CHANGE@WORK
Other Columnists
Let's be clear: The blockbuster bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love
- One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia" is not
about career reinvention.
Still, the book - featured twice on "Oprah," read by untold book clubs and
the basis for a film to star Julia Roberts - is inspiring career coaches to
recommend it to clients. Friends and family are giving copies to loved ones who
have found themselves in professional or work-life turmoil - and who, in turn,
tell their friends.
"Eat, Pray, Love" is the memoir of Elizabeth Gilbert, a writer who, in
life-meltdown mode, launched a "year of self-inquiry." At age 31, she
recognized that her path - marriage, suburbs, possible baby - was making her
feel "utterly consumed with dread."
After a messy divorce and an obsessive relationship, Gilbert, a
self-described emotional wreck, headed off to Italy, India and Indonesia in the
fall of 2003. Her goal was to "thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set
against the backdrop of each country, in a place that has traditionally done
that one thing very well."
In Italy it was to be the art of pleasure, with a special emphasis on food;
in India it was to tap into the spiritual through massive doses of chanting
and meditation, and in Indonesia, Bali to be specific, it was to find a way to
balance the two - pleasure and spirituality.
Kimberly Jones of Nesconset read Gilbert's story and found it affirmed her
decision to change her career. After finishing 14 months of intense schoolwork,
she had found herself slipping into something akin to postpartum depression.
It was fertile ground, she says, for an "it's over - now what?" line of
second-guess thinking.
Jones, a lawyer for 14 years, finished work in September on a master's
degree in public administration - a field in which she hopes to make more of a
social impact. "If I wanted to just work for the buck, I would continue
practicing law," she says.
In her view, the book is "about looking at your life and being present and
making choices and being responsible for the choices and not spreading blame."
The copy she received for her birthday in October is now underlined and
dog-eared, and she's recommended the book to friends. "It's that kind of book,"
she says. "It bonds people together."
And, yes, the many thousands of others who bought the book or received it
as a gift have responded to Gilbert's humorous writing style and tales of the
wild and crazy characters she met along the way. They would include Luca
Spaghetti - his real name - an accountant in Rome. And at the ashram in India,
Richard from Texas, whose first comment to her is, "Man, they got mosquitoes
'round this place big enough to rape a chicken." (He reportedly has inspired a
line of Richard from Texas T-shirts.)
Siobhan Murphy, an executive coach in Babylon, has suggested the book to
clients. In one of her newsletters, she pointed to two key issues that often
come up in her practice:
First, as Gilbert travels on her journey, she develops more faith in her
natural instincts. She "shifted into believing she could and should have her
prayer answered," wrote Murphy, and advanced beyond "a tentative vibration that
said: 'I'm not sure I can have this.' She allowed in a new possibility."
Murphy wrote, too:
"The author is also introduced to the power of forgiveness and the use of
ritual to release the hold resentment has on her. Frequently in coaching, I
find that people need to forgive themselves, their employers, their colleagues
or someone in order to unhook themselves from the past, reclaim the energy they
are using in anger, and use that energy to move forward towards their goals."
Indeed, in an interview with National Public Radio earlier this month,
Gilbert spoke of how we often cling to comforts, "your comforting senses of
your own limitations, you know, like this is who I am. I'm boxed into this ...
." But, let those beliefs go and "you'll be amazed at the things that occur."
Yes, this sounds a lot like therapy, but Gilbert also did much personal
excavation work on her own through writing and asking for divine guidance. She
says she was able to contact her inner wisdom - or was it God or "the angel who
was assigned to my case" - through written dialogues. And that wise voice, she
writes, "is always available for a conversation on paper at any time of day or
night."
One person who was inspired by the book is Jonathan Lien, 26, who read it
at the suggestion of Murphy, his stepmother. (Gilbert, who expected her memoir
to be read pretty much just by women, said she's "really touched when I hear
that men are reading it.")
Lien read the book in January, quit a real estate job in February and took
off in March for five weeks of backpacking in Europe. He says he came back with
a clarity - that he wanted to work in the family business, Cornucopia Health
Foods in Sayville, in a role that would help bring it to the next level.
Such a thought had crossed his mind earlier, he says, but actually making
the change took "stepping away and looking at the bigger picture instead of
focusing on the little details of life."
Certainly, such travel jaunts can be characterized as running away or
goofing off. In reality, they can help allow your true desires to surface, says
Lindsey Pollak, a career blogger and author in Manhattan.
Pollak is the person who told me about the book in October the day before I
left for two weeks in Italy. I started reading it on the plane and finished it
a week later in Amalfi - where I met a woman from San Francisco who had just
quit her financial services job and was traveling for several weeks, "Eat,
Pray, Love" in hand. As for me, the book reinvigorated my interest in journal
writing and someday spending more than two weeks in Italy - make it more like
two or three months.
Still, let me not give the impression that you have to uproot your life and
reconfigure yourself. "We romanticize the idea of a spiritual journey,"
Gilbert said in the NPR interview. "And we think that we have to actually
change our nature ... in reality, it is the opposite."
And, she said, often "we wait for our happiness to happen to us ... or wait
for somebody to come and bring it to us." But "my whole book is about taking
that into your own hands." (In her own case, she was able to banish depression,
right her course and marry a Brazilian businessman whom she met in Bali - and
let's not even get started on her enhanced career success!)
That self-reliance is something that Jones, the
lawyer-turning-nonprofit-executive who is also relocating to California, found
compelling: the affirmation for "taking a risk and making unusual choices and
aggressively pursuing your happiness."
She characterized her take-away message from the book this way: "Don't
settle. No matter how long you have to wait, be patient and faithful in
yourself."
