Guest Blog: “Winning My Career-Jackpot as My Peers are Retiring”

This week I am honored to have a guest blogger from the California Writer’s Club. JoAnn Smith Ainsworth is an example of someone who had a successful first career. With the help of a career book available several decades ago, she realized there was something else she would love to do which her first career was helping her with. See how she realized her second career after she retired. – Elizabeth Wagele (http://www.wagele.com) P.S. JoAnn has typed herself as a Perfectionist career type.

Winning My Career-Jackpot as My Peers are Retiring by JoAnn Smith Ainsworth

Elizabeth, thank you for this opportunity to share my writing experiences with your readers.

I’m an example that “It’s never too late to follow your dream.” It takes focus, hard work and not giving up. If your readers hold tight to their passion and stay focused, they’ll eventually create their dream.

As you know, I started writing a dozen years ago as a way to supplement my social security. I sold at age 68, e-published at 69 and released in paperback at age 70.

You asked some interesting questions. Let me see what I can do about answering them.

1. Would you have chosen writing as a career earlier in your life if you had known yourself better or had different guidance?

I’m a late boomer. I didn’t think to use my B.A. and M.A.T. in English and my MBA studies to become a published author until nearing retirement. Then I needed a way to make money where age didn’t matter and I wouldn’t have to commute. In publishing, all that matters is the quality of the book.

I had exciting careers before becoming an author. Early on, I was Chief Clerk of a U.S. Senate Subcommittee in Washington, DC. At the end of my corporate career, I was database administrator for one of the top 10 U.S. law firms. I also was on its team to develop its first website.

My corporate work experiences all added to my ability to create a business as an author. My database experience (where I organized vast amounts of data) made it easier for me to manipulate 80,000+ words in the novel. I prepared for this new career by taking several years of craft classes. Your readers may find that they need to re-train to follow their dream — especially in this rapidly changing world of technology.

2. Would a book on careers have possibly helped to change your life?

In the 1980s, during a recession, I was out of work for some time. I did turn to a popular book at that time for guidance: What Color is your Parachute?

At the same time, I joined an Employment Development Department self-help group. By following the suggestions in the book, we were able to analyze each other’s work skills. I valued that experience. Fortunately, I spent the last 20 years of my corporate work experience at the law firm and did not need to search for a job.

Working with lawyers was a good choice. In law, the precise word is needed to convey the thought. That work helped mold my discipline as a writer. I hope by sharing these experiences that I’ve helped you and your readers understand the importance of analyzing skills and weaknesses and staying focused on your goal. By adding knowledge to personal passion, you can create the career of your dreams. I did. I love writing novels.

I invite you to visit my website (http://www.JoAnnSmithAinsworth.com). Join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

My very best for success to you all.

JoAnn

I Get By With a Little Help From My Dreams

If my dreams were removed from my life’s history, I wouldn’t know who I was.

Dreams started shaping my life starting with the first dream I can remember at age 4 or 5.  This dream influenced me to feel separate enough from my family to go inside and look for meaning in art and music. http://wagele.com/enneagram5.html In adulthood I began taking some dream classes and drawing my dreams. Getting practice drawing sparked an interest in creating cartoons, which led to trying to produce greeting cards with my friend Renee. The greeting cards didn’t succeed, but we realized there was a need for an accessible introductory Enneagram book just then, so we turned to writing one ourselves, using my drawings for non-verbal learning and to spice it up with humor. “The Enneagram Made Easy” http://wagele.com/easy.html  led to several more books and hundreds more cartoons. So in a practical way my dreams created an enjoyable second career for me following the career in music that I started out with.

Here on the left is a part of one of my dream drawings.

There are two other reasons why I love dreams. First, by paying attention to almost every dream I have, and by taking some of them to groups where I can hear what other people have to say about them, I learn  things I need to learn about myself, for example to be stronger, to take certain things more seriously, and to look at parts of myself I might be neglecting. As of today I’ve recorded 1710 dreams. Several themes stand out and certain symbols recur. When their meaning becomes clear, many things tumble into place. My dreams have given me major gifts.

Second, studying my dreams and the dreams of those in the dream groups I belong to is a fascinating activity–an  interesting glimpse into the psyche. I marvel at my teachers’ gifts at interpreting and intuiting dreams’ symbolism and meaning. It’s  interesting to watch the methods my own unconscious mind comes up with “behind my back” to get points across to the me I know myself to be. Dreams trick us into taking them literally, when that’s probably rarely where the real meaning is. So it seems crucial to me to have input from at least 5 or 6 other people to help me get the point.

Would I like to have a career as a dream writer or teacher? If I were as gifted at working with dreams as some of the dream teachers I have worked with I’d consider it. I’m surprised at how many people think dreams are not important, that they’re just the mind’s clutter from the day. I find my dreams to be more intelligent than anything I can come up with in my waking life after I delve into them to figure them out. “The Career Within You” http://www.wagele.com (available December 29, 2009) will probably emphasize dream-related careers in future editions as more people see the importance of our dream life to our psychological health and wholeness.

What Does My Cartoon Say About You?

What was your first thought and/or feeling when you saw this cartoon–and your second and third if you had them? Stop a minute to recall your reactions and perhaps write them down.

Did you think literally–that the big fish was indeed a fish and would protect the small fish if they behaved themselves? I think we’ve all heard of fish who hold their babies in their mouths. The humor of the cartoon is based on incongruity of one of these parent fish acting like a human. Was what the fish said a happy surprise to you, a gruesome surprise or somewhere in between? Don’t tell me it was no surprise at all; that would bruise my cartoonist’s ego and I’d have to look for a shark to eat YOU (just kidding. My sometimes morbid sense of humor is part of my personality.)

Was one of your first thoughts, “How can that fish tell those little guys what to do with his mouth full?”

Did you take the cartoon as an anti-imperialism cartoon, with the big fish poised to gobble up some poor, defenseless countries, and the shark another big country waiting in the wings for its chance? This person would be using the intuitive preference rather than the more literal sensate one in the MBTI system. Learn more about the MBTI personality types by clicking on the “Happy Introvert” cover at http://www.wagele.com and reading about introverts there or all 16 types in the Happy Introvert book.

Or did you think of the big fish as personal kind of bully–someone in your office or family who protects you but demands obedience in return? Possibly you feel trapped and abused by more than one such bully in your life. Someone who is tuned in to feelings more than thinking might tend to react this way. Circumstances is also a consideration.

Beyond the broad content, what do the expressions on the faces of the shark and the big fish say to you?

And what about the pacing of the words? That’s a big part of the cartoon,  too. The sort of musical part. They start out rather comforting and relaxed: “Come in and I’ll protect you.” The middle part: “but….. you have to do what I say” is a command but we don’t know what the command is. And lastly, the PUNCH line is percussive and threatening – boom, boom, boom! “OR I’LL EAT YOU MYSELF!” You might  hear it as a mild warning or an announcement of definite doom, depending on whether you see the glass half full or half empty.

How you react to my cartoon says a lot about your personality. The more mindful of your feeling reactions to cartoons and to every experience you have, the more you’ll get to know your true self. That often means subtly examining how much you like something. For example, how do you feel differently about the three kinds of characters – the little fishes, the big round fish with the startled expression, and the shark with the goofy expression?

I’d like to hear if this was interesting to think about. If you come up with a neat caption for my cartoon, I’d like you to tell me that, too.

11-18-09 There are some interesting new comments on this article on Facebook. One person thinks the fish could be an Enneagram Achiever or Asserter, which I agree with, and sees the cartoon in a sociological way.

The Good Soldier: “How to Survive Death”

While writing “The Career Within You,” Ingrid Stabb and I invented a way of finding your career that resembles a tree-finder. The result of taking the “Wagele-Stabb Career Finder” myself was to find out that I’d do well as a journalist.

Most of my books have had a large journalistic component: interviewing people. But what fun it would be to go out on exciting assignments, too, were I to start a new working-life. I’d be an objective observer at happening events,  the first at big fires, imbedded with armies, interviewing world leaders. Or maybe I’d be a photo-journalist or a cartoon-journalist.

If you go to my web site, http://www.wagele.com, you’ll see a blue book cover with the title, “How to Survive Death.” My friend and mentor Harry Gans and I wrote this light look at death. For part of it we interviewed people, mostly at the French Hotel Cafe in Berkeley, about what they expect to find when they die.  You can read this little 26 page book  on my web site free. I think you’ll enjoy Harry’s illustrations.

I have another journalistic project going on, too. This one is also about death but a more serious, longer book. I want to find out how the nine Enneagram types think about death and whether the intense experience of the death process intensifies how they express their type. I’ve been collecting some interesting stories about death by people of Enneagram types for a few years. I’m sure there are many other fascinating stories out there, but many are reluctant about sharing their experiences. If you have a story I’d like to hear it; the only requirement is that you know your own Enneagram type and the Enneagram type of the person it’s about. Send it to: ewagele@aol.com and put “Enneagram/Death” in the title bar. When I get enough, I’ll make them into a book.

This is Veteran’s Day week. Bill Moyers ran a part of the documentary, “The Good Soldier,” on a recent program. I recommend it.  The most important issue for me when I supported Obama was that I hoped he would end the violence our country was engaged in.

From  http://www.thegoodsoldier.com/reviews.html

An astounding film, “The Good Soldier” directed by Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys should be mandatory viewing for every President and member of Congress who is willing to make the decision to send men and women into war. In a culture where many veterans do not speak back home of what they witnessed and participated in battle, this film portrays five combat veterans from different wars ranging from WWII to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Iraq who emotionally lay it on the line. The sheer humanity of such inhumane situations is astounding and riveting and heartbreaking. The courage it takes for these soldiers to speak of their darkest moments and moral dilemmas with such brutal honesty is to be commended and brings up questions of our government supporting those they would send to die who did not die but came home. “Life is more difficult than death,” one comments.“War puts you at odds with what is right and wrong,” one veteran explains. Their training as soldiers is to become killers without remorse, but as one asks, “How do you turn that off? One day you’re killing then the next you’re sitting at a bar in New York City.” In wars where the enemy looks just like the innocent civilian, “collateral damage” leaves its mark on the psyche of the soldiers which haunts them for the rest of their lives. As one veteran who is a founder of Veterans for Peace states, “War is not the way to settle a disagreement.”- HipHamptons.com Must See Films: Hamptons International Film Festival – Conflict and Resolution Section

“It’s hard to imagine watching a more affecting movie than The Good Soldier … it may be as affecting a movie as I’ve ever seen. It took one seemingly simple question—What makes a good soldier?—and reduced the answer to its essence. That being, the ability to kill other human beings. Using the voices of veterans from WWII, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Iraq, each gave this exact same answer, and they all spoke not only of their guilt and regret, but also of how at some point during their time in the military they needed to kill. Their reasons were different, but the training that gave them the skills and permission was not. I found it both hard to watch and hard to turn away from, and I know I’ll never look at the words ‘collateral damage’ in the same way again. Really powerful stuff.–…. All of them were visibly haunted by their pasts, and have found ways to come to grips with the tasks they were required to perform. In some cases by regularly protesting, and in the case of Will Williams, by founding the Madison Area Peace Coalition. These were all good men who were deeply affected by the fallout from their wars, and each has done whatever they can to make a difference. I cannot get the image out of my mind of Iraq veteran Jimmy Massey standing alone on a street corner in North Carolina in battle fatigues holding a sign that said: ‘I killed innocent civilians for our government,’ as someone pulled up next to him and yelled: ‘You shouldn’t be protesting our government wearing that uniform!’ “- Jason Albert, theOnion.com

“You’ve got a wonderful film here. I watched it tonight, totally absorbed. The testimonies of the five soldiers bring the issue of war to the viewer with great emotional power. It was a brilliant idea to hear veterans of the various wars – … because the net effect is to deal, not just with one odious war, but with the phenomenon of war as a universal evil. It is especially important, if we are to ditch forever the idea of ‘good’ wars, to tackle head on the war which is generally considered morally unassailable – World War II. Thanks so much for letting me see this. I hope it will get the attention it deserves.”- Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

“The Good Soldier” This is one incendiary movie. When you turn somebody into a well-trained killer, how do you turn off the killer part of their personality? That’s the question asked by Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys in their clear-eyed, heartbreaking documentary. … “Good Soldier” is implicitly anti-war, but not didactically so. At heart, it’s a rueful acknowledgement that when you put young men in stressful, violent situations, they’re not always going to behave according to the Geneva Convention.- Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star

“The Good Soldier”… is a powerful documentary in which filmmakers Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys present a cadre of highly decorated soldiers who’d fought valiantly in America’s wars – …  and, in doing so, came to the conclusion that warfare was neither a righteous nor effective way to resolve differences of opinion, ideology and/or national interests. As Chief Warrant Officer Perry Parks, who flew helicopter combat missions in Vietnam, says, “A young person who is considering a life in the military needs to know that it is not just the job, the education, the travel – the glorious parts they show you. Your real bare bones job is to go out and kill people. Every man is an infantryman. Every soldier’s priority is to conduct the war.”Taking it further, Captain Michael McPhearson, who grew up on Fort Bragg, changed his mind about the military after fighting in the Gulf War. “Soldiers serve the public; they serve our society. I am saying do with me what you will. I am giving you my mind and my body. When I go to war, my body can be broken, my mind can be broken, or I don’t come back. I give you permission to do this. I swear to uphold the Constitution, which includes the Bill of Rights. It is a generally just document. When leaders break that, then I believe a soldier has the right to break their agreement.”McPhearson, resigned his commission and has become the Executive Director of Veterans for Peace. He now faces the anguish of having a son in the military. “I also believe that a soldier has a right to decide they don’t want to kill anybody anymore. They have a right to break that too, because I have to live with taking somebody’s life. You don’t,” he says in the film.

Cultivating Mindfulness

Yesterday I had lunch with some friends. I was feeling guarded about one of them, who will often fly off the handle in the passion of presenting his positions on things. I have quite an even temperament and I don’t always do so well with people who are the opposite from me in that regard. I tend to feel overwhelmed by their emotions and lose track of myself. So before we met I felt uneasy considering what I might do about this. But as I observed him talking to another member of our group I noticed what an emotional person he is–and I let it in that this has nothing to do with me. I think I’ve been seeing him as intimidating me all too readily. As it turned out, he never did go into a rage that day. Now that I have greater insight into myself, I have time to work on my own attitude before we meet again in a few weeks. I will try to accept him as a person who is unlike me; he is emotionally based. Hopefully I have tender feelings, but I would never express them so dramatically. Either it’s not my in-born style or maybe I’m too timid. He probably represents my shadow.

As often happens, this breakthrough (I call it a breakthrough because I had been struggling with this person’s temper for a long time) didn’t come out of the blue. It comes on the heels of a much larger breakthrough concerning a family member. Being mindful was a help to me in both cases. After receiving a wrongfully accusing letter from a relative, I had plunged into a negative feeling state and started to obsess about how to react. Several times I considered pushing my feelings away and trying to forget the whole thing, but my energy was so intense I decided something productive might be percolating inside of me. I had felt similarly when in on the verge of creative breakthroughs in the past. Sure enough, in another couple of weeks I had solved a big puzzle. After trying to be open and waiting, things came together and the story of this tangled relationship started to make sense. I was glad I had stuck it out, including working hard on the dreams I had during this period, and able to make more progress on this situation than I ever expected. So taking the “positive” route doesn’t always achieve the best results. Sometimes hanging out in an uncertain or even negative place turns out to be the best in the long run.

“The Happy Introvert”

Do you know if you’re an introvert? Would you be proud to know you were? As I say in my book, “The Happy Introvert; A Wild and Crazy Guide to Your True Self,” when I proudly announced to my mother that I was an introvert, she shot back angrily, “You are not! You are a nice girl!” Now that many decades have gone by, I can say with certainty that being an introvert has brought me many pleasures. I’ve never been bored except when other people don’t know when to stop talking and I try not to let that happen. I generally love people and I spend much of my time studying them. I also like my own company and can find many ways to amuse myself. This is a big subject that I filled a whole book with, so there’s not room to cover it here, but here are some questions you can ask yourself if you think you might be an introvert:

1. Do you usually prefer limiting your time with people to an hour or two?

2. Do people usually realize you’re interesting only after they get to know you fairly well?

3. Are you critical of superficiality?

4. Do you tend to concentrate in depth when doing a project?

5. Is your style of speech relatively calm and quiet?

6. Are you more likely to engage in learning or improving your skills than looking for outside stimulation?

7. Is your ability to remember people’s names average to low?

8. In social situations, do you sometimes or often stand back and observe?

If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, it’s likely you are an introvert. We all use both introversion and extraversion every single day, but one of these feels more easy and natural more of the time. I kept hearing people talk about introverts in a negative way and I wanted to help clear up some of the misconceptions about this subject. I’m glad I did. “The Happy Introvert” helps those introverts who might think something is wrong with themselves, when really introversion is perfectly natural and necessary. It also tezches people how to relate better to the introverts in their lives.

See the cover and order the book at wagele.com and/or read my articles on “Parenting Introverts,” “A 5 on Music, The Enneagram, and Infinity,” “How to Get Along with Introverts,” and “Introverted Feeling Types;” and see some reviews and an interview here.

“Finding the Birthday Cake”

The Dinner Party

“Finding the Birthday Cake; Helping Children Raise Their Self-esteem” is a small book I wrote for children to teach them the Enneagram and provide a fun story about some animals’ adventures. The cartoon included here isn’t in the book; it’s a child’s version of the cartoon by the same name that’s in “The Enneagram Made Easy.” How fun it is to go back to childhood and start remembering the songs, nursery rhymes, and feeling of being very small compared to everyone else. Animal dolls had a special happy significance as an intermediary between children and adults. They “knew” who they were but they didn’t have an agenda for us other than to be fuzzy, scary, strong, vulnerable, or whatever we wanted them to be. As stuffed toys. They seemed to love us back but they didn’t fight us on anything. Ah, those were the days.

When I was around 4, I had a dream that helped me realize some important ways I was separate from the rest of my family and guided me to going inside and exploring art and music. As an adult, writing and drawing my dreams help me figure out some puzzles about individuals and human nature that perplexed me. I will continue to be curious about human beings as long as I live. My dream drawings provide material for some of the drawings in the books I write. So I can’t say enough about my respect for that part of ourselves that we often call the “unconscious.”

My Career As a Composer

I majored in the composition end of music at Cal, Berkeley, where I composed a few short pieces while studying with Seymor Shiffrin, Arnold Elston and Andrew Imbrie. I took orchestration and instrumentation from the entertaining Mr. Denny. Later I composed a song when my husband Gus and I counseled at a summer camp north of the Bay Area. It was a round called “Redwoods.” In the last few years I improvised two sets of variations – one on the familiar “Chop Sticks:” one variation  for each Enneagram type; and another lullabye-like set on the nursery rhyme, “Jack and Jill.” You can’t call these few compositions a career, though I have another song in mind that I want to record for “The Career Within You.” Maybe composing is a minor sub-career.

Would I have liked to have been a composer? I think it might have been difficult to keep thinking of new musical ideas. COULD I have been a composer? Well, Brandeis University offered me a scholarship to graduate school in music composition, but I turned it down. I think I was both too afraid I wouldn’t have enough new music ideas in me and too in love with the idea of staying in Berkeley to accept their generous offer. I’ve often wondered, however, how being around other budding composers might have affected my motivation to compose.

I have recorded my variations of “Chop Sticks” and “Jack and Jill” and I’d like you to hear them. They’re on my web site, http://www.wagele.com/musical-enneagram.html You can hear Chapter 7 of “The Beethoven Enneagram” CD on my web site, too, if you’d like to hear me play some Beethoven, at  http://wagele.com/beethoven.html  Who knows? Maybe I’ll become a career changer some day and become a full time composer. You never know!

“The Career Within You”

What a tragedy it is to possess such natural gifts and to hide them from ourselves and the world. Elizabeth and Ingrid are great detectives who would have you understand your perfect habitat for all you can bring to the workplace. - Chip Conley, Founder/CEO Joie de Vivre Hospitality and Author of “Peak.”

In our book, “The Career Within You; How to Find the Perfect Job for Your Personality,” every career type is expressed in the type of desk it might use. Here is one example:

Typical desk of an Asserter.

You can imagine your own ideal desk (if you use a desk at work). You should find something close to it in one of our 9 career-type chapters–this or another one. The way you’ll know your career type is through our writing and the description of many people who’ve held careers talking about their own experiences. My cartoons will also help.

After reading all 9 type chapters, you’ll go back and take the Wagele-Stabb Career Finder at the end of the chapter you most closely identify with. This is more personal than you might think, because we’ve found a way to base the outcome on your own highest strengths within your type. Then you’ll match your own preferences for careers with the careers people of your type have shown they were best suited for. I can’t tell you how proud we are of this test we devised.

So if you’re looking for a job or need to manage the job you already have, get to know yourself as well as you can and learn what you can do for yourself to achieve practical results. Our book has two other chapters that will guide you through the job finding process with great expertise. I’m not boasting. This is mostly Ingrid’s forte, having been counseling people in careers for a long time. She knows so much about resume writing, networking, and all the ways to negotiate for a job.

Our book has its own website: http://www.careerwithinyou.com (It will be up and running in November of 2009.)

I have my own website: http://www.wagele.com All my books are on there, plus reviews, articles, and ways to order them. There’s a popular Famous People section, too.

You can see us and information about our book on http://www.HarperCollins.com Write in Ingrid Stabb, Elizabeth Wagele, or “The Career Within You.”

My first post: Why My Career Wasn’t “Doctor”

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This is my first post ever. Since the first blog I looked at after setting up this blog was Dick Bolles’ about his doctor when he was five years old,  I decided to write about my Dr. Murphy, who made house visits to our home in Salt Lake City when I was a child. He was a kindly elderly guy. Every time he examined my nostrils he said he was first going to look in one nose and then the other nose. I didn’t quite know what to make of that, but I knew he thought I’d be amused. He was trying to relate to me as a kid so he was alright. I hope we improve our national health care policies. At the time, it never occurred to me how my parents paid Dr. Murphy. They didn’t have much money. It must have cost quite a bit for the 5 days in the hospital when I had scarlet fever at age 7. We lived on the third floor of an apartment house. After Dr. Murphy’s visit one late afternoon, I was surprised to see a couple of men come in with a stretcher, carry me down all the flights, and put me in an ambulance. The ride was fun. After I came home, our apartment was quarantined for some weeks. My mother was upset because she wasn’t allowed to send out the laundry and my sister wasn’t happy that she had to stay home from school. All of this would have been needless these days because of antibiotics. Career-wise, I would have loved to have been a doctor. I try to absorb anything I hear about medicine. If I had thought I could have handled the science and math classes I might have gone into it. I didn’t care about earning a big salary, so starting at 17 I was happy teaching piano lessons. That was compatible with raising a family of four children, too. Did I ever tell them they had two noses though? That’s a mystery even to me.