We'll See

"Such bad luck," said the villagers when a farmer's horse ran away.

"We'll see," replied the farmer.

When his horse returned with three other wild horses, they exclaimed "How wonderful!"

"We'll see," he said.

Then his son was thrown while trying to ride one of the untamed horses and broke his leg, The villagers, of course, offered their sympathy.

"We'll see," said the farmer.

Because of his broken leg, the son was passed by when military officials came to draft young men into the army.

Responding to the villagers' congratulations on his good fortune, the farmer replied, "We'll see."

This Taoist tale came to mind when one of my clients expressed frustration with the lack of growth in his business. "I might have to get a job," he said. "Horrible!"

His anxieties brought to mind my own concerns early in my career. Seeking a logical solution may be helpful to some, but the failure of logic can be a cue to access your intuition. Maybe you'll only feel a nudge ("Something feels right about this, though I'm not sure why"). I've learned, even with experience that seemed at the time to be a failure, how important it is to keep your vision intact. Here are several examples from my own career: 

After completing my PhD at age 42, I quit the job that had carried me through the final years of graduate school (during a decade of post-divorce single parenting) because I got angry at my boss. I naively thought I could create my own consulting business but barely managed to squeak by for almost nine months and finally reached the point where I couldn't pay the rent. I was getting desperate when a friend called. One of his former students worked for Shillito's Department Store's HR Department, and they were looking for an internal training consultant. The salary was barely a living wage, I regretted having to bypass my vision of independent consulting, but I had no other options.

We'll see.
 
Among other duties at Shillito's, I was responsible for sales training -- a real stretch for me as I was shy and extremely self-conscious in front of a group. During my time there, I also worked on a project for the Director of Executive Development from the parent company Federated Department Stores (FDS), only a block away in downtown Cincinnati. He wanted a project quicky summarized in writing and I was confident about my writing skills so I'd volunteered.

Three years into the Shillito's job, I was offered a job by a friend for twice as much as my current salary, working as an educational consultant with a software technology firm. I left Shillito's feeling somewhat disloyal, but I was barely making ends meet and couldn't turn down the extra income.

We'll see.

Three months after that, out of the blue, the FDS Director whose writing project I'd completed offered me a corporate OD job that again doubled my income. He said internal policies were such that I would not have been a candidate for that job if I hadn't left Shillito's.

In the corporate OD role, I gained experience coaching senior executives in Federated's many retail companies who were being primed for key positions in company leadership. Again, a big stretch for me, not only to overcome my shyness, but learning to deal with the resistance of executives who resented me in my corporate role. Four years later, FDS was bought in a hostile takeover and their OD department eliminated. The severance pay was enough to live on for at least six months, but I had just turned 50 years old, and didn't see any opportunities in my future. 

We'll see.

A week later the Senior Vice President of Human Resources for CSX Corporation hired me as a private consultant for senior executive development in their subsidiary companies. I negotiated a contract with CSX that took me all over the U.S., yet left time to develop other business. I would not have known how to close that deal had I not had the sales training experience. And I'd not have been approached by the CSX HR person except for my work with Federated's executive development methodology, which he'd adopted for his corporation. Again, I would be sent from a corporate office to "help" individual company executives, but I now had the training and experience to quickly develop their trust.

In the early stages of my new career as an organization consultant, a Cincinnati client introduced me to the Enneagram, which he'd learned in a spiritual retreat with Richard Rohr. Fascinated with how this model gave me useful insights into my clients' patterns, I started asking my clients if they'd "barter" a couple of hours with me--I'd work free for two hours if they'd tell me their stories and help me learn the Enneagram in depth.  I eventually taught it to all of them and their teams, taking extensive notes. This was early in the Enneagram's development beyond a small group of seekers, and no one was yet writing about its applications in business settings.

Intrigued by a request for articles on business applications from Clarence Thompson, then editor of The Enneagram Educator, I contacted him, he was interested, and my articles began appearing in The Enneagram Educator. I was exhausted from all the travel required by my coaching business and my second marriage was sinking, so I retired, started a web site, and focused on writing.

We'll see. 

When that marriage ended, I had enough retirement income to live on and was free to move to Florida to be near my family, but I was devastated emotionally and not paying attention to my investments . . . until the high-tech market crash and no more retirement income!

We'll see.

This was a few years after Coach U had become well-known, and the word "coaching" had become part of business vocabulary. In another development that would serve me well, though no effort of my own, other coaches had made coaching by phone a popular option. The Enneagram was also becoming more popular, and now I was one of the few with experience in both coaching and the Enneagram.

Meanwhile, Clarence had not only begun publishing my articles--he'd become a dear friend and eventually my co-author of Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram, the first Enneagram coaching book published. On the strength of our book and riding the waves of Enneagram popularity and phone coaching as an option to extensive travel, I began to build a phone coaching business, even though I was now in my mid-sixties!

I could not have predicted or planned for the wavering trajectory of disappointments and opportunities that fulfilled my vision of having my own business, but on a scale of much greater experience and learning. Nor could I have known that path would eventually lead me into happily coaching by phone with clients all over the world until I was 82 years old.

I'm now in my second year of a diagnosis of autoimmune disease that's attacked my lungs, and living quietly tethered to an oxygen tank, not knowing how long I have to live or what my quality of life will be. 

We'll see.