This is the second part of my personal story of change. To start at the beginning, please read Part 1.

In my last post, I left off with my experience of learning to play and compose music. As I mentioned, I began to realize that patterns play a powerful role in how our ears – and eventually our minds – receive certain musical sounds. The best thing about this discovery is that it gave me a framework for understanding a lot of things about the world. Human behavior may be the most important of those things.

This section of the story will deal mostly with my study of human and organizational behavior, and how they affect my work and outlook on life today.

Acting Out
“Life is but a walking shadow,
A poor player which struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.” William Shakespeare

Do you remember high school?

Yeah, me too.

I don’t know how your high school worked, but at my high school (graduating class size: 102), if you weren’t a jock, you weren’t anyone. I definitely wasn’t a jock, so I had to find myself a social niche. By my sophomore year, I figured drama club was as good a choice as any. I made a lot of friends through acting, some of whom are still my friends today. On a more intellectual level, I began to learn how to become an observer of humanity.

What do I mean by that? Acting involves a lot of watching. In order to create a character that is believable, a good actor has to know how humans interact. This requires studying other people and yourself intensely. Through acting, I learned to step outside of myself and watch from the perspective of the detached observer. High school definitely wasn’t my favorite time in life, but being able to become a watcher, rather than a participant, in some of the drama (pun intended ).

Over time I got to be a pretty decent actor and became pretty serious about it. I was even serious enough to decide to study theatre in college. That didn’t last very long. As I’ve written about in the past, I made a rapid change decision. However, I’ll always carry the lessons I’ve learned about the value of observation.

How Come People Act Like That?
“They take your love and your money.
They take your sugar and your honey.
They take you skinny or fat.
Hey, how come people act like that?” Muddy Waters

On the very first day of my very first philosophy class, my professor started his lecture with, “Philosophy is an experience of radical freedom.” I was hooked. After 18 years in a small town where people did pretty much the same things as everyone else, I was ready to question everything. Over the last few years I had begun to piece together how patterns and rhythms effect human experiences and I’d also developed my powers of observation. That turned out to be a great platform from which to begin the study of philosophy.

Very early on in my studies, I realized that I have no patience for esoteric questions. There are philosophers that study things as useless as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” but I was never one of them. Sure, at times I got hung up on questioning whether we actually exist, but for the most part I focused my coursework on ideas that I could apply in the real world. The great thing about philosophy is that it really addresses the human condition. If you stick with it, it can help you answer questions like, “What is the best way to live?”; “Why should I be ethical?” and even “Why do people act like that?”

I soaked it all up for four years, accumulating knowledge and maybe even a little wisdom. As I was writing my senior thesis (on the intersection of ethics and friendship), I seriously contemplated a career as an academic. Unfortunately, the current academic environment doesn’t really allow a lot of space for the exploration of such basics questions. The last thing I wanted to do was write 800 pages on Hegelian understandings of Spirit (which one of my professors actually did).

When I spoke with my advisor about my future career possibilities he told me very bluntly that it would unlikely that anything I wrote in philosophy would make any difference until at least “500 years after you’re dead.” I decided that I had to do something that would help the world a little quicker than that!

Getting Things Done
I will get things done for America -
to make our people safer,
smarter, and healthier.
I will bring Americans together
to strengthen our communities.
Faced with apathy,
I will take action.
Faced with conflict,
I will seek common ground.
Faced with adversity,
I will persevere.
I will carry this commitment
with me this year and beyond.
I am an AmeriCorps member,
and I will get things done. The AmeriCorps Pledge

In the very funny Broadway musical Avenue Q, there is a song that asks the question, “What do you do with a BA in English?” I was facing a similar dilemma. I graduated from college in 1999, at the very height of the dot-com boom. I was watching my classmates take jobs as investment consultants starting at $90,000 a year. None of those types of opportunities interested me at all and the recruiters in freshly pressed suits didn’t want to talk to me anyways. At the time I decided that eventually I would get old, fat, and rich, so I should seize the moment and do something useful for the world.

There are a lot of service opportunities available to fresh-faced college grads in the United States. After checking out a few options, I decided to join the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. The NCCC is a full-time, 10 month commitment to serve. Corps members are assigned to a campus and to a team. Community groups in the campus service region can apply to have a team come to them and perform service work. I was really attracted to the possibility of traveling throughout a region in the country and doing a variety of work, so I joined.

I have to say that being a Corps member was a great experience, but difficult. I met some amazing people and some incredible jerks. I got to go to the White House and shake Bill Clinton’s hand. I also swept up a lot of dead cockroaches, ate Army food, and wore combat boots.

From the very beginning of my AmeriCorps service, I had plenty of opportunities to study human interactions and organizational transitions. My team’s very first assignment was disaster relief, which was a challenging and high stress situation. Talk about rapid change! The situation we were in was constantly changing, from where we were sleeping, to the work we were doing, to people loving us, and then being mad at us.

My team leader taught me a tremendous amount about how NOT to help people cope. I don’t want to place too much responsibility on her, because she was young and under a lot of pressure. Let me just say that by using my powers of observation I was able to deduce that people cope best with rapid change when they have a stable platform from which to work. When my teammates and I felt like our work was meaningful and secure, we could tolerate almost anything the outside world threw at us. When everything was in flux, including our leader’s faith in us, it became much more difficult to do good work.

Because NCCC teams never stay with a project for more than 6 weeks, I had the chance to work with many types of organizations. Some were small and nimble, others were immovable bureaucracies, and still others were just struggling to survive. I realized that there is a sweet spot between chaos and efficiency and that very few organizations can stay there for long.

In the end, I realized that the NCCC was not a great fit for me at that time in my life and I terminated my service early. I certainly don’t regret my time as a Corps member, but there came a point when I was done. I ended up taking the first job that was convenient and getting out of town.

Not-For-Profit
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service

Immediately after AmeriCorps I was working at a dead-end job that was amusing, but not as challenging as I wanted. Over the course of a long, cold winter (made quite a bit better by the introduction of my best friend and significant other), I did a lot of soul searching and tried to figure out where I might fit in any kind of a career track. Clearly academia wasn’t going to work. Serving in AmeriCorps only left me more aware of the acute needs of people in the U.S. and around the world. I realized that I had to something that could impact people immediately. I decided that in the end I could best be of service by working in the nonprofit or NGO sector.

My first nonprofit job was at a very small agency. At its height, it had four full time staff members. I barely made a living wage, but I had the chance to learn at a pace that I never dreamed of in school! That organization went through 2 mergers in 3 years, first with a smaller agency and then with a larger agency that eventually swallowed it up. When I worked there I learned about changing funding environments, service environments, client demographics, legal requirements, accountability, oversight, and so much more. It was great work and I loved every minute of it (except for the crying kids!). I was able to watch as the organization evolved from a very team-oriented structure to more command and control. As the agency began to struggle more with funding, the director became much more interested in controlling the details. Clearly it was getting to be time for me to leave.

At the time I left that job I was one year into a Masters degree in Public Administration (MPA), with an emphasis in nonprofit management. I was quickly running out of money to pay for school, and I was in need of the new job. Fortunately, the best possible solution presented itself: work for the school and get free tuition! My studies and my work complimented each other very nicely. I was able to continue my studies of organizational structures, planning tools, administrative systems, and all of the other things needed to keep an agency running, while literally working to help keep agencies running.

I’m still working at the same school, and I’m still helping public and private community groups develop systems, manage knowledge, and generally change in intelligent and sustainable ways. When people ask for the elevator pitch about what I do, I tell them that I help organizations ask good questions and get good answers.

Sometimes I find myself sitting in a meeting, but moving my mind to the perspective of the outside observer. I’m present physically, but my brain is absorbing everything from afar. I watch how the people in the room talk to each other (or at each other) and try to figure out the story lines behind the spoken words. Every day of my life I get to use my brain and help people. It’s a pretty charmed life, which has only been enhanced by this blog.

Thank you for making this possible.

This is where I’ll leave my story for now. To be honest, this has been a difficult couple of posts for me. In some ways I’m not confident that my story adds a lot of value to this blog. I’m also feeling a little more exposed than I’m entirely comfortable with (which is why it’s taken me so long to finish this!). I hope you’ve found something interesting in this series. If you have questions, or would like to hear more, let me know about it in the comments.

Photo courtesy of cnw.

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