Author: Elisa Spain

Friedrich Nietzsche’s full quote from 1888, “Out of life’s school of war — What does not kill me makes me stronger.” 

This quote came to mind as I was listening to Henry tell me his story. Perhaps it will resonate for you as well.

Henry grew up in a middle-class home where his parents sacrificed extensively so that he and his sister could “have everything.” He frequently heard them argue about money and decided early on that financial success was critical so as not to experience these same stressors.

School came easy to Henry, at least easy enough that he could coast and get passing grades. After a physical transition (his family moved states) in his early high school years, he had an awakening and realized that he needed to perform if he was going to achieve financial success. He calls this his first transition. He went from “needing to have others recognize and appreciate my abilities to seeing my own value” and went from a C and D student to straight A’s overnight.

Along the way, Henry discovered he had a knack for numbers and finance which led him, not surprisingly, toward a career in investment banking. He hated it.

So, at age 24, he decided to quit. As luck would have it, his dad called at that exact right time and asked if he would come home and start a business. It seemed a win for both of them. He knew his dad needed money for retirement; he could help his dad and escape the job he hated.

Henry became an accidental entrepreneur. The business they chose played well to both of their strengths, and it did well immediately, better than either of them expected. The growth continued, and Henry believed it would continue forever. As is often the case with immediate success, “I became overly confident in my abilities, some might say arrogant. Frankly, in retrospect, I think I was privately even more inflated than I realized.”

Ten years later, at age 34, all at the same time, they lost a large client, a key employee, and discovered they had severe technical issues that required substantial investment. Henry had just bought a new home and had not yet sold the previous one. And if that weren’t enough, a few months later, he learned his mom was seriously ill, and his father took leave to care for her. Suddenly, the wheels were coming off.

“I learned a lot about myself in the process. I was in my early thirties when things started to unravel, and I went from overconfident and feeling firmly in control of my world – to wondering if I had ever been a success. I began to question whether I could achieve again, and I asked myself if my best days were behind me?”

“Less than a year later, I had a full-on anxiety attack. I spent a month and a half in a full stupor. Having watched my birth family struggle financially, I was determined I would not follow that path.”

Upon reflection, perhaps it was that determination that led to the anxiety attack. A strength over-used?

“I went to see a counselor who told me I was going through a personal transformation and that I would come out of it stronger than when I went in. And, while I didn’t believe it at the time, she was right, of course. People who knew me then and know me now tell me they like, the less arrogant, more thoughtful, more mature me.”

“I learned that despite my perceived confidence in myself, I didn’t have all the answers. It was time to ask questions and to pause and listen to other people’s ideas.”

Henry went back to work, and the business recovered. He bought his father out of the business after he had been absent for two years caring for his mother, who had passed. The company did well enough to afford the lifestyle he wanted, yet something seemed to be missing.

Three years ago, after eight years of record growth, Henry began a quest to better understand his drive for a sense of self-worth. At first, he believed that the missing piece was in the business. “Shouldn’t I be doing more, making more?” he asked himself.

In the last few months, after about a year in the You Pivot™ Program, Henry has greater clarity that self-worth doesn’t come from growing a business. Instead, these drivers of self-worth come from being at peace with who you are and from being in service to others, helping them realize their dreams with the realization that it’s okay to fail.

Today, at nearly fifty years old, Henry feels energized and more balanced. He continues to enjoy leading his business and spending time with his family (his top priority). He volunteers with an accelerator, helping other entrepreneurs grow, and has begun building things in his workshop, something he did with his dad in his youth.

Surprisingly, (or perhaps not), along with his personal energy renewal, has come renewed energy in the business. The business had its best January in a long time, and 2021 is on track to be a great year.

Advice For Others

Sometimes we need to be kicked in the face –– to have to get up and look around a bit, drive down a path and see where we are. Transitions can be painful and can take a while. There is no easy fix, no drug to make it faster. You won’t wake up one day with an aha. Instead, we slowly transition and notice retrospectively that it has happened.

Finding ways to give back to others teaches you so much about yourself –– As business people, we often measure our worth in lockstep with the enterprise’s success. Finding a way to give back to others during a transition can help us find self-worth outside of business, career, and financial reward. See Ego Diversification. 

Reach out to others, get a coach, find peers on a similar journey – In my journey, I needed to reach out to a coach, someone I respected, who would tell me the truth and ask me the right questions. As leaders, we may feel weak when seeking advice about ourselves. Everyone is willing to lay themselves bare when seeking counsel for business strategy. Somehow that feels strong, but being vulnerable about ourselves is so much harder.

As leaders, we want to be that strong, capable person. We tell ourselves if I don’t know my direction, how can I have a sense of self-worth? In my experience, it’s when I have felt uncertain that I have benefited the most from reaching out to others and being vulnerable.

After conducting these interviews and writing these YOU PIVOT™ stories for nearly a year now, a common theme for the men I’ve interviewed is a choice to follow Dad’s career path. This choice has worked well for some, reference Flunking Retirement: Marsh’s story of following his dad into the military And for others, like Darnell, not so much.

Darnell’s dad was an engineer at the same company for 43 years. So… Darnell became an engineer.

He realized even before he graduated, that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Darnell knew he was a natural leader and a people person, so he pivoted toward an MBA.

That said, the traditional corporate path was what he knew from his dad, so off he went to a big company. The plan was to “work my way up the ladder, punching the tickets – moving up to responsible positions. My stated goal then was to become president of a company within a company in my 40s”.

Along the way, he realized he is less of a rule follower and that he had his mother’s family genes. She came from a family of entrepreneurs – grandpa started a business in the boom times – followed by a bust. And then another boom. 

“As I reflect on my career, there must have been something about the turnaround, from bust to boom, that caught my attention because everything I’ve ever done has been a turnaround. And, I don’t fit the turnaround stereotype. In my first company turnaround, I was more of a consultant/project manager and observer. From this experience, I learned that if a company is going to survive independently after the turnaround, it has to be about the people, not just the financials. 

One thing that was consistent with the stereotype, every time I got it turned around, I moved on to another adventure. While I was accustomed to moving, having grown up moving every three years, part of me regretted moving on. I wanted to stay around to be part of the growth.”

Darnell got his chance to pivot to a growth company and accepted a position with a German conglomerate. At age 39, he was on a path toward becoming President of a company within a company by age 40. 

It was not to be. 

While moving all the time seemed normal to him, his wife’s experience was the opposite. She lived in the same town all her life and wasn’t keen on raising a family so far from their extended family. They stayed in Germany for a while, but he knew she wasn’t happy being so far from family, and he committed to returning to the U.S. 

While he sometimes wonders what would have been if he had stayed, this spurred his pivot out of corporate and into privately held.  Who Knows What is Good and What is Bad.

He came back to run a failing company. He learned from this position that his knack for turnarounds worked best in a privately held company. His training, combined with his independent nature and leadership abilities, fit best in a private company where politics was not primary. He went on to do three more turnarounds after this one.

Darnell is sixty now and has come full circle. His wife was diagnosed with heart disease two years ago, so time with her is his number one priority. Time to pivot again. His vision is to create a three-legged stool:

1. Family time
2. Investor/advisor in stuck companies, i.e., turnarounds
3. Active philanthropy at the board level with his passion projects 

And, as is often the case, we plan, and life happens. Darnell invested in four small companies, one stalled, one is still trying, one is on-hold, and one… took off.  

Darnell moved from advisor to CEO and is having fun with this role. “I can apply all my experience, all I have learned, without recovering some of the baggage, i.e., the rat race, the emotional need to work more, ego engagement, etc. I still care, but I am not emotionally invested like I once was.”

So what happened to the pivot vision? 

“On the surface, it looks like I just changed jobs. And, my intention is for this to be temporary. I’ve organized my role, my contract, and my compensation to still treat this company as an investment, albeit with a larger role than an advisor. I am giving myself a B on having an exit plan – truth be told, I don’t have a clear path out with a timeline. That said, my 3-legged stool vision is front and center. Every day I am focused on taking actions toward the vision, e.g., hiring key leaders to reach my goal. 

Advice for others

• Have a vision – Always be looking out a year or two ahead of yourself. Life isn’t always going to happen the way you think it will, so at least be thinking about what is next before exiting. It’s essential to think forward, to wrestle with that map continually –write it down and wrestle with it.
• Align your actions with your vision – I’ve designed my three-legged stool such that I can spend as much time as possible with my wife and have other things to keep me distracted. While I am having fun building the team at my current company, I am building ahead for the first time in my career. I am doing this intentionally so I can go when the time is right.
• Make choices that give you the moral high ground – Decide what is important to you and choose accordingly. I am not taking a full salary in my current role to ensure I am treated as, and think like, an investor. This choice gives me the comfort to chose my exit on my terms. 

It’s an interesting coincidence that this month’s interview with Sheila followed last month’s with Marsh. They are both from the same generation, Sheila a bit younger at 75, and both followed similar, very intentional, highly accomplished corporate career paths. And yet, as a woman, perhaps because she is a woman, Sheila’s story and her transitions were quite different from Marsh’s. 

Sheila came from humble beginnings in a small town in England. Her mother aspired to be a social climber, and her idea of success for Sheila was to become a bank teller. While banking became her chosen first career, little did mom know that Sheila would become the first woman business unit president of a Fortune 500 national bank. 

Sheila was the first in her family to attend university after demonstrating she was a star student, taking Calculus at age ten and studying Economics at age thirteen! (perhaps a young genius, which she wouldn’t admit when I asked). She had the intellect and drive to do it all. She played competitive field hockey and tennis, excelled in school, and later after meeting her first husband on the first day of university, marrying and balancing two careers. 

Career #1 was as a teacher, first in high school and then at the college level. And when she was bored after the second year, she enrolled in the London School of Economics to earn her Master’s part-time while teaching full-time. An exciting time especially when her advisors recommended her for a position as an Economic Advisor at the Treasury. Her intention was for government to be her next pivot AND incorporate teaching by teaching civil servants. Instead, she moved to the United States. Her husband was also building his career. His company asked him to move to the US, and he accepted the opportunity with her support. 

So here she was at age 30, always having been intentional about her path, with a significant unplanned pivot – new country, no green card, no job. And she got lucky; she leveraged her economics experience and met a woman who was an international economist. She made some introductions, and Sheila landed a position as an economist with the same bank, where she became the first female business unit president eighteen years later. 

Early in her tenure as president, the Board Chair of one of her clients approached the bank’s CEO, asking if Sheila could serve on his board. Initially, the CEO said no. The Chairman persisted, explaining that this is the best development experience he could give her at this point in her career. The CEO finally said yes, and this experience gave her the kernel of an idea for her next pivot. 

Not one to want to “meet herself on the next lap,” as she described it, after seven years as president, it was time to plan for what would be next. The current CEO was younger than her, so she knew that role wasn’t an option. At age 55, she exited the C-Suite and began her next pivot.  

She quickly added three corporate boards to her portfolio, later becoming the first Non-Executive Chair of one of these companies. And soon after that, she returned to her teaching roots by co-founding a learning institute for C-Suite Executives and high potential women executives. 

Today at 75, Sheila is on to her next pivot. She has begun unwinding her commitments, slowly stepping down from corporate board service, and hiring a CEO to run her founded organization (a non-profit). Instead of contributing one-to-many, she is coaching one-to-one, working with CEOs as they navigate key issues in the board room. 

Following is Sheila’s advice to others planning a pivot:

• Take the boat off the dock. Until you do, you have no idea what is out there. At the same time, don’t let your confidence blind you. I did a terrible job of risk mitigation when I moved to the US. It worked out, but I was unprepared for the challenges I would face. I was overconfident. 
• As demonstrated in Marsh’s story Flunking Retirement, even today, it is easier for men to navigate without mentors and sponsors. As a woman, I believe I would not have been able to pivot without sponsors and mentors. Be sure and access your network and leverage it. 
• Learn ethical pragmatism. Be mindful of your standards/ethics, but don’t crucify yourself. Remember, there are times when it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right. Many times throughout my career, I tolerated people in my organization that I would not choose as friends. On the other hand, I once resigned from a board because I felt the CEO was not acting in the shareholders’ best interests. In this case, I could not be effective in changing the outcome, but I could be right. It’s a delicate dance that we each must undertake.