From Sloop to Kayak

My client was discontent. He felt, he said, as if his competence was unseen. He worried that his considerable executive skills might atrophy. Though he lunched with colleagues regularly and stayed connected in his networks, he felt “out of the loop”. He felt unnecessary. Unneeded.

Additionally, he felt poor--- shrugging off the ten thousand he said he’d made that morning in successful day trading. True, he said, with the market down 30%, he still remained up 8%. Grudgingly, he admitted that this was something. His best friends said, “courage” and “persistence”; and he knew they were correct. But his friends didn’t know what it was to have so much time with the family retrievers during the day. Without the structures and well-known constraints, his game had disappeared. Time, always so precious and short, suddenly felt weighty and burdensome.

His wife and grown kids didn’t understand; and he felt terrible that they seemed to suffer so much when he was in this state of mind.

Still, my client could acknowledge that he was luckier than most. His market-sense and resources allowed him economic breathing room. Yet while he was grudgingly proud of his continued capacity to earn through his own portfolio management, it was not the way he wanted to earn: so he dismissed it.

Were there bright spots? Yes, reading the newspapers, magazines, and online resources, he saw economic revival after the downturn; but wasn’t sure about his being part of it. After all, he was 53 and had been looking for work for over a year. He felt far too young to contemplate retirement; but wasn’t that what he’d become overnight? Retired.

While others might feel betrayal after a lifetime of loyal service, he “got” it. He understood that his downsizing had not been personal, but necessary from the corporation’s perspective. But was this the other side of Simon’s “bounded rationality ”? The unexpected personal pain in going forward despite the generous and even enviable severance package?

I heard him this way: he was talking to me through a filter of hurt and incredulity. The same thing that happened to so many others had also happened to him. Like them, he’d also believed that he was somehow different because of his valued skills and capabilities. Like them, his preparedness for understanding what had happened had been insufficient. He was a yachtsman, used to piloting his sloop and suddenly, he’d found himself mid-rapids in a kayak.

But then, he was still testing me from a position of command: checking to see if my knowledge of management was sufficient to recognize classic theories he’d last read thirty years ago at B-School--- and with a certainty of their content which reflected his competence and resolve. True, his position was difficult; but despite it, he looked better and more relaxed than at any time I’d known him in the last two years.

He agreed, smiling. No, it was not a dead end, despite it feeling that way at times. How might we both understand what was going on for him?

He reflected on the question and took a deep breath. “ Its sort of the same thing for me that we see in the big picture, you know- the global economy.”
How so? He went on to describe a story with a sudden, truncated ending. Like a joke that ended before the punch-line. That didn’t sound correct to me. After all, he was excited about the world and its economic oscillations. He just didn’t know the outcomes.

“No, not a joke,” I said. “Rather, an opportunity.”

We parted with his acknowledgement that I might have had a point. Maybe. That the ragged edge of life experience could be woven into the way he navigated the future. That is, he had fallen hard into a sudden lack of personal meaning when he’d thought he’d had the roadmap. The challenge now was the creation of meaning, once again. The challenge now was his own authorship of his life’s narrative. For the time, he might also enjoy his afternoons with the retrievers. And he was certainly proud of his trading abilities.

He laughed. We agreed to talk again in a few weeks.