Jumping Ship: On Job Transitions & Uncertainty
Laura Miles, one of our practice’s art therapists, and Dot Dannenberg, our practice manager, both changed jobs during the pandemic (to come and work in a bigger capacity for Alexandria Art Therapy!). Their job-change motivations and positions are different, but their experiences had a lot of overlaps. Are you considering a job change? Take a peek at their chat about doing scary things and how the pandemic made changing jobs both more difficult and more clear.
LAURA MILES: I quit my job in the middle of a global pandemic. It was the hardest and scariest decision I’ve ever made. It can be so challenging to take a leap of faith and do the scary thing, especially when there are no guarantees that your new role will give you the same stability as before. It’s the ultimate exercise in vulnerability. The in-between time is also really terrifying, especially with things like health insurance or just the gap between the last paycheck and the first new paycheck. What if something happens while I’m transitioning, and I need the benefits I had at my old job?
DOT DANNENBERG: It can be easier, in a lot of ways, to just maintain the status quo. Humans don’t really like change, and a lot of times things have to come to a boiling point where it gets really bad for us to shake up our whole worlds.
LAURA: It’s also hard when you’re in a job that does have good parts. I loved my work, but it wasn’t serving me anymore. I wasn’t happy. But that didn’t mean it was easy to leave. I was asking myself, can I leave my patients behind? Can I leave my coworkers that I’ve built relationships with? Can I even imagine my life being different?
DOT: Having to initiate that change, having to decide that it’s time--that must be so hard. I haven’t had to do that many times in my working life, in part because my partner’s job moves us all over the world every few years. So really, for the last five years or so, all of my jobs have had a timeline. This is your assignment, you’re here for two years, and then you have to move on. So every few years, I find myself unemployed and have to reinvent myself and find new work. I guess this means that I’m pretty good at leaving and finding new jobs. You’d think that would maybe make it less scary every time, but it really doesn’t.
LAURA: Whether it’s your choice to leave a job or not, changing jobs brings up all of these feelings around safety--what is safe, what is familiar, what is predictable. I found myself realizing that by leaving my old job, I was purposefully doing something that in some ways didn’t feel safe, which isn’t a natural state for most of us.
DOT: Right. As humans we’re kind of wired to nest and get comfortable. And to protect what we have. And then we think about leaving our job, and it’s like, “oh, am I sabotaging myself? Why am I blowing up this good thing I have going?”
LAURA: For me it really made me spend a lot of time thinking about my values. I value being curious and brave--do I have that in my work now, or is changing the curious and brave thing? Is what I’m doing aligned with my values, or can I find a better fit somewhere else?
DOT: Some of the examination that comes up around values is really positive when it comes to changing jobs. It helps you figure out what you really want. But sometimes shaking things up makes you second guess. Am I bailing because things are too hard, or is leaving the harder thing? Do we always need to be doing the harder thing? What kind of change brings necessary growth, and what is just change for the sake of change?
LAURA: There were also a lot of other hard emotions when it came to leaving a job during the pandemic itself. I felt a lot of guilt--I had this opportunity to shift from one job into another, but so many people had lost their jobs during the pandemic. I know I was so privileged to be able to do this, and I realize that not everyone can.
DOT: For me, my last job came to an end in August of 2020. So, right in the middle of the pandemic. Like...deep pandemic. There I was, unemployed, and I felt like everyone else was unemployed too. That was really difficult. I definitely felt my privilege, too, as my partner’s job was safe and secure and we knew that this was coming ahead of time, but the timing of all of it with the employment crisis of the pandemic felt really scary.
LAURA: And maybe what made it ultimately possible for you was that you had support. I think for a lot of people, maybe they feel like they can’t change jobs, or they should just stick it out with an employer that’s not a good fit because the support isn’t there to make the transition. You can’t really upend your life if you’re not in a safe place to do so.
DOT: It’s weird now to be thinking about this because I get the sense that you (and I definitely felt this way) felt kind of alone to be changing jobs at what seemed like the end of the world. Like, shouldn’t we be hunkering down? But now, as the U.S. eases back into whatever normal life is, people are leaving their jobs all the time. Apparently more Americans quit their jobs this past April than any other month this century.
LAURA: It makes sense. When things have been this bad, maybe they can really only get better? I was surprised by my reluctance to make the change, even when I also felt excited by it. I definitely felt alone, but that was already a familiar feeling because I was working in a medical setting, which meant I was both out-and-about in the world all the time and yet very isolated in other ways. Leaving meant I could feel more in control of my own risk level health-wise while also taking a huge risk at the same time.
DOT: The physical risk some jobs suddenly demanded was this whole new factor. I think all the time about my friends who are teachers or restaurant workers, too. I’m always so shocked when someone just stuck it out and kept working even though the risk they were being asked to assume didn’t come with any kind of commensurate compensation. The pandemic taught huge swaths of the population that we’re not being paid enough, we’re overworked, and we can be perfectly productive from home. And for people whose jobs were still stuck in the old way of doing things, employees have decided they’ve had enough. I’m really suspicious of people who didn’t have some kind of ah-ha moment during the pandemic. Not necessarily that the pandemic had to “teach you something” or that everything is tied up in a lesson, but I feel like the pandemic did serve as a great clarifier. It may have helped you realize what your real values were. Or that your job was treating you poorly. Or maybe the systems you never thought about before were suddenly exposed, and they looked really, really unsteady. I think our faith has been shaken in so many institutions (and people) over the past few years, and it’s natural that with those realizations would come the desire for a change.
LAURA: And the isolation factor of the pandemic, for better or for worse, made a lot of us realize that we were on our own when it came to advocating for ourselves. It became impossible to make a decision (or avoid making a decision) based on what others wanted or needed from me, or what I thought they wanted or needed from me. You have to rely on your intuition, even when the changes are painful. It can be hard because transitions can feel like losses, but a loss that you’re inflicting on yourself. Things weren’t necessarily working, but WHY WOULD I CREATE MORE SUFFERING ON PURPOSE??
DOT: All transitions come with some form of loss, for sure. Loss of identity, loss of confidence. Loss of old relationships or rituals. And loss is traumatic even in instances when you’re gaining so much. You might be really excited to be at a new job in a new role, or maybe your new job brings added financial security that your last job didn’t have. But those things don’t erase the losses that are happening at the same time.
LAURA: Job satisfaction and work stress have been common themes in my sessions lately. I’m taking a direct approach to the conversation and saying “Some of those old ways aren’t working--and maybe they never did. That’s Before Times stuff, and we’re not doing it anymore.”
