15: Embracing Waiting Seasons and Purgatory

I'm so thrilled to share this awesome conversation with you today!  My friend and former colleague Geoff Curtis joins us on the pod to talk about his new book about something he calls "professional identity purgatory."  His life story and so much of what he talks about in his book is so needed in the career conversation today and it's taken too long to really express it the way Geoff has.  We talk about how timelines of seasons are limiting, how we all wear an armor at some point in our careers and how we can all be in the same season of life but decades apart in age.  We discuss the raw reality of the in-between and waiting seasons and what to focus on in the midst of them.  Don't miss this conversation and go RIGHT now and get his book wherever books are sold!

Embracing Your Own Purgatory: Curtis, Geoff: 9798901021088: Amazon.com: Books

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Seasons with Purpose, where we have honest conversations about how seasons of all types show up in our lives and how we can walk into and through them with intention so that we don't miss any of the moments that matter most. Hello and welcome to episode 15, Embracing Waiting Seasons and Purgatory. Today I'm thrilled to have my former colleague Jeff Curtis join us to talk about his new book and a season that for far too long so many people in the corporate world have avoided talking about. Jeff is courageously sharing his insights and learnings from the inside of what he calls professional identity purgatory, and his story is such a great reminder of what seasons of waiting give us, but also how hard they can be. Jeff is a former executive vice president, corporate affairs, and chief communications officer at Horizon Therapeutics. During his nearly 30-year healthcare communications career, he has worked domestically and internationally in various roles on both the client and agency side. This blip is adapted from his book, Embracing Your Own Purgatory, which is available now and I think is a good intro to our conversation. This is Jeff's words. I didn't just lose a job, I lost the scaffolding I built my professional identity on. I told myself it was a blip, but I was wrong. What followed was a seemingly endless holding pattern with no title, no structure, and no clear direction. It's the space between who you were professionally and who you might become. In Catholic theology, purgatory is the in-between, not heaven, not hell, but a passage of purification before something better. That's the metaphor I keep returning to because professional identity purgatory isn't failure. It's a transition with no timeline. It's the disorienting gap between losing an identity you've spent decades building and not knowing what replaces it. I hope you love this conversation. Over to Jeff. Welcome. I'm so thrilled to have you here and see this new journey and new season you're in as an author. So thank you for joining and making the time to chat with us today.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Yeah, no, thank you for having me. I'm excited for the conversation. Really looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

Me too. So for our listeners, I got to read your manuscript originally and seeing the different iterations and the journey of that it's taken you on has been fascinating to watch. I'm sure even more exciting to be in it.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

So you were an early part of the process.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

I am so honored. I really am. I'm gonna be honored forever. I'm proud to be on that list. So okay, so for the pod squad, I always start with tell us a little bit about yourself and what season you're in currently, which is a great tee up for your book.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

Yeah, so uh 30 years in the communications industry, 18 on the agency side, 11 in-house, all focused in the life sciences, biotech, pharma space. Um, my last corporate iteration was as chief communications officer at a company called Horizon Therapeutics. In 2022, we were acquired or announced the acquisition by uh Amgen, and then I exited in 20 November of 2023. So it's been a little more than two and a half years uh since I exited. And the question about the season, I think I'm gonna take this quite literally first. That's fine, and then we can then we can talk about the figurative piece of it a little bit later. But I would say even after two and a half years, I I still feel like I'm in kind of a a late autumn phase moving into winter. I mean, some of that familiarity that I had is is gone, but still has flashes. And what I want to do next still really hasn't taken shape. And so it's kind of an in-between bridge type of place. I the more I do these types of things and the more I talk about the book, I do see glimpses of spring, literal spring, yeah, things blooming, new identities flashing here and there. And I always joke with people that it's no coincidence that I live in Chicago because the big running joke is that we have 12 seasons: a fool's spring, a fake winter, a third winter, all of those things. And so I I kind of feel that roller coaster still up and down, but still in all of it's been stripped away, and I'm trying to find that new thing where I can really latch on to and and grow with it.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

I love that. And you're such a great example of embracing, I call them the in-between seasons a lot, transition seasons, as you discuss in the book, and we'll talk about this. I think we don't embrace or make space for the in-between seasons, and they're sometimes just as important. And we're in this in-between season currently in North America, listeners, we're in this, it's almost spring, but it's then freezing cold. What's called an in-between season, even in real weather seasons, we don't take the time to embrace it. That's largely what I read in your book. And I appreciate your honesty.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

I think it's just we don't spend time in those spaces. And again, not to continue to use the Chicago analogy, but people also say that what do you know about Chicago? Oh, not much. Been in the airport, it's a flyover city because flying from the East Coast to the West Coast. And I think some of those in-between spaces, again, to continue that analogy, are flyover type of spaces. You don't spend time enough there to learn exactly what the space is about and what it can offer you. So I I think if there's one takeaway, it's that spend time in the space just to understand what it can teach you.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

I love that. I love the spend time phrase. Actually, I'm gonna keep using that in our discussion. Okay, so before we get into the book and the details, how about weather seasons? What's your especially as a Chicago, a Chicagoan? Chicago Chicagoan. Chicagoan. Okay. As a Chicagoan, what is your favorite weather season and why? And has it changed?

SPEAKER_02 6:25

No, I don't think it's it hasn't changed. I think, and it's gonna be cliche. It's summer just because summer's always been forced relaxation based on what I've kind of talked about in the book, even though I didn't necessarily slow down all the time. It was still at least psychologically, some sort of forced relaxation. And so I always look forward to summer. And frankly, some of the my best memories growing up were from the summer, so I've always kind of latched on to that more so than any other season.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah. I'm a fall spring season lover, but because of the transitions, because I feel more comfortable than most in transitions or change, and so I embrace spring and fall, but summer is is a popular one among our seasons with purpose guests for sure. And that concept, especially those of us who've been in the corporate world for years, I think summer at least feels more that way because it's of course it's then, but that's not even in the corporate in the corporate space.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Doesn't need not to turn the tables on you a little bit, but what why why do you think you're most comfortable in transition or more comfortable in transition than others?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

To your point before, I can see the beauty in it. And I'm actually pretty comfortable in change. I was a project manager at Pod Squad. We worked together at a marketing agency. I wouldn't have been my best self in client service for the same client for seven years. I thrived in the opportunity different different projects. Not that you don't do different projects on different clients, but the concept of being all in on a project, but then I like to, I like to move along. So I I've always been that way. I don't know. I like I feel pretty comfortable in change, not the uncertainty piece, which we'll talk about, but my skills thrive in transition and change because I'm I'm decent at adapting. It's where I it's where I probably do my best work. It's funny because I thought I was a planner for a long time. If you layer over Myers Brig Myers Briggs and all those pieces, I am a pretty good planner, but it's almost it almost I've learned as I've aged. I've learned that I planned to compensate for my little bit of ADD-ness of doing things all the time. And so my planning was actually the structure that I needed so I wasn't all over the place. Does that make sense? I had to layer that over in my career too, but in life. So my plannerness that everybody would say about me was probably a coping strategy from back in the day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Yeah, probably. I mean, I to me it's interesting you say adaptability, and this is something that I've been looking at too and struggling with, actually. I think I'm adaptable and agile as well in different situations. But when the uncertainty happens, it's almost why doesn't that skill translate into dealing with that uncertainty? Because I think we always use the fact that we're adaptable in a professional work setting or in a life setting. But then when something something disrupts that, yes, and that you're dealing with the uncertainty, it's almost like the skills go away. And how do you do that? So to me, it's just an interesting juxtaposition on on both because I would describe myself the same way. I would say I'm adaptable, I'm agile, I'm all of these things in a professional setting. And then all of a sudden, when that goes away and there's uncertainty, like you just said, we don't know what the hell we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

I agree, and I felt that a lot. And you and I have discussed, I also was at the firm we were at for 21 years. So I stayed that I say I like adaptability and change, and then I needed the the steadiness, and this is a good transition to the purgatory question because I think that that change place where we are stimulated, excited, ready for the next thing, probably helpful in the room because we're able to see ahead, um doesn't bode well for the uncertainty. So, first of all, before we go into the specific questions, tell us about your book, what's it called, and where are you in the process, and then we'll go into the specific questions on purgatory.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

So the book is um called Embracing Your Own Purgatory, which is why the word purgatory keeps coming up so much so far. And it's really focused on again my journey post-transition, explain post-acquisition, but also investigating just life and work patterns, not only through my eyes, but through the eyes of others. I interviewed about six other people for the book who are in varying places, various places of transition, or have been through life. And it was it's not just about professional life, it's about life overall and how different things can impact how you act, what the next thing you do is, all of those things. But the bottom line is, and what we've kind of been alluding to already, is that we as humans are very uncomfortable with that emptiness that exists in any type of transition. And so what do we do while we're in those spaces? It's a great space to learn about yourself. Um, it's also a great space to be productive in a different way and find new meaning from something that you may have previously done that you may not do anymore, new metrics, new definitions of success, all of those things.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

So let's dive into purgatory. In the book, you describe multiple different types of purgatory, specifically in your career transition. Can you just give us a top line of them and why they have been important in your journey and how the different types play out?

SPEAKER_02 12:07

Yeah, so I I finally could name certain things, at least by my definition. And that was hugely important for me. So even in this process was just naming something or naming a feeling. So in the book, um three purgatories, as you mentioned, professional identity purgatory. So losing that career-based self that defines a lot of us, and I think we're all familiar with that. Um, purpose purgatory. Um simply put to search for the new why when our purpose, whatever that may have been, and then expertise purgatory. So that fear that we have, that those skills that we've gained, the relevance that we've had, all of a sudden has an expert expiration date. And one story I tell in the book was I was at a small gathering of very senior level communicators, and for some reason, unknown to me, I asked a very high-level communicator who I I I didn't know, but he was Fortune 50 CCO. I asked him how long I would be wrong. And the answer he gave was about 18 months. And again, I don't even know why I asked the question, but for some reason I wanted to know the answer because it was weighing on my mind that I'm leaving this job, I'm moving into something else, and this profession has consumed me for almost 30 years, and I and I'm losing that identity, at least this iteration, and didn't know what to do. So I never thought about it from an expiration standpoint, and it was just a shock to the system. And all of them have impacted me. I don't think one more than the other. It's all kind of glommed together and impacting me in different ways. I think the hardest thing that I had to confront overall was just the discovery piece of it and not rushing through that discovery piece of it, and kind of what we've been talking about is spending that time in the space to figure out what that next thing will be. It's gone from the naming to understanding the experience, not only through my eyes, but through the eyes of others, and then understanding what it means to kind of sit with that discomfort. And the the last thing I'll say is that my dad passed away in 2007, and there's a chapter in the book on that. And it wasn't until now that I really looked back and understood what that meant from an identity standpoint.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

I'm an I'm an only child, and I didn't think about it in that way until I started writing about it and reliving the experience. And then back to the whole naming thing, I said, okay, that was actually a my first loss of identity as my father's son. I mean, my mom is still alive, and and obviously I'm her son, but there's just that difference from a bond standpoint and difference from a loss standpoint. So it's not just loss that you've lost a level in, it's how does that loss impact you from how you even frame your identity. So that was an in a very interesting exploration as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

What I love about this, I think everyone would agree, there's seasons of life, we all know that. But I think so many of us get halfway through a season that we don't even know and feel more lost. And my instinct was if you can name it, but understand that the season can look like this from a timeline perspective, it can also look like this almost provides some preparation. Does it mean we have all the answers? No, which I think is what you describe in the professional identity purgatory, especially. But naming it and just being aware that you're in the season matters. It shows up in my life. The times I felt the most lost was when I didn't actually realize I was in the season or doing anything to accommodate that season. And I was three-quarters of the way through it. I almost was finished with it. And until I opened my eyes, I've seen it a lot in parenting, right? You, you and I know well, the teenage years, the insert whatever season you kind of know is coming, but until you're in it and you haven't changed how you're speaking to them, how you show up in delivery of what they need. Do you take them or put them in hard situations? Same concept, right? I think the naming is so important. And you pointing out the question of what season am I in? How long do I have in it? And what can I do to be intentional about the next steps or the pieces in it or to look for why we're in it, which is kind of what you talk about for purgatory, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:03

Yeah, and I think too, it's also important to pay attention to those feelings, yes, and and how you're feeling too, right? Because that experience that I mentioned about the expiration date, I felt a certain way then, and probably for a year after that. I don't necessarily feel that way now, and I don't necessarily know if I care that much now, but that's uh the growth piece. That's right. It really is. It's it's even looking back retrospectively and saying, okay, that was one point in time, and I was really angry at that one point in time when somebody told me that. So I adjusted my lifestyle to meet that or to combat that expiration, and that likely wasn't the right thing to do. But now I can look back and say, okay, now that really doesn't matter anymore. And it's how have you taken emotion from that, dealt with it, and solved in a way that makes sense for you moving forward.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

Uh it almost becomes a guidepost, a moment in time, you can call it whatever you want, but as you look at the season or the journey or the purgatory that you're in, you can name it. So I think that's a good transition. And and I think our listeners are probably thinking, how do I do that? In your book, you mentioned that you had written a statement of purpose, which became a bit of a grounding piece, especially as you entered purgatory. What do we what do our listeners need in order to get to a statement of purpose or even just to naming in the midst of their purgatory or in the midst of their season?

SPEAKER_02 18:36

I think what you're what you're getting at is uh really how I've been talking about what I hope the purpose of the book will be in and of itself. And that is conversation. Can we start to have conversations about feeling? So to me, that is the first step of getting there. Can you actually say out loud, like we're having this conversation to a friend, a family member, a former colleague, I'm going through a transition process right now. This is how I feel, and this is where I think I need to move. To me, that is one of the primary steps that people need to take, is just is just talking about it out loud, like we're talking about it out loud right now instead of just sitting with it internally. The the purpose statement piece of it, you're right, it was a grounding exercise for me and part of the application process um for the fellowship that I did. But I even put snippets of it in the book to show people where I was at, right, where at least I thought I was at when I was entering the early stages of my transition.

unknown 19:45

Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

And it was very aspirational. I said a lot of things about who I was trying to be and who I was, and and I I think that is a good exercise of saying it out loud. Even writing it down on paper is a form of conversation to say, here's what I'm doing, here's what I don't know, here's what I think I know about myself, and here's what I still need to learn about myself. And the whole using I don't know is really okay. If we can ourselves get out of kind of a performance-driven cycle and more of a self-discovery cycle and be honest with ourselves, whatever form that takes, I think it's a a great step to take because you're stripping away all of the things that you knew before to try to get a better understanding of who you are. I mean, I even write in the purpose statement that I couldn't see the um a full truer self that I had, but I knew it was there.

unknown 20:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

So even if you can admit that you know something is there that's different from what you've been experiencing, I think that helps build a better roadmap moving forward. Again, I can I mean, we could probably spend the whole podcast talking about therapy or coaching, but those were also significant inputs as well for my life. It was my work psychologist, it was outside therapy, it was coaches that I had that got me even able to understand feelings where I was at certain points, and I'm still not doing a great job with it, but it was all of those things factored in. I did have to start by talking out loud about how I was feeling and where I was going and what I thought I was doing. So there are all of those things uh help.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

We're all a fan, we're all fans of therapy in every every facet of the world right now. So here at the podcast for sure, we talk about it a lot because I think the naming piece is the takeaway here. You did it. You were able to name something in the in your statement of purpose that was a guidepost, as we called it before, to go back to as you entered and are still walking through purgatory. And I think that's important in whatever way we can do it, even just the concept of manifesting, right? So writing it down, repeating it back, talking to someone through it. That's really important. Before you get to Purgatory, or if you are in it currently.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Yeah, and what what I see too, Katie, is and it's been fascinating to me. When I was posting on LinkedIn before the book was published, and even now when I'm posting on LinkedIn about the book being published, people commenting, people sending D me DMs, people emailing me, and the common refrain is I don't know if you knew this about me, but and then there is a five paragraph sub-story.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

And to me, it's wow, that is one very trusting of me with their information and their stories. Two, that's exactly what I want this book to do is that how therapeutic was it for someone to write four paragraphs to tell me about whatever story it was in their life that they can equate to the purgatory that I'm describing. And to me, that is back to your question about what steps people can take. That is a big step. It's them telling me, thank you, or for naming it, but this is what I went through. And I didn't even know what I went through. But now there is space for me to kind of name, even though it was 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, name what I went through.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

I was gonna say that. Your entire book is naming it so that people can I can identify it in that way and talk about purpose. You found such purpose in your own purgatory. You'll I think you'll just keep finding layers of purpose in the midst of it as you hear people's stories and people can really recognize themselves. I think it's fair to say we've all been in one of the purgatories you describe at some point, right? Maybe not the career piece, especially purpose. The way you describe it and talk through it and are honest about I'm not out of it yet, but here's what I'm seeing and learning and observing in it is a beautiful gift to all of your readers. I felt the same way, and now you're hearing it from multiple people. Good work, way to go in putting it down and writing in the midst of it. I also think there's a lot in the therapy feeling space these days about talking about the middle, right? So the in between, the middle, the purgatory. And there's definitely people on that disagree that say you have to have everything buttoned up, you gotta know what you're talking about before you go in, right? In the midst of a career space, especially. You have to be the expert. And I just think breaking that concept in for the next generation is beautiful and much needed to be able to say it's okay to stop, take assessment, name where you're at, and potentially redirect instead of you've got to have it all together just as a subline. I think it's a good thing to teach our kids. I think it's a good thing for the next generation. Yes, that shows up in different ways, and it should for everyone where you are in that process and that journey. But saying, I don't know, is a is an okay thing is a great takeaway. It's it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

And a word that you just said is expertise, and I agree with you that we're always have to be or need to be the expert in the room. But what what's more powerful than being an expert of yourself and understanding your feelings? And so that's kind of the reframe, right? That's a reframe that I'm calling you out, but that's that's the professional identity speaking of that. We have to be the expert in the room, the subject matter expert. But we often aren't the experts of ourselves and our feelings and how we're thinking. And so if there's anything else, it's yes, be an expert of that first. And then it's honestly going to help you be an expert in the room in whatever you're doing. These days I'm talking a lot about leadership, particularly to entry-level professionals, people, students still in college, all of those things. And I'm saying to them, if you think that you want to be a leader at some point in your career, start paying attention to that now and taking the time to understand what that means. But more importantly, take the time to understand yourself and who you are, because that's only going to make you a better leader moving forward. And so, to my point, be an expert on yourself first, and then go be an expert in the room or be an expert to your team.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

What a great takeaway. That's also going to be the quote that I make into a quote board and put your name against for this podcast. Love it. Love that. To your point, that is such a good reframe. And really important in an honest conversation about let's use career for a second in the future of business. It's changing drastically right now. It's changing drastically. And if we don't reframe for the, especially for the next generation coming up into the corporate world and give them permission to reframe it and talk about it differently, it's gonna be a disaster. We, as leaders, won't be set up to support the next generation, but I think they also won't even know what they're getting into because we're not being honest. We're not sure yet. Some of these industries are not sure what's gonna happen with AI. Let's be really honest. Hello, listeners. I hope you're enjoying this episode today. If you are new here, welcome to the Seasons with Purpose podcast. And I'm so glad you're here. No matter how you got here. The best way you can support any of your favorite podcasters or content is liking, following, or subscribing to their channel or podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you've heard today, and I hope you do, I would be honored if you could share it with someone who you think it would help or impact. And I'm just grateful that you're here and engaging with all different seasons of purgatory in our lives. Now back to our conversation with Jeff. Another thing I really resonated with, one of my favorite parts, is how you described your former identity as armor that you didn't realize you were wearing. I I think it's a good way of saying and talking about corporate um business identity armor that we've built, we just put on, and we didn't even know we were wearing it. How does that show up? And what's a way to make sure we're not building that too thick that it's hard to then take off when we need to?

SPEAKER_02 28:51

Yeah, so the good news, even when I was describing this and writing in the book, is that is research that kind of this up. I talked a little bit about career investment. There was a psychologist, um Jana Koritz, that coined the term career investment envisionment, which is the process which titles, routines, achievements absorb all of who we are. Work kind of stops being something that we do and becomes something we are. And that isn't like putting your clothes on, it just kind of happens. And the thing is, is that we're rewarded every step of the way for those things that I just mentioned. Yeah. It raises recognition, belonging. All of those things help form the armor around us. And I think that's the interesting piece is that until it's gone or you're confronted with a situation where it doesn't exist anymore, and that comfort piece isn't there because you're not used to a certain scenario that you realize that you were wearing it the entire time. And again, the key ingredient for me was that comfort piece. Protection, provided structure, external validation, whatever it was, it was very comfortable. And again, that makes it, as I said, kind of unrecognizable that you're even have it on because you're just so used to it until it's stripped away. The story that I tell in the book, and it was a couple days into my fellowship, sitting in a room of our first session, 19 other people who I didn't know, and I'm sitting there looking at each one of them, trying to one-up them. I'm no longer the smartest person in the room, and I didn't know what to do. I'm looking at them like my past executive committee, thinking, okay, I have to be on my toes, some people I have to compete against, all of these things, and that's because I wasn't wearing wasn't wearing my armor anymore and didn't have that comfort to come back on. And that's that's the first time, honestly, that I realized that wow, there was really something protecting me, even though it was psychological, there was something protecting me because I was so comfortable with the environment that I was in and so used to the thing that I didn't know when the new thing came how to even behave or what I would do.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

So well said. And as we discussed before, naming it as armor is really powerful in the book because anyone who's gone through a tri career transition or been forced out or whatever the situation was has that same piece. In my own personal transition right now, I still feel that on my personal life. I wouldn't say I always wore it as armor that I didn't know was there, but taking it away is terrifying. Strip back down to what's my core, who I am, that doesn't have to do with my career or doesn't have to do with my personal life, whatever the situation you're in. Um, it's a beautiful way of describing it. I think important that you name it because I think it it'll give other people a name for how that shows up in how they use it, even if it's not just in their an interview or going to the next job, but how they identify themselves and become an expert in who they actually are. What a beautiful, beautiful concept.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Yeah, and I think too, back to what we were talking about earlier with the expiration date, all of these things you see compound, right? So it's a compounding effect is that okay, you're not going to be relevant anymore. And without four you're really exposed. So you're dealing with kind of an expiration relevance thing, you're dealing with the purpose thing, you're dealing with no longer being able to tie back to an identity that you had. And I think what's interesting about it too is that loss is loss. And I think people have been asking me a question, why didn't you do the thing again? I think that kind of misses the point too, because it's not that I have totally dismissed doing what I used to do or wouldn't do that again, but I just don't know. And I think the point is about the loss and and how you understand the loss and what that did to you and what that meant, versus the why you aren't doing something or the similar thing again. So to me, it's there are a lot of things that compound together that hopefully people will will start to see as they read the paying attention to to all of those things.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

I love that. A season we talk about a lot on the podcast is grief, right? So it it is just that's true about what you said about your dad, and it is just seasons of grief in some ways. Um, but you're right, the the turning point is the loss and how we identify the pieces going forward. Yeah, and and use them, use them productively. Love that. Okay. You tell a story in the book where you're in the middle of the cohort and you realize you're the youngest by far. I love how you said it was like the executive committee of my old life. Um, and all of a sudden you were the junior staffer and you felt you felt exposed. But your response stuck with me. You said, I'm gonna quote this, quote you here. We are all going through a transition. Some just happen at different points of life. To you describe it as being really clear in that moment that all of a sudden you weren't wearing your armor, you were the youngest in the room, your expertise didn't really matter to them. Not that it didn't matter, but you felt that it didn't matter and it wasn't as important as it ever was before. How did that judgment of you affect your response and then what you did next?

SPEAKER_02 34:46

If there's one thing that impacted, it was that I was just beginning the journey to understand exactly where I was going and what I was doing, and this was almost acting as another obstacle.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

And what really went through my head was okay, if the if this is the a safe space, and it's not that it wasn't eventually, but if it if this was a safe space right out of the gate, okay, this I'm in I may be in the wrong safe space because if my age and I think as it was put, youth and inexperience um was called out, I it created more self-doubt. That was just it it was exposing. And I think that was again another one of those things that showed how important the previous armor was.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:38

And so that was a big step in just understanding, frankly, uh, emotionally, one, if I could go through it, two, if I had really the staying power to go through the mental cycle that I was going through post-twent transition. But I think one thing it did teach me on the thematic is that the seasons don't discriminate by age. I mean, you could have you and I you and I could be sitting in the exact same season, decades apart, as I was with those people in the room. And there are different stories and circumstances that brought us there. And so there's there almost has to be a mutual respect understanding of that fact alone, is that we could have been going through the same thing, and we were just at different points in our life. We don't do a very good job of that from an age gap standpoint and understanding one another. And so even if we could just land on that, there is the a shared vulnerability of being between identities, that's the connection. And and if we were to settle as that, and that's the commonality, awesome.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

What a beautiful, what a beautiful reality, and the fact and we should have that conversation, which we are, but everyone should and feel comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 36:59

And again, back to the whole loss thing. I I you I was confronted again a couple months later where I I was in a room presenting, and the same person said, Well, you have so much work time left is is what you're proposing gonna be your your job, Eric.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

And then the next part was, Well, how are you going to fund it? And so there was a there were a lot of things hitting me from both sides. Yeah, and again, at that at that point, I was four months in to the fellowship, and I'm thinking, still again, really why are we still you're still being asked the same questions? Why, why am we still in this spot? And I mean, maybe eventually, and again, it was still a great experience, it was it was a needed experience. I was just taken aback by the fact that there was just this outward, almost lack of understanding of why we could all be in the same spot at different points in our life. And to me, what steps can people take and all of those things? It's it's that's another step. It's that understand that if you're separated by 20 years, and yes, you may have had 20 year more years of career time, and I may have had 20 fewer years, that doesn't mean we can't be in the same spot and still wrestling with the same things.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

I love this so much. Let's just make it more known and shout it from the mountaintops. We can all be in the exact same season. It's completely age agnostic, it's completely life story and circumstance agnostic. You can still be in the same place, the same season for whatever reason, however you got there. But let's not, and this goes to the timeline question. I also think, and I even did it earlier, I there is beauty in the timeline or expiration point concept. I think it's important to think through. But there are also real dangers in putting a timeline against seasons because it doesn't have to be sequential in relation to your life. And the fact that we do that and ask questions that way, especially in the career space, the business world. But that's true in life too. Why aren't you having kids yet? Why are you not married? The fact that people start from that place is completely, I'd venture to say, inappropriate. And we need to get better at naming the these in-between, the purgatory or the in-betweens.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

Well, and just think about too, Katie, how much stress timelines put on you.

SPEAKER_00 39:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Regardless of what they are, and particularly those that aren't set in stone. You're you're putting your own timeline, whether you're projecting it on someone else, which now I realize that Fortune 50 CCO was likely doing. He was projecting timeline onto me based on something that he felt. And that just creates stress and it doesn't help you because you the it's almost it speeds it up as okay. I have to get out of here. If you have the time and you don't have to get out immediately, stay in it for just a little bit longer, just to understand where you may need to go or find comfort.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

I love this so much. Let's all be better at this every let's all agree to be better at this. Yes, and what's challenging me in this conversation is just the way you we ask questions of each other too. Instead of listening, right? Even just asking a question in the wrong way implies you have to have a timeline on a season, which is not true. You don't. We can all be in the same season, and the timeline of it'll be drastically different. It's great for awareness. And you're challenging me to make sure that we're asking questions that way, not just as a podcast host, but as a friend, as a spouse, as a parent, as a colleague, that we're not putting or assuming timelines in the midst of the season, but having honest conversations about the feelings, naming the part that we think we're in, so that we can open up and have that conversation in a more understanding way.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

So good. So good, my friends. Look at the seasons you're inspiring for people here too. Okay, so to bring it home a little bit, do you think that most people actually can identify their identity and authentic selves eventually? Is that the end goal?

SPEAKER_02 41:46

I mean, I think it's the end goal. I mean, based on what we talked about before, I think it's I think we should always strive again for being that expert on ourselves and what that actually means. Um to your question, based on my experience, probably cautiously, yes. Um, but it has to be, as we've been kind of been describing today, those willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing immediately what's next, rather than just engaging that reflex that fills a void automatically with some sort of productivity, a deliverable, a metric, something that we're used to. Because again, I think that gets to the running, running, running. Okay, I I'm not comfortable with this space right now, and I'm gonna go do the thing that I was doing before. And I again I have more and more conversations with former colleagues, with people who are in kind of a similar position of I just need to go do the thing that I was doing. Yes, and are getting very tensed up with the discomfort. And whether that's people pushing them to say you should go do this or why aren't you doing this, similar to what you said earlier, to you know what, I'm gonna hold off on that a little bit because I can. I think the harder problem that we've been talking about is that people never understood themselves in the first place. And the strong professional identity just consumed that. So it's not necessarily something that was lost, it was something that was never really fully formed. And I think back to the learning and understanding about yourself is that why wasn't that ever fully formed? Why did I not do the work to just understand who I was? And so I don't I don't want it to be a deficiency for people to say I I lost that. Um, even in my case, even with all the work that I've done, I'm I I immediately identified where I lost something. But then I as I was I'm kind of looking through it, I I never really fully understood myself. And so this is a part of the process. It's not about reclaiming something that was gone, it's really asking yourself was it was it there? Did I have a a really true? Vision of who I was or or what I was. And if the answer is I don't know, then okay, you have the work to do to get there. And you can still deal with the loss, but let's start working on yourself.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

And putting the time into that is not a waste. It's not unproductive. That's another truth here. Putting time into making sure you understand yourself enough to take the armor off and know what's left can only help going forward. That's a that's a fair question and really important to understand. And to your point, it's sad sometimes how much that happens. Not that it's bad, as long as we find that and back to the timeline, that can be at any point in our life, at any season, coming out of any purgatory. The j that is part of the journey. It and hopefully the destination.

SPEAKER_02 44:53

Yeah. And I think one of the things that we always wrestle with is vulnerability being very threatening.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 45:04

But it's always through the lens of a professional identity. So it's, oh no, no, no. I can't do that work. I can't be that vulnerable. I can't be that authentic because I have an identity to protect. When in reality, it's really the thing that needs to be done. And I've seen it time and time again where companies will start doing some sort of psychological work, whether it's through a consultant, whether it's through a work psychologist, whatever it may be. And then it stops because nobody's comfortable with the whole vulnerability transparency piece of it. And they're threatened, threatened by it. And we need to get out of that space where we're threatened by it. And again, hopefully, I mean, I'm I put my a lot of my life out there. And as I said, that people are going to find out a lot about me that they didn't know, particularly those people who know me for a very, very long time as an industry person. And I I did that for a reason because I know the importance of someone taking a step and not having all of the answers and being vulnerable and being okay with being transparent and saying, okay, well, if that person can do it, then why can't I do it? So stop looking at it as a threat to your humanity or whatever it is, and it and something that's real progress.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

I love being able to see and be a small part of your journey to find that. That's that's what you found in the midst of it is the vulnerability actually is exposing you to all this feedback that you're getting from the book. I also love that now part of maybe the authentic self you found is author. Maybe that's a piece that you never knew was missing and now it's a part of your thing. I heard a podcast recently that you should write your own obituary. This is that same concept, right? So if you got the chance to write what you wanted someone to say about you and who you are, what would you say as opposed to some random person writing it? And oh, by the way, you never get to read it because you're dead. That's a great way of framing it, right? Like no matter how long the seasons were, the the whole piece of your authentic self, what do you actually want it to be?

SPEAKER_02 47:22

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

Love it. Okay. What do you want people to feel and take away when they finish your book?

SPEAKER_02 47:30

Uh a few things. One that they feel less alone. Um, I'm pretty explicit in the conclusion that I and I've said today in our interview that I don't have answers, frameworks, anything like that. Um it's just a very vulnerable account of disorientation I've experienced. And I just hope that they understand that they aren't the only people that have experienced this or maybe going through it. Uh hopefully they feel that they have the permission to stop pretending they have it figured out for everybody. I mean, that's a big thing. They hope that they'll feel seen and just willing to be honest with themselves. The other piece that has come up recently that I think is very interesting is I also want to shatter the stigma that men can't talk about this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 48:25

And it has come up a couple times in feedback. Interesting. And and people have has have said that audiences are going to be surprised, or readers are going to be surprised that a man wrote this book. And I took that as a compliment. Um, but I'm also now kind of hoping that it creates a different type of momentum among male readers who aren't necessarily as vulnerable or maybe a little bit threatened by being vulnerable, to kind of take that step just to understand that it's okay to talk about this stuff in your friend groups or with others. And I I mean it's a it's a big step, but it's again, it's a needed step because I think, at least in my experience, I've found that the most resistance to this type of work is in the male audience. And and so if I can help shatter that that stigma that help people take some baby steps in doing that, awesome.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

I believe strongly you're doing that, my friend. I hope there's CEOs listening because as we talked about, the future of business is uncertain, is like an understatement right now. Not not every industry. There are some that I think will hold strong, but there's quite a few industries that are being disrupted. And in the uncertainty, I think that there's danger in that right now. And the vulnerability is the way forward. I'm so grateful that you're being honest about that purgatory, whether they want to call it that or not. I think you naming it and being vulnerable and honest in the midst of it is the only way to get through it and be better coming out of it. And I think it makes all of us bolder if we've go through it and live in it with honesty and intention. Doing the I think that is the work to find our authentic selves. So I think you're doing life-changing work, not just writing a book, but having these honest conversations and being the example of that. And I know there'll be a lot of other people who feel the same way. So for those of my listeners who want not just your book, but to find all the things about you, what's the best place to find you?

SPEAKER_02 50:48

Uh, best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Jeffrey Curtis on LinkedIn should be easy to find. I post. Sometimes I may overpost, um, but I'm okay with that.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

That's okay.

SPEAKER_02 50:59

And then the wherever books are sold online Kindle, paperback, hardcover, all available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, other websites, and hopefully you will see hard copies in bookstores soon.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

This was great. I'm so, so thankful for your time. Thank you for sharing your story with our listeners. And I know so many people are going to get so much out of your book and your words and your honesty. And thank you for being vulnerable in this space. We're so grateful you were here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

Thank you. This was uh a great opportunity, and thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

Thank you for joining us today. I hope you loved this conversation with Jeff and learned something from it. Cheers to whatever season you are in. May you thrive in it with purpose and intention. If you've made mistakes in this season, learn from them and start again tomorrow. I'm rooting for you. Go be great today and see you here next week.