I Shouldn't Be Telling You This Part 13

It also helped for me to integrate my mystery writing with my family. I introduced my kids to many of my favorite mystery movies, including the four fantastic Miss Marple films of the 1960s with Dame Margaret Rutherford. I once even had my daughter, Hayley, follow me through the woods so that I could hear the sound of someone tracking me. Needless to say, today they both have a love for the macabre.

So as I said, plunge in. You will be tired at times, even cranky, and at some moments you will wonder if you are nuts for doing it. But I bet you won't regret it.

{ Reinvention: A Brief Course }.

You may have read, as I have, that the average person will have at least five careers during his or her lifetime. But guess what? That statistic turns out to be completely untrue. Or rather, it could be true, but n.o.body knows for sure. There is actually no data on the subject of how many careers the average person will have in a lifetime. Someone just threw out that number at one point, and it stuck.

Yet, despite the lack of research, I'd say there's a more-than-decent chance that many of us will end up changing careers at least once. Even if you love your work and your field, there may come a time when you're no longer being challenged or excited and you start to grow restless, eager for something new. And you don't have to be plugging away for twenty-five years to feel that way. The Atlanta-based psychiatrist Dr. Ish Major says that he's had plenty of thirty-something patients who find themselves at a crossroads. "Maybe you blazed through ten or fifteen years of your career, and then you find yourself asking, 'Is this it? There's got to be more.' "

And of course sometimes the need for reinvention isn't a choice: it's thrust on you because your field runs out of steam or suffers a setback.

So let's start with the idea of you in charge of the situation. You used to love what you are doing, but now you're feeling bored or discontented by the area you're in, and you're ready for a switch. Yet you're not sure what your shiny new career should be. It would be nice if you had a eureka moment-and those do sometimes occur. But since you may not have time to wait for it, why not hurry it along?

That's sort of what my friend Amy Archer did. Amy and I were writers together at Glamour magazine when we were both in our twenties. In her late twenties, Amy took off to see the world for a while and then ended up teaching, at Brown University and at several prestigious prep schools. One day, sitting at her desk at a school in Portland, Oregon, she had a startling epiphany.

"It was three days before the first faculty meeting," she says. "I was thinking about school projects, and I realized-I can't do this. I was almost shaking. I knew then that what I wanted to do was become a photographer. I went to the head of the school and told him I had to leave."

Archer had actually been nudging herself toward that moment for a while. She loved photography and always had her camera out. The summer before the new school year began, she'd taken a pretty serious photography course in Aspen. So the idea of finally doing it full-time had begun to crystallize long before that shaky moment at her desk. Her reinvention, like many, was really an evolution. If you see a thread of something beginning to run through your thoughts, follow it. Take a cla.s.s, explore on the Internet, have lunch with someone who's already doing it.

Shock Reinvention What if a need for reinvention isn't a choice but something that's been thrust on you-because, for instance, you're downsized out of your job and you realize that opportunities in your field are drying up. You come to sense that it's time for a whole new ball game.

The first step, says Dr. Major, is to begin to let go of your former self. "You have to deal with the finality of who you used to be. It can be like grief. What I hear a lot is 'I don't know who I am without that.' But what I tell patients is that whatever it was, it wasn't the biggest part of them. They need to get in touch with their essential self." How do you do that? Dr. Major suggests asking five friends and five family members to describe you in one word. "In most cases," he says, "seven out of ten people come out with the same word. And that word will say far more about you-your essential self rather than your social self."

It may not be necessary to totally shift gears. The executive coach Terri Wein suggests meeting with people who "value your skill set" and who can brainstorm with you about how to take it in another direction. A friend of mine who was let go after running a big special-events department found great happiness as a freelance consultant who specializes in generating concepts for events.

What if it is time for something brand new? How do you begin to figure out what that is? The "threads" probably are there, but you're going to have to tease them out. Note the everyday moments when you are "in the zone"-when you have total focus and single-mindedness of purpose. Maybe it's when you're doing something with your hands. Also, think about what captivated you as a girl, what captured your fancy then. "If you have to reach outside of you, you've gone too far," says Dr. Major.

Another good strategy is the "taking the bus to Cairo" approach I talked about in "What Are You Really l.u.s.ting For?" in part I. You're looking on the outside but letting it connect with your internal longings and needs.

Your First Foray Now to begin. Archer's advice: "Find something easy and minuscule to get you over the hump of 'Where do I start?' " Instead of going out and just shooting pictures, Archer dug out old notebooks of hers in which she'd made notes about photography and also found the negatives of pictures she'd taken years before, including a series of candid shots of the singer Tom Waits. Her first step was to make prints of those photos. She was working with something familiar, and that made plunging in easier.

She also found it helpful to place herself in an environment where people were doing what she now wanted to do. "There was a wonderful darkroom in Portland run by a group of women, and I went there to develop my photos," she says. Before long her work began appearing in cafe shows and then in one of Portland's best art galleries. Recently she shot all the photographs for interior designer Bunny Williams's enchanting book, Sc.r.a.pbook for Living.

Reinvention almost always involves a learning curve, and once you jump in, you'll have to be teaching yourself at the same time. "For me, that was one of the hardest parts of reinvention," says Andrea Kaplan, who started her own PR firm several years ago. "I'd been in corporate jobs in the past and always had a.s.sistants. When I went out on my own, I had to suck it up and go to cla.s.s to learn Excel. Then I took cla.s.ses and read books on social media. But now I'm really enjoying the new rhythm of life that comes from not being connected to the same place every day."

Does that sound good? Then go for it!

Acknowledgments.

I'm so very grateful to everyone at HarperCollins and HarperBusiness who supported and guided me with I Shouldn't Be Telling You This. In particular I want to thank the awesome Kathy Schneider, who sensed my secret wish to write this book and then told me to go for it; Hollis Heimbouch and Colleen Lawrie for their incredibly valuable direction and editing; Rachel Elinsky for her unrelenting and imaginative efforts on the PR front; Robin Bilardello for kick-a.s.s art direction; and Emily Walters for her generous patience with such a micromanager.

I also want to thank my absolutely terrific agent, Sandy Dijkstra, and her entire team, including Elise Cap.r.o.n, Elizabeth James, and Andrea Cavallaro.

Last, thanks to all the smart, gutsy, successful women who taught me so much along the way.

Contact Kate.

I so hope you enjoyed I Shouldn't Be Telling You This and that it provided you with information you found valuable for your career and your life. If you have a question related to the book, feel free to e-mail me and I will make every effort to get back to you by e-mail.

katewhite.com/content/contact/.

Best wishes, Kate White.

(This link is not supported on all e-book reading devices. If you are unable to access this link from your device, please visit KateWhite.com from your computer.).

About the Author.

Kate White has been the editor in chief of five magazines, including Cosmopolitan, and is the New York Times bestselling author of two thrillers, Hush and The Sixes, and the Bailey Weggins mystery series. White is also the author of popular career books for women, including the bestselling Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead . . . but Gutsy Girls Do.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Kate White.

FICTION.

_______.

So Pretty It Hurts.

The Sixes Hush Lethally Blond Over Her Dead Body.

'Til Death Do Us Part.

A Body to Die For If Looks Could Kill.

NONFICTION.

__________.

You on Top 9 Secrets of Women Who Get Everything They Want.

Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead . . . but Gutsy Girls Do.

end.