Career Strategies for High Performers Who Want a Life
Leadership / CEO / Career Strategies
Date Published: January 25, 2021
Publisher: Elite Online Publishing
You’re a high performer who wants a career on your own terms. Maybe you’re exploring the next, best step. Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you want more. No matter where you are right now, you need options. When you have options, you’re in control. You make decisions from a position of strength. You run to something, not from something.
Options are Power provides strategies for surrounding yourself with options. You’ll learn to lead with a Me-Suite mindset, cultivating the role you want work to play in your life.
You’ll create a life in which:
● your personal core values drive decisions
● your priorities are clear
● you’re staying fresh and relevant for the future you want to have
With options, you’ll always have the right, not the obligation, to make a change.
My life mission is to help career-driven, life-minded individuals surround themselves with options.
Options are power. Let’s get in there.
EXCERPT
CULTIVATE THE ROLE YOU WANT WORK TO PLAY IN YOUR LIFE OPTIONS ARE POWER
Lying atop a marginally comfortable bed in a Seattle hotel, wearing my Cornell sweatpants and allowing my laptop to live up to its name, I took a sip of the second nightly gin and tonic on the side table and ignored the TV as it blabbered some background local news. I had about three more hours of work to do for a client, and I was determined to finish before midnight. At seven p.m. on that fateful July night in 2010, my phone rang. It was Mom.
“Hi, shug. I have some troubling news,” she said. “Your dad is having a heart attack.” My mom was the leader of a high-pressure hospital laboratory. She had never been one to beat around the bush, but this level of bluntness was unusual, even for her.
“What? Is he okay?” I asked, not sure what else to say. As soon as I spoke the words, I realized how ridiculous they were. Of course he wasn’t okay.
“He’s in the hospital,” she said.
My mind raced with options to address the issue at hand. I’m a natural problem solver, so I immediately went into fixer mode. “Do I need to come home?”
“Well, I know you’re so busy,” Mom replied empathetically, not actually answering my question. But the concern in her voice spoke for her. She needed me to be there.
“Let me check flights. I’m coming home.”
The red-eye from Seattle to Birmingham via Atlanta allowed plenty of thinking time, maybe too much time. Not knowing whether my father would be alive on the other side, I checked my watch at least a dozen times during what seemed to be the longest flight I’d ever experienced from one coast to the other. I’ve since flown to South Africa and to Asia multiple times, both considerably more flight time than this one. Yet, that flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, with my dad’s life in limbo, remains the longest flight I’ve ever taken.
Seated in an exit-row window, I listened as the pilots whispered updates. The flight attendants walked slowly through the aisle, in the dark, without the cart, scanning to make eye contact with anyone who might be awake. Back then, there wasn’t Wi-Fi on planes, so red-eye flights were really dark and quiet. With sleep an impossibility for me, given the circumstances surrounding my trip, I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, suspecting I’d start crying. Despite my efforts, I unintentionally caught a flight attendant’s eyes as she passed my row.
“Can I get you anything, hon?”
Ugh! Too late to pretend my eyes are closed. “How about the snack box?” I mouthed this more than spoke it, making a square in the air with my fingers. She handed me the box I knew well from months flying this route. Oreos, cheese spread and crackers, and a mint. I stared out the window to the light at the end of the wing. It was following me like a personal moon. Helplessly, I wondered what was happening on the ground at UAB Medical Center. Was my father asking for me? Was he scared? I tried to recall the last thing I said to him. I knew it had been something pleasant. Our relationship was great, and I was grateful for that fact. But what had we last talked about? I couldn’t remember. I wanted so badly to be there for him and Mom. If this was his last day, he’d be proud of his principled life and the family he had prioritized.
In contrast, I thought: If this plane goes down and it’s my last day, I’ll be disappointed at best. If someone speaks at my funeral about my amazing abilities to build a merger integration playbook, I’m gonna be pissed. I’ll be dead, of course, but I’ll also be pissed. In that moment, the reality of the life I had created reared its less-than-attractive head. I was doing everything in my power to get promoted as fast as I could. Work was working well. I was getting prime projects, accelerated promotions, high-profile task-force appointments. But on other dimensions, I wasn’t doing so well. I’d gained about thirty pounds living on the road. My friendships were staler than rice cakes and just as bland. My husband saw me only two full days a week, and we spent much of that time together with our two friends, gin and tonic. My finances were fine, day to day, but not purposeful. I had quiet time in the air that night to think about my life.
The companies I most admired—Nike, Tesla, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, Starbucks, Patagonia—all had core values that steered behavior, that took a stand, that created the future they wanted. I respected that. At the same time, like all high performers, these companies fell short of those core values from time to time. Whether due to an employee mix-up, the ill-spoken words of the CEO or board chair, faulty machinery, outdated processes, or some other faux pas, they screwed up. Only for them, the mess-ups landed front and center atop the headlines for the daily news rundown. Although not perfect, they had a clear North Star for quick course correction. Why don’t I have this steerage for my own life? What are my core values? How do my core values guide decisions for the future I want to live in?
That red-eye flight was my moment that mattered. The moment I decided there is no work-life seesaw to balance. There is only my life, and all decisions I make, including those about work, must be in service of the life I want to live, not in balance with it.
Dad survived a widow-maker procedure while I was hurling at 35,000 feet with five hours of stress. Literally hurling. As a twomillion-miler, my barf bag was typically used for stale chewing gum and trash, but this remains the only flight when I actually used the barf bag for barf.
When I entered his recovery room, Dad said, with a tired smile, “You didn’t need to make this trip, doll. I know you’re so busy.”
Strange, I thought. That’s the same thing Mom said. Is that what my parents know most about me, that I’m busy? In that moment, I decided no one I love would ever again feel I was too busy to show up. I decided I would make my career serve the life I wanted to live. Work would work for me. I also decided I didn’t care too much for Oreos anymore
About the Author
Donna Peters is an executive coach, speaker, and author. As Founder of The Me-Suite, Peters helps career-driven professionals shape the life they want to live.
Formerly a senior partner in management consulting, Peters hosts The Me-Suite podcast, 2021 finalist for Best Business Podcast. She is faculty for the Executive MBA program at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and certified through the International Coaching Federation.
Peters holds an MBA with distinction from Cornell’s Johnson School, an MFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a BA from Davidson College.
Options along Peters’ journey have also included acting professionally, co-owning a restaurant, and teaching English in South Korea. She’s visited 45+ countries, lifts weights, and gardens with heirloom seeds.
Peters’ core values are curiosity, freedom, and respect.
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