CAREERS
We often share stories of career success, but what about the defining moments that were missteps? Career development coach Alice Olins asked three high-profile women to share the opportunities that never came to fruition – and why they mattered
I’m going to take you back to the start of 2019. Specifically to a fancy cafe in west London, where, on a cold January morning, was meeting my then business partner. We’d planned for an easy, cappuccino-filled post-Christmas catch-up, but when I arrived, I knew something had shifted. As I pulled out my chair, my gut tightened and the truth came to pass: my business partner was done. She wanted to close the business and for me to follow her lead.
This crossroads was not in my plan.
I certainly wasn’t shutting up shop, so I needed to take a leap – to trust that things would work out while continuing to put one foot in front of the other. Like many defining junctions in our lives, path-altering career moments demand we carry on with our daily activities – a collision that can feel blinding and stressful, and that can prevent us from realising that we’re simultaneously banking a formative experience.
Recognising that grim career moments can often become golden learnings is the moral of this story. As Apple co-founder Steve Jobs put it: ‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.’
I love how Jobs verifies trust. Trust in yourself – something we master with every stumble and rejection – is what gives us space to develop our instinct muscle. When we consolidate our learnings and build this instinct, it feeds resilience and allows more acceptance of the inevitable discomforts that are part of pushing for progress and success.
Like most people, I have avoided picking through my career downers; I still come out in metaphorical hives when I think about my 23-year-old self, who was pummelled with knockbacks. I began to question my abilities, swerved the truth with friends and often felt like a failure before I’d even begun. What I’ve come to realise through my work in women’s career development is that if we watercolour the junctions, stop-off points, failures and rejections alongside our professional peaks and wins, the picture of our career resembles brilliantly interconnected paintings of many strands and discoveries.
But to see the beauty in ‘what went wrong’, we need to do some sifting through. As a career coach, I regularly come across professional heavyweights who have pinballed around and would be the first to point out they’re now in careers completely removed from their expectations at the start. For them, the misses have given them freedom: the PhD rejection became a blessing; the turned-down promotion led to a more expansive role.
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