Who’s driving your car?
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A couple of years ago, I took a sharp right turn in my career. I walked away from the operator/COO path I’d spent years building — the jobs I was good at and known for — because they no longer brought me joy.
The strangest part was realizing that whole categories of roles now fell into a painful new box: “things I’m great at but don’t love.” [I wrote more about the Venn Diagrams below in a post about how to choose your next job.]
Those jobs are extra tricky because you know you’d succeed in them. Other people would think they’re impressive. But deep down, you feel nothing.
That realization left me uneasy and stuck.
Anyway, this right turn I took — away from the thing I knew how to do and the thing for which other people knew me — has been a really winding and complicated journey. There have been many times when I’ve wanted to run screaming back to the old path — to go back to what seems familiar and easy, a path that other people more easily recognize.
About a year and half in to this journey I was feeling very uneasy — lost, confused, unfulfilled in some ways, and just generally stuck. I realized I needed new help, and I eventually got connected to a coach named Vanda Marlow, who specializes in many things, but significantly for me, she loves working with women in the middle of their lives who are grappling with their relationship to their career and work.
Vanda and I discussed many things as we worked together over a year and a half — including how to say no to things, time, money, art, creativity, and much more. One of the greatest gifts she gave me was a metaphor. This metaphor has lodged itself so deeply in my brain that I now use it regularly.
This metaphor arose when we were discussing who to listen to when making a decision. I’m not talking about which friends, but rather, which parts of myself to listen to. I don’t have many work regrets, but the ones I do have come entirely from moments when I listened to the wrong part of myself when making a decision or engaging in work. It can be a very confusing experience — disorienting, I’d say — to realize that there are parts of yourself that will guide you in the wrong direction if you let them have too loud a voice.
Ok, so this metaphor comes from the world of Voice Dialogue, which is a deep, sophisticated field related to IFS, so anyone who has done either will recognize this. As I’ve done lots of work like this over my life, I’ve realized that one of the most important things is how to make the work memorable. The way Vanda explained this concept to me made it instantly accessible to my weird brain.
She told me to picture my inner voices like people in a car.
Some are in the front seat, driving or navigating.
Some are in the back seat, along for the ride.
Some are shoved in the trunk, muffled and forgotten.
Vanda asked me simple, powerful questions like:
Who is driving your car and why?
Who else has a loud voice and is in the front seat?
Who did you stuff in the trunk? Why are they there?
What would happen if you took them out of the trunk and put them in the driver’s seat?
Those questions led to really valuable work, like:
Taking people/voices out of the trunk and asking how they ended up there.
Having direct conversations with whoever’s in the front seat — especially the ones gripping the steering wheel — and figuring out what it would take for them to loosen their hold.
Two examples from my own life made me realize how career-defining this work can be.
Someone in the Trunk: My Creative Self
When she asked me who was in the trunk, the first person who popped out was my Creative Self. For those of you who don’t know me, I have a VERY creative brother who is two years older than me. He is both creative (and has always been) and charismatic (don’t tell him I said that). Unsurprisingly, for anyone with close siblings, I have defined parts of myself in relation to him. In high school, Will acted in plays and eventually directed them; I was the stage manager. He’s an incredible creative writer and now writes movies and TV shows; I am a practical writer — great at describing things to people for practical purposes, but not creative — certainly not creative. That relationship pretty much defined my creative identity.
So, Vanda and I took my Creative Self out of the trunk and had a whole conversation with it, and then put it in the driver’s seat. It has become a mission of mine over the last three years to let my Creative Self drive the car — and to use the word creative when I talk about myself and what I’m good at.
Someone in the Front Seat: My Achiever Self
My Achiever Self has been in the driver’s seat for most of my career. It got me promotions, big jobs, and impossible opportunities. It knows how to push, how to strive, how to keep going, how to adapt. It definitely comes from my family biography, and I think it was a huge part of what made me successful in my 20s and 30s — someone desperate to prove herself as “good at work”, to be recognized as “good” on the basis of what she contributed.
Very interestingly, this voice has served me less and less well over the last 10 years. In fact, I’d argue that it’s helped me make some bad choices — ones I regret — where I chose achievement over happiness, things that would make people think I was cool over things that would actually make me excited to go to work.
I do think the work of the last couple of years has been wrestling with my Achiever Self and letting other parts of me drive. And one thing I’ve learned is that it is not work you do once and are done, but rather a muscle you develop. There are moments when my Achiever Self pops off or jumps in the driver’s seat, and I’m building a set of tools that help me recognize when that is happening, acknowledge why it’s happening, and help that version of me gently let go of the steering wheel.
If this metaphor is helpful to you, here’s what to think about:
We are all in a car full of voices — a car full of people created by our journey in life.
Some we over-rely on.
Some we’ve silenced.
Some we’ve never even invited inside.
Every transition is a chance to ask:
Who’s driving right now?
Who needs to ride shotgun?
Who have I left in the trunk for too long?
For me, letting my Creative Self take the wheel and asking my Achiever Self to ride shotgun, or even take a back seat, has made this next chapter harder and scarier, but also it’s the most professional fun I’ve had in years.
And that’s the point: you can’t steer toward a new chapter if the wrong voice is gripping the wheel. But when the right one drives, even a winding, uncertain road can feel like the right turn.
So good! Thank you.
Inspiring!!