Posts Tagged ‘Spike Lee’

If you’ve ever watched NBC’s new show “Who Do You Think You Are?” you’ll have an idea of the kind of advice career consultant Nancy Anderson dishes up in Work with Passion in Midlife and Beyond (New World Library, 2010). The popular television series helps celebrities do research about their ancestors, often tracing their roots back more than a century. Typically these household names learn something surprising, like Sarah Jessica Parker’s connection to a young woman accused of witchcraft during the trials in Salem, Mass., or director Spike Lee’s likely ties to a Southern slave owner.

Anderson believes that people who are unfulfilled at work need to look backwards, too. In fact, she challenges readers to write their own autobiography, and to start by examining their parents’ and grandparents’ attitudes about money, work, and relationships. Why examine your family history? Anderson claims this exercise helps you identify patterns that you might have picked up along the way - good and bad – and figure out where they originated.

Anderson recommends that all fledgling memoirists refer to their relatives by first name only (“Ellen” rather than “mom,” for example), as a way to view their influences in a more objective light. “They will become people, not relatives,” she says, and “You can declare a moratorium on the stuff that doesn’t work for you.”

To help put the less productive influences of history behind you, Anderson suggests focusing your energies on your own strengths, values, and needs. Strengths are what you do easily and well. Values are the ways you consistently tackle problems when you are successful. Needs are the intangibles that you find emotionally satisfying, such as autonomy, creative challenges, and variety.

Finally, write down some goals to help you move towards a more satisfying worklife, but keep them small. “Change that lasts is, of necessity, a slow, gradual process,” she writes. If you select tasks that can be accomplished in a reasonable time period, you will become more accustomed to winning, she says. And that’s a habit you can happily pass down to future generations.