Like many who switch careers, Susan’s transition brought her back to her starting point: working full-time for a top consultancy.

Yet her professional life—the way she does her work, the way she relates to coworkers and employers, and the way she balances her personal and professional life—has changed because of what she learned along the way. Making a career move is a chance to make fundamental changes in one’s life. Many people, like Susan, have long-held dreams about their careers but for one reason or another—including financial, family, or social pressures—have put them off. In some cases, like Susan’s, the issue is less the substance of the work than the lack of flexibility of the institutional structure in which the work gets done. In other cases, a person may have dreamed of becoming a writer, musician, or entrepreneur, but the practicalities of life were constraining. Still other people experience the deeper problem as an issue of authenticity, finding themselves caught in work situations that ask them to suppress too much of who they are in order to fit in. Whatever the cause, a time comes when long-ignored values, priorities, and passions reassert themselves—or the inconsistencies in our lives grow too blatant to ignore.

Elizabeth McKenna, who wrote about the life and career changes of women struggling to balance work and personal life, tells a parable about a woman swimming across a lake with a rock in her hand. As the woman neared the center of the lake, she started to sink from the weight of the stone. People watching from the shore urged her to drop the rock, but she kept swimming, sinking more and more. To the gathering crowd, the solution was obvious. Their “drop the rock” chorus grew louder and louder with her increasing difficulty staying afloat. But all their yelling did little good. As she sank, they heard her say, “I can’t. It’s mine.”^[3]

McKenna uses this story of a drowning woman to illustrate how stubbornly we can hold ourselves back. Susan, in fact, had many “rocks.” One was her definition of a good job and, therefore, a good career move, what she called the “relentless logic of a post-M.B.A. CV.” That rock was made heavier by her ambivalent feelings about sacrificing her ambition in order to be a better parent. Another rock was her fear of not having enough money, an understandable but untested fear. Although she knew what deep change she sought—better balance, greater meaning—when a job came up that allowed her to hold on to the rocks, she convinced herself that it was a good move.

Dropping our long-held assumptions, however, is not a simple matter of letting go once and for all. We are usually dealing with a mixed bag of preferences, priorities, and habits, some that we should hold on to and others we should jettison. When she first left her old job, Susan assumed that the problem was in the nature of consulting and not in her own attitudes and behavior. As she gained experience with new ways of working, she also learned new information about herself and eventually came to a more measured appraisal of the personal needs that triggered her desire for change in the first place.

Experience reveals barriers to change that we can rarely identify at the outset of a career transition, no matter how much selfreflection we do. What we see as feasible and appealing is always constrained by the limitations of our experience. Susan’s story is not only about discovering a true passion for her work and a more balanced lifestyle. It is also about unlearning the assumptions that lead to the “next logical” and absolutely wrong move—in her case, untested assumptions about what kind of work produces a good income and what kind of job allows work-life balance. Dan McIvy’s story below illustrates that as we explore possibilities, we start to recognize, question, and eventually dismantle some of the basic operating principles that are at the foundation of our working identities: what kinds of relationships we develop with the institutions in which we work and with our colleagues, and what kind of balance we strike between our private and professional lives.