Editor’s Note: This is the final article in a four-part series of job search and career transition articles. Parts one, two, and three are also online.

The Gap is a violent clash of energies – turbulence to the nth degree.

On the one hand, there’s the energy of What We Want:  visionary, idealistic, imaginative. It puts a gleam in our inspired eye, fills us with passion, makes us reach for the stars. It’s fun to think about the new possibilities. We feel determined, purposeful.

On the other hand, there’s the energy of The Way Things Are: reasonable, established, entrenched. It doesn’t see what we see when we’re all inspired, and it doesn’t care anyway. All it knows is that there’s a right and wrong way to do things, and what we have in mind is definitely the wrong way. Sit down before you hurt yourself. You’re rocking the boat.

Throw those two energies together, and they’re like the Capulets and the Montagues crossing paths in the marketplace. There’s gonna be trouble.

What’s worse, the Gap is our handiwork. We hit turbulence when we take off in the pursuit of our big ideas. We cause it. As long as we’re moving ahead with our plans to create something new, it might get a little bouncy up ahead. (Don’t you love it when the pilot comes on the intercom and says that?)

When we move in the direction of accomplishing something new, we stress our relationships, our routines, our habitual ways of thinking and believing and doing things. We have to, because if we don’t, nothing’s going to change. That’s why, whenever we chase a new dream or goal or big idea, we also chase storms. No, more than that – we create storms. And the bigger the change we want, the more violent the storm is going to be. A little bouncy? When it comes to the Gap, it’s more like Storm-Chaser.

We can stop anytime, and it won’t be turbulent anymore. But making things calm down comes at a stiff price: we need to stop moving toward the goals we want to achieve, the new thing we want to create. Do we really want that? Of course not. We set out to change things. Giving up is a shortcut back to status quo. Been there, done that.

So if we’re on the path to change, we need to buckle up. It could get a little bouncy up ahead.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a four-part series of job search and career transition articles. Parts one, two, and four are also online.

What we’re up against in the Gap is “ego.” By that, I mean what makes us who we are – the dynamic organizing principle that gives our lives psychic shape and physical expression, that creates and sustains who we are, what we do, and what we have.

Ego accounts for how we make decisions, our likes and dislikes, our areas of competence and ignorance. It draws reality into orbit around itself, defines what’s normal and what’s not, what’s safe and possible and predictable, and what isn’t.

Ego was formed when we were young, to make us feel safe in a scary world. It gives us our sense of self, creates boundaries that differentiate us from others. It’s the summation of the beliefs and behaviors that shapes our habitual experience of life.

Ego is why we resist change – even the change we want. Ego blocks new ideas not on their merits but as a matter of policy, because it has created – on a deep, subconscious level we’re probably not in touch with – beliefs that some things are possible for ourselves and some things aren’t. When we challenge those beliefs, they resist us, and until we root them out, they’re going to prevent us.

The Gap comes into existence when we dare to defy those beliefs by moving toward what we want. The Resistance we meet in the Gap is ego shuddering in the face of our passionate commitment to change. The bigger the change, the greater the threat, and the fiercer ego’s resistance. Ego began as a normal part of psychological and social development when we were kids. Now it turns on us. What was once our friend and teacher and bodyguard is now our Resistance.

Ego can’t create the new, but it can and will sabotage our efforts to do so. Either we break ego’s control over us or we go back where we came. The Gap is where we settle the issue.

And hell hath no fury like an ego scorned.

[to be continued]

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a four-part series of job search and career transition articles. Parts one, three, and four are also online.

We got inspired, we went for it. So now what? Time to take a bow while the world applauds our resolution? Nope. The bows will have to wait. What comes first isn’t a bow, it’s a facer . . . into the Gap.

The Gap is Resistance with a capital R. It’s the distance between what we have now and what we want have when our dreams come true. If we want our Big Ideas to come to fruition, we must live through the Gap, because that’s where we’re equipped to meet the challenges we need to meet and make the changes we need to make in order to finally prevail.

It’s not so bad at first, when we’re still freshly charged with inspiration. Meeting challenges is fun. We find resourcefulness we didn’t know we had. There’s a sense of triumph in overcoming. But after awhile the challenges get tougher, and it’s not so fun anymore.

Change is tough; there are a thousand reasons to quit, and sooner or later one of them is too alluring to resist. Sooner or later we hit one too many obstacles, become overwhelmed and afraid, bail out and scurry back to the safety of whatever we left, leaving our half-executed plans and unrealized visions strewn behind us.

That’s life in the Gap. No wonder people give up on their dreams.

Life in the Gap is about hitting barriers, and hitting them hard. A friend of mine calls this “crash dummy syndrome”:  you hit so many brick walls that after awhile when you hit a new one it’s not a catastrophe, it’s just another day at the office. Brick wall incoming! BAM! Go back and do it again. BAM! Do it again. BAM!

Crash dummies save lives. In the Gap, we’re the crash dummies. Is that any way to live?

It is – when the life you’re saving is your own.

Once we’re in the Gap, the only way out is through. And to get through, we must overcome not only the Gap’s challenges, we must also overcome ourselves.

[to be continued]

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a four-part series of job search and career transition articles. Parts two, three, and four are also online.

At the gym where I used to work out, the regulars used to gather this time of year to complain about how crowded the place was with all the “The Resolutioners.” But don’t worry, they’d say smugly, they’ll all be gone by mid-February. And they were right, year after year.

New Year’s Resolutions rarely work. Why not?

We make them because we’ve had some time off, got relaxed, found ourselves reflecting about the things in our life that chronically make us dissatisfied. We tell ourselves this time we’re going to do something about it – get healthier, change jobs, start a company, take up a new hobby, whatever. Maybe we even dare to share our new thoughts and plans with someone else.

And then we wake up with an inspirational hangover. What were we thinking? Inspiration flew the coop overnight, taking all those new thoughts and ideas with it, and we’re left hoping we didn’t do anything too stupid while we were under the influence.

We mean well. We start well. We don’t finish well. Why not?

Because we’re not prepared for the ferocity of the Resistance with a capital R we run into when we try to change things in our lives. Everybody who’s ever tried to make good on a New Year’s Resolution knows about Resistance. It always shows up, never misses its cue, and it’s always pissed off. And it always brings the same message:  What were you thinking? Don’t you realize you’re making a fool of yourself? We wither under its barrage, go limping back to status quo.

Resistance is a fact of life in the world of change, and there’s no use trying something new without knowing how to deal with it. The good news is, we can learn, and when we do, we get to be one of those smug regulars the next time January rolls around.

The first thing we need to learn about is life in the Gap.

[to be continued]

Editor’s Note: This is the final article in a three-part series of job search and career transition articles. Part one and part two are also online.

Why does its seem like our grandest visions bother to come to us when they could’ve found someone a whole lot better qualified?

Inspiration does that to you. It surprises you, lays the whole glorious vision out there in high def, then drops the impossible mission on you, knowing full well there’s no possible way you could ever do it. And then it asks whether you’ll accept your mission anyway.

A few years back, I launched out to pursue a big dream of producing a stage spectacle. People were encouraging – they told me it wasn’t completely outlandish to think I could do it. I was a lawyer with a creative streak. So what? There are lots of those around. Surely the combination of right-brained aptitude and left-brained education and experience would help me out. Right?

I appreciated their support, but knew better. A career of advising small business owners wasn’t going to help with a multi-million dollar business plan or its capital requirements. Running a law firm of five lawyers and support staff hadn’t done anything to prepare me for managing a cast and crew and other independent service providers and product vendors totaling over 70. Diddling around in theater hadn’t taught me the artistic and technical intricacies of putting on a multimedia stage spectacle. And on it went. There was no way I could justify to myself that I was the man for the job.

How did I deal with my lack of qualification? In the end, I didn’t. I didn’t pursue my Big Idea because I could, I did it because I was called – because when no one else wanted the job, it was up to me or I was going to have to let the whole crazy idea go. And I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. It had its hooks in me too deeply. So I accepted the impossible mission.

That’s what we do when inspiration gets its hooks in us. There will be all sorts of sound and well-educated reasons for doing the thing we feel inspired to do – or not – but in the end none of them can explain that initial moment of inspiration when we see and hear and feel that thing that moves our hearts so much we just have to give it a try.

If that’s not a calling, it’ll do until the real thing comes along.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series of job search and career transition articles. Click here to read Part 1.

A former Marine drill sergeant once told me how they “greeted” new recruits – stomping into their barracks at 3:00 a.m., shouting and cracking whips. “I guess you could say we gave them a wake up call,” he chuckled. Then he got serious. “They needed to know right away that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Otherwise they weren’t going to survive boot camp, let alone the kind of combat we send them into.”

Wake up calls jolt us into a present, unpleasant reality. They leave us disoriented, lost, afraid. They create tension, discomfort, dissonance. They ask us to take an unflinching look at what’s uncomfortable in our world – what’s making us unhappy, what we’d like to change. And not just what’s in our world, but what’s in us.

Lots of people have gotten nasty wake up calls the past few years:  the tough economy, job loss, business failure, downsizing, foreclosure, bankruptcy. Sometimes wake up calls aren’t so harsh, but come more subtly, from inside – a restless longing to pursue a dream, a resolve to reinvent ourselves in midlife, or a vague sense that all is not well in our world.

How wake up calls come to us ultimately isn’t important. What’s important is how we deal with them. It takes courage to wake up. It takes more courage to stay awake, and get moving in the direction of the change we want to see. There are always an overwhelming number of good reasons not to change – which is why most of use go right on living our lives of quiet desperation.

And to make it worse, our dreams just won’t leave us alone. They keep coming back – a nudge, an invitation, a crazy idea. Each time is more forceful than the last. If we keep putting them off, next time the wake up call might come drill sergeant style.

Just be warned, that’s all.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three part series of job search and career transition articles. Click here to read Part 2.

Change starts with inspiration. Inspiration ignites us. It is both fuel and fire, the match that strikes and the blaze that bursts. Inspiration makes the impossible possible. Without inspiration, we’d never change or create anything.

At the core of inspiration is this one idea: something else is possible . . . and because it is, everything must move aside to make room for it. No, more than that – everything else must become new.

Inspiration invades our numbed lives, overwhelms our defenses. It disconnects our habitual sense of what is normal and possible, detaches our allegiances to status quo. One minute we have an ironclad case for The Way Things Are; the next we’re tearing it down. One minute we’re drifting and purposeless; the next we have a cause to throw down for.

Inspiration is our beginning. It is also our destination – the shining new reality we will inhabit when our idea unites with our hope and takes shape in our lives. What we see and think and feel when inspiration greets us is what we’ll see and think and feel on that grand and glorious day when we finally arrive where inspiration calls us to go.

Sometimes, inspiration comes with visions of glory. When it does, it thrills us with new passions and possibilities, shocks our unused neural pathways into unaccustomed life. It shakes us awake in the dead of night, urges us to our feet and outside to gaze into deep space. It plays a new tune on a new instrument, until our long submerged essence resonates with a new boldness, stunned at the robustness of its own long-silenced voice.

Inspiration awakens us to glory days we live with abandon. We revel in their freedom, joy, and passion. They are the days of newness and discovery, celebration and vigor – the days of wildness and courage and daring, the sweeping dive of new love, the dizzy freshness of everything that’s good about life.

At other times, inspiration isn’t so kind or so pretty. [to be continued]