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"The 8 Myths of
Making a Living...
and the Truth of
Making a Life"
By Mary Lyn Miller

Getting Clear About Your Life & Work

Time For Change:

Mary Lyn Miller, founder of The Life & Career Clinic in Manhattan Beach, offers some basic steps to begin the search for a more satisfying career.

	Evaluate what it is that you enjoy, what you really love doing in life. A common mistake is to look only at your career. Hobbies, recreational activities and natural talents can be incorporated into a new career.
	If your life involved doing more than one thing you cared about, how would that change your lifestyle? If your life is very structured, maybe more flexibility is in order, or vice versa.
	Think about what you would regret not having done at the end of your life and start doing it.
	Expand your concept of what a career is about. Maybe it's not just about one job, 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. Maybe its a combination of things like consulting, a creative activity and part-time work.
	Money is meant to enhance the quality of life, not replace it. So don't focus on money first, focus on quality. If a new job offers less money, that doesn't mean you're unsuccessful.
	Expect fear. Any change forces you out of your comfort zone and fear is an important part of that transition.
	Go slowly. Finding a new career is a process that may take many attempts.
	Don't try to do it alone. Help from counselors can offer a fresh perspective. You may have preconceived ideas about what your career should be.

It would have been understandable if Jim Micali's friends were somewhat jealous of him.

By the time the Manhattan Beach resident was 29, he had masters degrees in engineering and business administration from Stanford and UCLA. Micali had been a high-tech engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rockwell International. And he was president of two successful manufacturing firms he had turned around as a business consultant.

Status-wise and money-wise he was doing quite well. What a success and at such a young age, his friends certainly thought. How happy he must be.

"I remember being in the president's position and going to work and dreading it - I was there, I was there early and I was going crazy because it meant nothing to me," said Micali, now 36. "I thought something was wrong with me. I had everything that everybody thought was great, but I couldn't imagine doing it."

On the outside, Micali was doing wonderfully. On the inside, however, something was missing.

Like many career-minded folks, Micali had come to the startling discovery that his job was not his life, that he felt unfulfilled. And like a growing number of his disenchanted counterparts, he decided it was time for a change.

"In hindsight, I'm pretty certain my priorities had been job status and money," he said. "What the industry was, what I was doing, didn't come into the picture."

Micali visited Mary Lyn Miller, founder of The Life & Career Clinic of Manhattan Beach. Miller helps clients determine what is really meaningful to them both personally and professionally.

"As a guy from New York, talking about doing what you love, finding what you're passionate about, what you need in your life - as opposed to what external professionals say you need - was foreign," Micali said. "It took me awhile to understand."

Micali's latent interests proved to be creativity and artistic expression, a far cry from his analytical path.

These days, Micali still earns a nice living in the business world, but as a private consultant, training corporate clients to operate more efficiently on their own, without his long-term assistance. Through a joint venture, Service Dimensions Inc., he has worked with such clients as Yamaha Corp., First American National Bank and the Atlanta-based Suntrust National Bank.

"I'm an educator, a motivator, a teacher," Micali said. "Before, I had a negative taste in my mouth about consulting. Now I'm helping them work through the problem. That's much more rewarding. As they learn, you see the light bulb go on. I feel like I'm doing something."

But private consulting - working largely out of his home-office - was only part of the solution for Micali. The acrylic paintings, the life drawing and the brightly colored, homemade tables decorating his house are just as important.

One of Micali's clients was the Brentwood Art Center. While he did some consultant work there, he took some classes. Much of his own art now hangs in the home he owns with his chemist wife, and he has sold several other pieces.

As other outlets, Micali does public speaking and business development for The Life & Career Clinic, and he took up swing and salsa dancing as well as improvisational comedy.

"That experience of passion, when I'm in the moment, I find most often when I'm speaking or creating some form of art, whether physical or traditional or my furniture," he said. "And I'm making more money now doing three different things."

The New York-based Trends Research Institute, which tracks national trends, calls the move "downshifting," diverting off the fast-paced, high-pressure career track. It's a movement that has been on the rise for the past five years, spurred on by disillusioned baby boomers, but rampant across the board.

Consultant Miller said there are several reasons why Micali and others are looking for mid-career change.

"Corporate life has changed," Miller said. "No longer is there a promise (from business) of cradle to grave support, so the loyalty factor has been reduced a lot. People are becoming independent, realizing they can no longer depend on a job to take care of them."

The less workers can depend on a single job for a lifetime of support, she said, the more likely they are to go ahead and do something they enjoy.

"Our parents were in an era, especially a lot of us with Depression parents, of you get a job, get stability, get some money coming in," Miller said. "So we'd go into a job like accounting, whether we liked it or not. We excelled at whatever we did and then we just hit a wall. We're paying our bills, but we're not getting ahead. If you're not happy, you're not getting ahead."

Judith Sommerstein, a career counselor with offices in Torrance and Brentwood, said many successful corporate employees simply shift priorities.

"Some of them are in their midlife and are choosing to go entrepreneurial, have a home-based business," she said. "Or they chose a business that's completely different to get out of the stress. I don't see it as much with young people, but I see it for people 35 on up, all the way to 80."

Sommerstein cites examples of lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals in successful, high-paying jobs, whom she has helped through career shifts.

"I've had attorneys I've worked with who really wanted to get out of what they felt was the rat race and have gone into completely different careers," she said. "Some have gone into nonprofit careers, some into teaching, some into business for themselves."

For Heather Backstrom of Harbor City, the idea of spending more time doing community service work was the appeal of the downshift.

Backstrom, 35, had worked almost nine years in the human resources department of the Toyota Motor Credit Corp. in Torrance. Last April she decided to dedicate her life more to social service causes.

Not that she wasn't already very involved in them.

"I've done volunteer work practically my whole life. I've volunteered for the South Bay Free Clinic, the Wellness Community, AIDS Project L.A., the All Peoples Christian Center in South Central Los Angeles," said Backstrom, who was named Toyota Motor Credit's national volunteer of the year in 1997.

"I got such a sense of personal satisfaction, I wanted to extend that to my full-time job," she said. "When I started my job search, I purposely only looked for jobs in social service-type organizations."

While searching, she took some consulting assignments - developing a needs assessment for the San Pedro YMCA and compiling an annual report for the Boys & Girls Club of Long Beach. It didn't take long, though, for her to land a job as human resources coordinator for the Beach Cities Health District, a Redondo Beach public agency.

"Salary was definitely less of a priority to me than what the fulfillment from a job would mean and the satisfaction of the job," Backstrom said. "Personal job satisfaction has shot up tremendously. There's no comparison, working for an organization that serves the community and whose sole purpose is to promote health and well-being."

As with Backstrom, income became less of a priority than job satisfaction for another L&CC client, John Barksdale of Hermosa Beach.

For seven years, Barksdale, 35, had been working for the Paine and Associates public relations agency. He had been commuting weekdays from his South Bay home to offices in Costa Mesa and Beverly Hills and was getting tired of it.

"I calculated that I spent four months, three weeks and two days just commuting - that's what really stuck with me the most," he said. "And I was putting in 50- to 60-hour work weeks."

Barksdale figured his time could be better spent, so at the end of 1998 he quit the agency job and started his own home-based public relations business, the Barksdale Group, with his wife, Paula.

As a result, he said, he has a lot more time to spend with his family, which now includes three-month-old daughter Elizabeth.

"I save two hours a day in commuting," he said. "I have tried to structure my week to take on 30 hours of work. It's just been great to be able to be home since my daughter has arrived. Whenever I want to, I can pop out for five minutes and say hi to her and then go back to work.

For Mona Hanna, 38, a crisis intervention counselor at the Richstone Family Center in Hawthorne and a high school counselor, it wasn't so much the time spent working as it was the importance of the work.

Hanna had been employed at a Los Angeles telecommunications company, moving up the corporate ladder quickly. But after six years there she got burned out. As the company prepared to relocate to Texas, she left.

At that point, Hanna and her brother-in-law went into business together, starting a beverage distribution service and building it into a $3 million a year operation. But again, after six years, Hanna said she was burned out.

"I graduated from UCLA in 1985 with a degree in psychology and the goal was to continue with that," she said. "When I started burning out I thought OK, it was time to start fulfilling my passion, money was not an issue anymore," Hanna said. "In the back of my mind I always felt guilty that I wasn't being true to myself, I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing since the age of 12."

Hanna would make far less money as a counselor, she said, but she had invested wisely and income was a low priority.

"I work with a very difficult population in the Centinela Valley Union High School District - (children contemplating) suicide, child abuse, depression - the really needy," said Hanna, of West Los Angeles, "It's extremely fulfilling, painful and real."

Hanna said she sometimes misses the corporate lifestyle, but the feeling doesn't last long.

"Sometimes I miss the challenge and the competition, having to rely on myself to make the dollar," she said. "That feeling I could beat somebody's quote, get the customer, the thrill of getting what I want, the thrill of the hunt - sometimes I miss it, but good riddance," she said.

"When I'm ready to go and I'm on my deathbed, I'll be able to look back and say I did good. It's selfish, because I'm living my dream. This is what makes me happy."

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