DEAR BECCA: corporate apathy is draining my life force
Dear Becca,
After product management and product leadership roles in startup, growth, and now larger enterprise tech companies, I’m feeling detached from my work.
Corporate politics, arbitrary promotions, lack of fairness, and general thrash from company leadership has made me feel worse at my job— whereas I used to feel confident and excited to grow.
I’ve lost my confidence that I’m a kick ass product leader (I used to feel that I was!) and I’m not sure what my next move is.
I felt more engaged and empowered working in smaller tech companies where I had more ownership. Is this just how all big public tech companies work?
I’m a great creator, manager, and product leader but I’m a sh*t corporate politico. I am getting strong performance reviews, but not getting promoted. Now I don’t care if I get promoted… too many moving goalposts and I don’t want to be tricked into chasing the carrot again only to get unclear reasons why the promotion case wasn’t successful.
Midlife crisis? Corporate blues? Champagne problems?
I used to feel excitement doing my job, now I feel frustrated — held back by layers of management that often don’t have more years of experience or skill than I do.
I used to love the work of product management, but now political maneuvering seems to be the skill I need to focus on even more than the product work… and it feels draining that being great at my job isn’t enough.
How do I get my mojo back? Do I even want to be promoted in corporate? What are my career options from here?
- corporate doldrums
Dear corporate doldrums,
LOL WAIT, TRADING YOUR TIME FOR MONEY DOESN’T CAUSE YOU TO OVERFLOW WITH JOY AND PURPOSE? WEIRDDDDD.
But, in all seriousness–the pain of releasing a way of life you have known so intimately, for so long, is intense.
When you grow up receiving praise for following the rules–getting the straight A’s, going to the good college, landing a job with tons of caché–your entire nervous system becomes tuned to the feedback loops that exist outside of you.
It’s not that you were being inauthentic, all those years that you enjoyed the work. Indeed, an essential aspect of you (the “precocious child” who knows exactly how to garner acceptance, praise, and love by controlling outcomes and achieving at a high level) was calling most of the shots, and the results were satisfying enough to the other aspects of your soul–so you kept at it.
But the truth of the matter is this: nothing about your work environment has changed.
You have always tolerated less-than-competent leadership.
Unfairness is a cornerstone of capitalism.
Arbitrary promotions were happening all around you; in fact, some of your own may have been arbitrary.
You’ve had success cultivating influence and cutting deals and managing key relationships (often called “politics”).
No; all that is the same as ever.
You are what’s changed.
A new aspect of your essential self has reached maturity.
And this part of you–unlike the aforementioned precocious child–is no longer satisfied with checking the boxes and following the carrot.
This part of you has a hunger, an unpredictability, a wildness that probably feels very dangerous to certain other parts of you.
Hence the feeling of “stuckness”--why leap off a cliff, when you know how to make great money at the job you’ve always done?
To be sure, when your role is more focused on management, there’s more negotiating, advocating, and influencing to do. And, in our late-capitalist work culture, rising fast in the senior ranks usually entails saying “yes” to whoever is at the top, and causing as little friction as possible for their vision.
But alas, this emergent aspect of you has ZERO interest in checking that corporate box.
And let me save you 6 months of strife: if you try to interview for new jobs before reckoning with how you’ve changed, it’s not going to go well–your disinterest will be impossible to hide, unless you fully abandon yourself in service of the status quo.
This new part of you is using emotions–boredom, disenchantment, sadness–to signal you, saying loud and clear: LISTEN TO ME. WE WERE BORN FOR MAGIC. IT’S TIME TO FLY.
For this new aspect of you–let’s work towards a name for her–there is only one option, and it is imperative:
Create. Create. Create.
When we are inventing something altogether new, no longer asking the past to dictate what is possible in the future, envisioning what’s next using nothing but the sheer force of our imagination? There is no ground beneath our feet.
No rules. No historical data. No parameters aside from the ones we alchemize. All we have is our desires, and our intuition.
To be a true original, an inventor of the future, a wizardress–it means disregarding EVERYTHING you think you know “from experience” or “based on what you’ve seen others do” or “about what is supposed to happen”.
It means taking every step without any guarantee that the ground will rise to meet your feet. You move with total faith that you’ll be supported, not based on logic, but just because.
Because you trust yourself. You trust the art. You trust your intuition. You trust that you’ll always get the support that matters most.
This faith turns nothing, into something.
That trust alchemizes space, into matter.
So. You know you’re being called to the edge of the cliff. What does it look like to go from here, to soaring in the heavens?
First, spend some serious time getting to know this new aspect of you. Try writing in two different voices: first, the voice that was totally happy in your product roles until recently. What is she optimizing for? What are her fears? Notice the feelings that come up as you channel her.
Then, channel this wild woman artist witch who’s been trying to introduce herself to you–what is her backstory? What are her foils? What are her gifts? Where does she want you to be spending your time? With whom? How does she want to feel? What does she value most? What conditions help her thrive?
If getting in touch with her feels hard, scary or confusing, don’t stress–your body is just reacting to what feels like a big, dangerous change.
Then, work through any resistance to this aspect of you by finding activities that reliably put you in flow: dance, painting, singing, running, yoga, music. These activities are inherently creative; your body will start to feel a little more at ease with the creative act, the more you practice.
This practice of flow will pull into focus the answers to some natural questions, with this new part of you in the driver’s seat:
What do I like?
What lights me up?
For what do I hunger?
What do I want to learn next?
How shall I spend my time?
How am I living my values every day?
Let the answers flow, without “buts” or “shoulds” in response to them. Write them down.
The amazing thing about having product experience is that you can productize anything, once you dial in your genuine curiosity and full-body engagement on a topic.
Trust me, if I can make a multi-six figure business out of hanging out with my friends talking about feelings, you can backwards engineer a revenue plan for whatever you’re into.
Third, (as a parallel process) you’ll leverage your community of people who love you and “get” you, sharing the answers to the above questions every chance you get.
Start now, scheduling at least one coffee date a week with someone you trust and are excited to catch up with. There’s no agenda or “outcome”, other than sharing what’s going on with you and connecting with them ( you can leave out sensitive work-related details, if necessary). They will be the mirrors you need for you to get excited about you.
This process of systematic connection is about generating an electrical current in your life, and I don’t know any other way to do it. Get out of your head and out of your house. Talk to the humans. Start with people who you don’t have to perform for; it doesn’t matter if they aren’t a *~linchpin of the tech community~* *eyeroll*.
As you move forward with talking about how you want to feel and how you want to spend your time, unconstrained by “having the correct answer,” you’ll pick up speed, gain clarity, and a firmer sense of who you’re becoming will begin to emerge.
You’ll start asking the people you talk to about more specific topics, introductions, and feedback.
Eventually, opportunities will begin to blossom in front of you like wild roses.
Some will be corporate jobs tailor-made for you. Some will be consulting opportunities that make your brain tingle. You may decide that you want to invent a job or a business that has never existed before in the history of humans. Only one way to find out.
Trying to predetermine “what the market wants” is like an artist trying to determine how much a piece will sell for, before they begin. It robs the process of soul, and cuts you off from your intuition about what the right answer is FOR YOU.
This process of a) getting to know yourself and c) sharing yourself acts directly on both you AND the opportunity you’ll end up taking. Both you and your future are being cultivated in real time.
Remember, your inner creator doesn’t care what you think you’re deciding right now; only that she gets her time in the sun, creating.
Lastly: I’ll be blunt because it’s what you already know. You’re going to quit this job, on your own timeline.
There’s no rush. Make sure your finances are in order for 6-12 months of discovery. Don’t do it without a counselor or guide; our withdrawal from the amphetamine of corporate life can be literally life-threatening, and other aspects of you will chime in with tired old stories about fear and stability. It’s important to have someone objective on the team.
While you build up your savings, find your sources of flow–and take them as seriously as your job. Starting today, every hour you put in at this day job is INFUSED with purpose–getting you one step closer, one dollar closer, one story of impact closer to taking flight.
Congratulations–you have begun the ceremony of your transition to who you’re becoming.
When a caterpillar goes into its pupae, it dissolves into a liquid concoction of cells in the process of reconstituting themselves. Just like that divine programming, the answer for what career options exist is inside you.
Your inner precocious child is going to have some feelings about this interstitial chaos. It would be weird if she didn’t, right? But you can reassure her: she is not going anywhere; she still has deep wisdom to share, and value to offer. But she’s been on stage for a long time now, and a new player is in the spotlight.
Lean into the discomfort as it cultivates you, get to know the voices in your head, talk to your people and share what’s going on within you, embrace the uncertainty and let it change you.
You are already on the path; it’s unfolding as you walk it, one step at a time.
__________
I’m Becca Camp, successful solopreneur, coach and mentor to overachieving artsy weirdos.
Follow me on LinkedIn for more frequent how-to instructionals on how to build a lifestyle business, spiritual musings, and subversive humor.