You Have to Make a Mess
A childhood friend of mine went to sleep away camp every summer. It was something I wasn’t brave enough to do, so when she came back I wanted to hear all about her experience.
In late August one year, over lemonades in her backyard, she told me about the highlight of her summer: her bunkmates had an all-out war in their cabin. Something like a food fight, but with all of their belongings. They grabbed pillows and hair brushes and swimsuits and journals and deodorant sticks and made a total wreck of the place, belly laughing the whole time.
And when it was over, they cleaned it all up.
A lot of us are afraid of making messes—because we’ve been told we need to be polished and have it all together.
Many of my clients approach career planning in this same way. They try to figure it all out in their heads so they can say something clear and defined about their direction.
They wait to approach their manager to talk about their career growth until they know exactly what they want and can make a specific request.
They waffle about applying for jobs because they’re unsure about which direction they’re interested in, so they wait to take action, hoping it will all somehow become clear.
They introduce themselves by saying their name and job title because it’s easier than putting together their own words that get to the heart of who they are.
I find, every time, that the way to clarity is mess.
In career coaching, I ask my clients questions and they talk it out. They usually feel like they’re rambling, going on tangents, and not making any sense. That’s how coaching works.
I give them exercises as pre-work for our sessions that include mind mapping and making rough lists instead of complete sentences.
The goal is to give you the space and structure to dump out what’s in your head, your heart, and your resume—so we can see it on the page and work with it. From there, we organize it, make meaning from it, and decide how you want to take intentional action from it.
It’s only through the mess that you can discover the bread crumbs—the aspirations that you’re too timid to say out loud. Samantha, a management consultant I worked with, dared to admit in our sixth coaching session that she daydreamed about owning a goat landscaping business. She had no idea how to get from here to there, and so she stuffed down the interest and labeled it as ridiculous and unrealistic. I didn’t let her get away with that—we talked it through. Four years later, she works and lives as a farmer on a remote island in Maine.
It’s only through the mess that you can notice the patterns and make unexpected connections between your different skills. My client Ellen had experience in many different roles—communications, project management, fundraising, and recording voice-over work for cultural institutions. These seemed to her like a smattering of disparate roles, like she had no common thread or career path. But when we looked at the mess, we saw an organizing principle: Ellen’s roles always served to give voice to great ideas. Now that’s her LinkedIn Headline: Giving voice to great ideas. It’s the common theme that unites all of her varied skills.
It’s only through the mess that you can discern what you want to explore. When PJ came to me, he was the vice president of a prominent family foundation and on the cusp of the final chapter of his professional career. He felt called to do something different—something that would bring together his past experiences but also give him opportunities to learn new things. The problem was: he had no idea what that something was. We mapped out his wide range of interests and the different paths he could explore. Then we made a plan for how he would gather insight into what each of those paths would look and feel like. He just celebrated the end of that position and the start of his next chapter consulting on cross-sector social impact projects.
Don't wait for clarity to strike
As you navigate your career, don’t wait for clarity to strike like a sudden bolt of lightning. It’s not going to happen. The answers are not coming from outside of you.
Instead, allow yourself to make a mess. Pour out what’s inside of you—write down or talk through the cloud of wild and unrealistic and safe and practical and unknown and fun possibilities, no matter how outlandish or boring they may seem.
Get them all out there on the page so you can see and explore the possibilities. (Even better, get a second set of eyes on the mess—someone else to help you identify and understand the patterns.)
Being messy is an essential part of career planning. It’s only through making a mess that you can allow yourself to figure out and get to the clarity you’re longing for.
