Comebacks Are Hard for Everyone—Leaders Are No Exception

Comeback kid

Source: Wikimedia

Imagine that you are mid-career, a former leader in your field. You’re determined to make a comeback, but the question, of course, is: How? What do you do to get noticed and, finally, convince people that you’re perfectly situated (never mind the resume gaps) to undertake a brand-new challenge? How do you seem credible again when you have a hard time even believing in yourself? Comebacks are hard, especially because we rarely get the chance to return to the same sort of work we had before we slipped into (what feels like) the outer darkness of a has-been.

Well, for starters, you draw on your experience and personal resources, at each stage leveraging what you know. So, for example, if you worked in publishing, you call on old colleagues to learn how to present yourself this time around. Is the industry looking primarily for acquisition editors or marketing types? Are acquisitions now focused primarily on the young adult market, or is there a greater emphasis on emerging authors of color?

You consider your experience to be a tool to ask the right questions and to get you to the next level (which is what’s happening now, and which may be a long way from where you once were. Your objective is to prove the continuity between where you once were and the current scene (“I was a changemaker then, and I have the instincts to do it again!”).

You make the effort to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, making the most of your position, wherever you happen to be. You don’t allow yourself to belittle yourself but, rather, you understand that everything you’ve previously done is preparation, provided you can demonstrate that it was. So, for example, if you practiced law for twenty years (before the stress finally threatened your health), you can present yourself as a problem-solver who thinks fast on their feet. You can present yourself as a writer.

In effect, you see the translational possibilities in every position that you’ve had, even as you understand your current limitations, perhaps in terms of age (it’s unlikely that a start-up aimed at 20-somethings will want you when you’re 50, sad and potentially illegal as that is). For you, “determination” becomes an exercise in rationally projecting where your next steps will lead, deploying a wide-angle perspective that (in the interests of practicality) may still not cover 360^o. You find the correct balance between re-imagining yourself and still inhabiting the real world (it’s unlikely you’ll become an astronaut, even if you have been an aeronautical engineer). You take charge of your evolution, never over-reaching, always incremental, always well considered.

Above all, you turn every disappointment into an educational experience. Why did that possibility hit a dead end? One of my clients told me that he heard from an interviewer that he should have been more attentive to the younger people in the room—after all, this was a teaching position! Okay, false starts are part of evolution (just ask Darwin).

The first crucial step in your evolution, therefore, is to assess what you know and how you can build on it. Since you once were a leader, you determine how “once” translates into “now,” even if your circumstances are radically changed. One of my clients, for example, was back in the U.S., bereft of having lost his perch in a foreign corporate culture where he was a success. That foreign culture was miles from anything that a U.S. company might readily relate to (in his case, France, whose sclerotic bureaucratic norms are ridiculed over here).

So, what elements of his past success could he still draw on? The process of making that determination was slow, and there were detours. But each time he failed, he learned something, incorporating it into what he knew about himself. This effort defined determination for him. Such “determination” became a feedback loop in which disappointment (which had segued into knowledge of himself and the market) led to an enhanced ability to present himself appealingly.

My client was forced to get in touch with himself, to evaluate his strengths and to strengthen himself where he was weak.

After a while, he discovered core capabilities that allowed him to transition from one industry to another, and to discover analogies between those industries that he had not realized might exist. Once he accumulated a critical mass of knowledge—about himself, about the possibilities that he could tap into—he ramped up his efforts. The process was sometimes fitful, even nonproductive. But a pattern of success (of successive successes) emerged. We learn from this story that determination results from positive feedback: Emerging self-awareness creates, and benefits from, an ability to seize opportunities as they emerge, while those opportunities lead to enhanced self-awareness. Determined people are energized by determination.

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As you think about this process, consider these factors:

• Leadership sometimes requires transition from your comfort zone into a new environment. Is that prospect frightening, or does it excite you?
• If it is exciting, are you prepared to draw on what you know and then present it as useful in your new environment, i.e., as important knowledge that a new employer should value?
• Are you able to overcome loss of a career by turning mourning into productive efforts to resuscitate yourself? Nobody wants to take a leap of faith, so have you adequately prepared?
• Can you build on one success to generate an even bigger one—for example, by continual reinvention of yourself, expanding the cohort of people who will appreciate you?

All these questions translate into whether you have sufficient determination to recover your moxie when you’ve been dealt a blow. Determination, in this instance, requires a type of nimble coordination between who you are, whom you have been, and what both say about what you can become. Though we ostensibly live now, we really inhabit a space filled with experience, as well as prospects elevated (or sunk) by that experience. Such coordination is possible, provided you remain attentive to how seamlessly these phases of your life segue into each other.