Patterson & Mines, PS. “Everything is always a crisis. You can’t focus because you are faced with deadlines on top of deadlines. As soon as you meet one, another comes along.”

She came home exhausted one night and decided something had to give – and it wasn’t going to be her family.

Many of Summerville’s colleagues were feeling the same way about their “successful” careers. They were frustrated, bored or burned out and seeking change. Summerville gave up her law partnership and began a new career helping other attorneys find business success and satisfaction. It was only then that she realized, “I was born to do this.”

Seeking to Make a Difference
Summerville is one of a growing number of women who have climbed the corporate ladder only to discover the view isn’t all that great at the top. She, like many women, changed careers to find more meaningful and satisfying work.

More and more women are seeking changes in their professional careers. They want socially conscientious jobs that offer more than a paycheck. Instead of just using their business or professional skills, many women today long to use their natural talents and find their true passion.

“Change is healthy,” says Carol Vecchio, co-founder and executive director of the Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal in Seattle. “It shows we are growing. It isn’t just fulfilling enough to sleepwalk through each day. We are all here for a specific purpose. People want to find their life’s work and be able to express and contribute in a meaningful way to others.”

Summerville is one of those people. She made her transition by studying books on career counseling and took a job at an international outplacement firm in Bellevue before starting her own business, Legal Career Management.

Multiple Jobs No Longer Stigma
She believes that the status quo is a thing of the past in today’s ever-changing business world. She says that job changes occur usually, but not always, in midlife. People in their twenties start out wanting to do something that validates that they are doing a good job, Summerville says. In their thirties, people usually feel they are doing well but not really enjoying their work. When they reach their forties and fifties, they want a job that is more substantial and one that contributes to society.

“They want to go beyond doing it well and enjoying it to leaving a legacy,” says Summerville, who has worked in the legal profession her entire adult life and spent 12 years as a litigator.

Years ago, it was a stigma to change careers. As Richard Nelson Bolles writes in his popular book, What Color is Your Parachute?, people leave jobs much more freely now than they did 30 years ago. He says jobs today are regarded as learning experiences; the more jobs a person has had, the greater the asset.

Vecchio, with the Centerpoint Institute and who has had extensive training with Bolles, agrees, saying it used to be that if you were in a job for a short time, you were considered irresponsible. Today, jobseekers score points if they’ve had several different jobs. “Now, if you stay too long somewhere, it’s considered questionable.”

Preparing For Change
The first step toward making a change is to look within yourself, Summerville says. “Look at what you do well and what you enjoy. Figure out what you really want to do, what your talents, interests and values are.”

She advises people to research the job market and not to be afraid to abandon the traditional 9 to 5 job market. “Recognize your different talents and the different demands on your life and structure your work life around it.”

“When people make big career moves, they often go in the right direction but end up in the wrong environment,” she says. An example would be an attorney leaving the practice of law to do something completely different and finding that the new company wasn’t the right fit even though the choice of career change was.

It’s also important to talk to people doing the work you think you would like to do. “Do your homework and ask lots of questions,” Summerville says. “Find out how they got started and what were the difficulties they encountered in their chosen careers. Better yet, try it out by volunteering before making a big change.”

When working with clients who want to make significant career changes, Julie Mellen, a Seattle-area career and outplacement consultant, advises them to develop career transition strategies, including conducting research on the job market so that they can make decisions based on valid data, rather than on wishful thinking or assumptions. She helps her clients clarify their career objectives, identifying skills and how they are transferable to a new career, and advising them on how to make contact with employers who need what they have to offer.

“It is natural for people to fear the unknown,” Mellen says. When making a career change, she says it is vital for the career changer to know why someone should hire them to do what they want to do – if they don’t know why they should be hired, they can’t expect the employer to figure it out. The career changer needs to ensure that all of their verbal and written communications make it clear what they want to do and emphasize why they will be successful doing it.

Exhilarating and Traumatic
Whether changing careers because of a layoff, divorce, boredom, burnout or physical injury, switching to a new profession can be both exhilarating and traumatic. “It really is a grieving process that we go through,” says Vecchio. “We have to let go of our former identity and vision and step back to find a new direction for our lives.”

Vecchio’s nonprofit center motivates people to “look forward to Mondays again” through workshops, retreats and career counseling/ coaching for individuals and organizations. She helps people embrace and learn from the uncertainty that change brings and uncover their passions. She is currently writing a book whose working title is The Time Between Dreams: Successfully Navigating Change and Uncertainty.

“Because women tend to be caretakers, our natural response is to put ourselves last,” she says. “When we go through transitions, it’s important to take care of ourselves first before we can look out for others. Doing that enables [us] to eventually have more to give others in our lives.”

Finding your true passion isn’t easy. “We need to ask ourselves, What are my passions? What do I love to do? What comes naturally to me?” Vecchio says. “People really need to follow their hearts. “So often in our society, the heart is not considered as valuable as the head.”

She says people often have the misconception that they can just pick a different job title and they will be happy. “There isn’t just one perfect job out there for us. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to step back, identify and connect with our passions.”

Specificity is the key, she says. “In terms of planning for a career that we will be successful in and satisfied with over many years, we need to define and clarify our passions first and then find ways to further develop the skills we will need to succeed in that career. It’s not enough to say ‘I like to teach’ or ‘I like to organize’ or ‘I want to work with people.’ Instead, we need to identify – with lots of detail – what our way of teaching or organizing or working with people is that is unique to us. That makes up the core of a vision for our work.”

Transition Takes Time
Sharon MacTavish, of West Seattle, said the Centerpoint Institute helped her rediscover her career passion and remember how she loves designing and creating clothes. She had worked as a nurse for 10 years, and then went to law school to help nurses in the workplace. After three years of providing risk-management advice to a major hospital, she was recruited by a hospital insurance company that needed a nurse attorney as staff counsel to handle claims. She has been working there 15 years, and although the work has been challenging, she says “I sought balance for my right brain.”

During a Centerpoint retreat, she was asked to make something that symbolized who she was. “I found needle and thread and made a paper pillow heart that I sewed together by hand. Who could have imagined then that sewing was still a passion? I sure didn’t.”

Two years ago, she went back to fashion design school in Seattle with the New York Fashion Academy. “I started part-time, and class by class I did it.” She finished the certificate program in July 2004, participated in the New York Fashion Academy’s fashion show, and launched Sharon MacTavish Designs – Fine Clothing for Real Women.

She now splits her time between her custom women’s clothing business and her work as a claims attorney. She has a quote on her wall by Harold Thurman Whitman, which she says gives her inspiration daily: “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Karen West is a freelance writer and mother who lives on Bainbridge Island. She covered business for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for several years.

©2005 Caliope Publishing Company