Vertical Oppression?

Quite the Freudian slip.

At lunch with a truly valued business associate and friend whom I have come to know well relatively recently. As such we have plenty to chat about regarding our lives and careers before we met.

I was talking about how fortunate I feel to be specialising in something which I enjoy most, doing which I am at my best, at which I am told I am a ’master’(whatever that means) and which supports a comfortable lifestyle.

I also mentioned my annual detox retreats and how long ago they became part of my personal approach to sustainable well-being. “Tony at 40 was a stressed HRD; Tony at 60 is a coach who is pretty much at ease with the world and with himself”.

“Why were you so stressed?” I was asked.

“Well, amongst other things I became tangled up in other people’s expectations for me; in vertical oppression.”

At which we both laughed.

Clearly I meant to say “vertical progression” but the use of oppression tells us something.

For one of the pieces of advice I wish I had been given when I was much younger was “attach yourself to your own objectives for your career and not to any one person or organisation.”

Equally we might all continue to learn the lesson of Edgar Schein’s Career Anchors. I’m not going to rehearse the thinking here but knowing your drivers seems like a good plan.

If I had done those things I would have spotted that I never set out to be very senior; I set out to do interesting stuff, liked working with fascinating people, wanted to support a decent lifestyle but never aspired to riches and wanted a great deal of flexibility in my career.

So being sucked into the expectations of others, of the organisations in which I worked, where success often was seen as, and talented people were rewarded by, promotion and vertical progression was something I wish I had avoided.

Of course the experience I gained along the way opened doors for me as a coach and adds to my credibility.

However, when I knew in the year 2000 that I wanted to be a coach long-term, something stopped me from turning that into ‘short-medium term’. That something may well have been the expectations of others and the culture within which I was operating.

Oppressive indeed.