Weave your career like a Carpet

I received a phone call at my office one day that started like this.

“Hoe spring jy?” (How do you jump?)

“Where do you want to jump to?” I enquired cautiously, wondering whether the caller, who introduced himself as Johan, had the right number.

“Well, I heard the way to make a career change is to find the courage to jump. They said you’re the right guy to speak to.”

“What kind of jump did you have in mind?” I explored more confidently, now that I knew he was not standing on the ledge of a tall building.

“It’s time to do my own thing. I want my own business. I have had enough. But how do I know when it’s time?”

“You know Johan, it takes courage to jump. But you don’t just jump, you weave a carpet.”

Silence.

Perhaps he now wondered whether he had the right number, so I quickly moved on.

I explored his new venture, his potential client base, where he would work from, what else he had in place and particularly who would buy from him if he were forced to open his business the following week. He had at least an 18-month preparation period before he could leave a good job that supported him and his family. 

I believe careers are like carpets, you don’t weave them all at once, but one border, one medallion, one stitch at a time.

I often get to speak to people who want to make a change and prepare themselves for that bold leap from one career or one lifestyle to another, much like the famous motorcycle stunt artist, Evel Knievel who did many wild jumps and broke many records and bones in the process.

Our friend Johan, and you perhaps, had some important carpet weaving to do. Whether you want to create a new career entirely, make a midlife career change, change roles in your organisation, start a business or make new choices about your later life, you can think of it as carpet weaving to get you there one step at a time.

Here is a list of some practical things you can do to get moving if you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or feeling pressured to ‘jump off’ something rather than ‘jump onto’ something that can fly.

1. Draw your ideal job and lifestyle

This was probably the first exercise I remember doing in a career workshop. It really did help me design my own carpet, even though it took me a few years to understand how powerful this could be.

The exercise is to draw your ideal work and lifestyle in one picture. Yes, I hear you say, you are not an artist. Me neither, fortunately that is not required. Stick figures are good and trees that look like lollipops work fine.

You only need about fifteen minutes to do this. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a large cloud that extends to the edges of the page. Then, inside the cloud, draw your ideal work and lifestyle in one picture. Include where you live, what you are doing, who is there. Draw the boat, your fish shop at the sea or your studio in the garden. There are some rules to this drawing, however. There are no constraints of time, age, gender, commitments, qualifications, health, or money. This is free space.

You don’t have to be starting out in your career to do this, after all said C.S. Lewis, ‘You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream’. The carpet you designed ten years ago that you may have put in mothballs now needs some new colour or pattern, so get weaving again, and focus on what you want now. What do you want to do differently now? Where do you want to live, now? What do you want to be doing in your work life? How are you wanting to advance your career in the corporate workplace? What do you want to do in your own business? If you are facing retirement, what do you want that to look like?

You may be surprised how your drawing will focus your attention so you can weave this future you want.  But make sure it’s your own future, your own carpet. You may have embraced what someone else said was good or valuable. Perhaps you’ve been comparing yourself to someone else and doing what they did, hoping for the same success. Your carpet will be unique, just as you are, so you need to make it exclusively yours.

Don’t underestimate the power of drawing what you want. Not all of it might seem possible now, so see what you can start working on now and weave as you go.

2. Go snooping and check it out

When I was young my father used to take me ‘snooping’, as he called it. It was generally on a Sunday and part of the deal was buying ‘snoopy peanuts’, chocolate covered peanuts that are still my favourite. We would go and look at cars, snoop at houses, drive around new neighbourhoods, explore areas of bush, and use sticks to kill enemies – mounds of orange earth just cleared. I don’t think I ever got to tell him how much I remember and enjoyed that.

I want to encourage you to go snooping. Go places where people do the work that interests you. Visit businesses that interest you without needing to get a job. Visit the campus where you want to study. Visit Sydney before you pack up to emigrate. Spend time in the theatre, with an artist or in a recording studio. Go house hunting where you want to live, even if your budget now only extends to the fuel to get there.  If you want to live in Texas, or anywhere, go there on the cheap and check it out. Visit book shops and see what is on the shelves and where your own book might fit.

And don’t forget the peanuts.

3. Do informational interviews

One of the most powerful, and underestimated carpet weaving activities is Informational interviewing. It’s having conversations with real people about work you may be interested in doing.

Informational interviewing achieves two important things. The first is getting real information from real people with their insights, likes, dislikes, their view of what is happening in their industry and who else they suggest you speak to. That leads you to the second important thing, build a network of people you can talk to, in an industry that interests you. Many of those people may become good friends or people you can assist or can assist you down the track. The bonus of informational interviewing is finding your own enthusiasm or a clear message that this is not your thing.

A workshop participant who wanted to move from the medical industry to adventure sports, told me he attended an outdoor expo and did 74 informational interviews in two days! If you’ve read the chapter ‘Try before you fly’ you will see how that is totally possible.

The purpose of informational interviewing is not to change career, but to check it out with real people. Will anyone speak to you? Well, you may be surprised how many people will help you provided you are honest and clear about your intention. Get their contact details, send them a thank note and get a referral to chat to other people.

4. Create a mock-up

Another thing you can do is to create your business idea on paper, long before you get funding or hire an office or start putting up ads on social media.

Design a brochure for your business using a pencil – remember pencils? Fold a piece of A4 paper into three. On the front fold write the name of your business, draw a logo in pencil and underneath it a single sentence that describes what you do. On the inside populate three main headings: 1) What we do 2) Who we serve 3) Our products 4) What makes us different. Design some business cards (you can even get a few made at a local print shop). Before I left the formal workplace, I had a pencil version of my business brochure. It was a work in progress, and I simply had to open my top drawer to contemplate it and work on it. Many years later it’s more sophisticated, but it’s not too far from where I started.

You don’t have to create only one brochure, try a few. Design five brochures or business cards that either complement one another or have nothing to do with each other! There is absolutely nothing illegal about having more than one career at the same time, different days of the week you do different things.  You can put together a portfolio of offerings that sit comfortably together. And who says you can’t run a guesthouse and do graphic design and create beautiful dresses and fix motorbikes and do the books for small businesses on different days of the week or different times of the day.

Create the pages of a potential website using many free online web-design tools. Write an article that might be published about your business in the future or write about a day in your life in the future, starting with ‘I wake up…’, in your journal.

5. Get connected

People still make the world go round, so start connecting and find your people. You won’t be the first person to have your interests, or your hobbies, or your concern for the environment, or your need to help the community, or your fascination for technology, or your desire to live and work at the seaside. Build relationships with people in your field of interest.

Connecting with people in your organisation, your industry or job of choice is a valuable investment in your life and career, even if it doesn’t come naturally. Hiding in your corner of the building, or at home, may feel safe, but you remain invisible to opportunities and learning. It’s a lonely journey on your own and it seriously holds you up.

I first discovered the world of Life/Work planning in books. Then I started looking for my people and I found them through my travels. As I began to connect with them, I found more than information. I found friends, enthusiasm, and the world of work I didn’t know existed. It had been there all along – I just didn’t know about it. And those people remain precious to me and have become part of my own story.

Go and find your people.

6. Get experience

A high school teacher once told me, gritting his teeth, that that so many children wanted to be film stars and soccer players, but weren’t in the local dramatic society or soccer club!

There is a difference between wanting to ‘be something’ and getting involved to try things out. Find a music teacher and see if practicing for many hours a day energises you. Write some articles and see whether writing makes you lose track of time, whether playing stocks and shares on a demo site raises your interest. Start doing something ‘on the side’ that doesn’t create a conflict of interest with your day job.

In the workplace, volunteer to get involved in short term projects, internships, an initiative the gets your hands dirty, something that provides a challenge for you. Look for opportunities to extend your current role in your organisation; find opportunities to get new experience and learn new skills. Give up ‘it’s not my job’ and see how else you can develop yourself, connect with new people and make a difference as you do.

Do work on a voluntary basis before you invest years of study in a field that is intellectually stimulating but does not work for you practically. Nothing on the internet can compete with trying it out for real.

Consider doing some speaking or writing around things that interest you.  There is an Afrikaans expression: ‘Wat die hart van vol is, loop die mond oor’, which says – a direct translation:  “what you heart is full of comes pouring out of your mouth.”

Write articles that give you exposure in your business or field of interest. Record podcasts. Write blogs. And along the way you will find your own voice. Many times, the act of speaking and writing clarifies your own thoughts. You don’t have to be a professional speaker or writer to get started, as long as you are genuine and have something of interest to share. You will develop more confidence as you get better at it.

Be brave and put yourself out there.

7. Get learning

Learning can add texture as you continue to add to your carpet and can be done at any time of your life and work. Do that accounting course you might need in future to run your business. Find short or online courses that are interesting or useful. If you are vague about what you want, or like me had no idea at all, just get learning. Sometimes you have to start anywhere. Learning about commerce, or language, or anything for that matter will never be wasted and you can always change your field of study and learn something else later. But waiting for the perfect course that will fill all your needs, is not going to happen.

Get an apprenticeship in a job or industry that you want to be in. It may not pay a lot, but it will give you invaluable experience and a leg up into a job down the line. There is a huge demand for practical trades, so this may be just what you are looking for.

If you have given up your studies, pick them up again. If that unfinished thesis catches your eye too often, finish it. If you want to learn practical things, find an old motorbike to work on. Go on a cookery course. Join a free course on forex trading. You don’t need huge funding to learn, there are many free online courses. In my early career I went on a typing course in a room of clanky typewriters and that has served me for many more years than I ever imagined. So sometimes it’s the very ordinary skills that get you started.

8. Save money

Earning or saving money is a great carpet weaving activity.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something simply because it earns you money while you work out the rest. I was doing some work with private hospitals and discovered that many of the nursing sisters were considering working in the Arab Emirates to earn more money for their retirement. Earning money for its own sake is a perfectly good choice and there is nothing immoral about doing good honest work that pays.

Consider doing other things to supplement your income. Sell your famous chocolate cakes, walk dogs, tutor people in your field of expertise, work in another country where you can stash some cash. If you are leaving a formal job to start your own business, create a slush fund of at least 18 months net salary before you leap, make money on the stock market online or invest for a longer-term goal.

Frequent flyer points and hotel points are money too. Most of my learning trips abroad were funded by frequent flyer points, low-cost hotels  and delicious budget meals. I travelled economy class except when points or favour moved me up the aisle. The best is we are now all online which allows us to travel from our desk, so consider what you need before you buy that next business class ticket.

When I first opened my business, my income dropped dramatically. My wife had given up practicing as a medical doctor to bring up our two boys, so our income was hit by a double whammy. We made log fires, cooked meals at home rather than eating out, read books rather than going to the movies, took dogs for walks, used paint rather than tiles –  we still have a pea-green bathroom that went out in the sixties. Even now, we realise how much more valuable those things are to us. I would certainly have earned more if I had stayed in corporate life, but it would have been at the cost of the kind of life I wanted. I am not suggesting that is true for everyone, we all value different things. But if your monthly income, or expenses, are in the way of your life, you may just want to review what really matters to you and make your money work for you and not against you.

9. Set up an office and buy stuff

With your carpet taking shape and patterns forming, there is still more colour you can add.  Why not set up an office at home that will support your future vision.

Convert a room into your new home office, paint it in your favourite colour and  convert it into your own space. Buy some second-hand furniture and  use it as the place where you can work on your future.

A client told me many years after he started his business that the most important thing he did was to paint and fix an outside room at home that would one day become his business.

You can also start to collect stuff you will need.  Go to second-hand shops and keep your eyes and ears open.  Theatrical costumes, equipment, furniture, a laptop, kitchen equipment, recipe books, tools for your workshop, a printer when it’s on special. Giosi, who had an upmarket men’s hairdressing salon, told me that many years before she started her own business, she had a high-quality barbers’ chair in her garage she had bought at a good price.

Create your work library from second-hand book shops. When I was travelling overseas in the early days of career, I would trawl people’s bookshelves, find books I wanted, buy them second-hand online, have them delivered to my friend in North Carolina, then ship them home at intervals. I have a wall of books that interest and help me continually. Only a handful of them are available in my country and some of my most valuable books are out of print. You might also look for old magazine in your field, they are generally inexpensive, and many people are dying to give them away!

Ann Bonthuys, who manages the conferences at our offices, worked for many years as a cleaner in a school. Over the years she bought cups, plates, glasses, and tablecloths so that when she retired, she could start her own hiring company from home. Her business not only supplements her pension but has helped her create the most beautiful home that was bare cement when she bought it. It seems she has passed this onto her daughter who has been sewing for an income and is now in her final year of studies to become a schoolteacher.  This family is weaving a carpet together.

Everyone must start somewhere, what can you start to collect now?

10. Get organised

The only thing that may be standing in your way is getting organised. If you have a plan but you are going round in circles, using up huge chunks of time on low value activities, living off other people’s stories and social media, you may need some structure to get you focused.

Decide when you work and when you don’t. Read ‘The 5am Club’ by Robin Sharma to take charge of your mornings and devote 90 minutes every day to the one thing that will change the game for you. Arrange meetings and activities around your own needs rather than waiting for the gaps to work in.

It’s difficult to weave your carpet if you are disorganised and allow every distraction in town or at home get in the way of your goal.

11. Make carpet weaving a daily activity

Many things are easier to talk about than to do. Endless conversations about carpet design, the history and the price of carpets may be fun, but nothing moves forward. The biggest danger is convincing yourself you have made progress by thinking and talking about it, when indeed you have done nothing.

Carpet weaving is not a one-off activity. Carpet weaving needs to become part of your daily routine, or it may get lost in daily tasks and low priorities that may be urgent but less important. You may have become so focused on helping others that your own dream has got lost. They say that what you focus on grows, so if it matters to you, give it your daily attention, even if only for a few minutes.

Remember also that faster is not always better, some things just take a long time. You probably know the story of the tortoise and the hare who decide to race each other. The hare, overconfident, laughs at the tortoise, races off, then stops to rest. While he takes a break after some fast sprints, the tortoise slowly passes him and gets to the finish line first. Slow and steady often wins the race. Write just one paragraph. Find a file. Find a website. Connect with someone. Read one page of a book. Make one call. Do something, no matter how insignificant that may seem.

No time, you say. If you have time to watch TV, scroll through social media or spend hours playing computer games, you have time to do some carpet weaving, one strand at a time. Even ten minutes focused on what you want is better than doing nothing or waiting for huge chunks of time that may never arrive.

Ask yourself what small task you could do today that would help you weave your carpet. It may mean opening a document and giving it a name. Writing the outline of an article. Making a single phone call. Finding a piece of research on the internet. Looking for an online course. Start with the small tasks that will ultimately lead to achieving the bigger goal.

12. Use the double-stitch

Sometimes where you want to go, is not in a straight line. You may be in the wrong industry with the right skills. Or be in the right industry with the wrong skills. Or you might be in the wrong place doing the wrong thing.

Your first step may be to get into a field of work that matters to you, even if the job itself is not what you had in mind. You can change job role later. Once you are in the field, you can make contacts, build credibility and advance in an industry that really interests you. Every field or work has its own way of working, of understanding life.

Or you could take a job that develops the skills you need, even if the field of work doesn’t particularly blow your hair back. When you have the skills, you can begin to explore other industries that are looking for someone like you.

If you are rethinking your own business, take a full-time job in the interim. Not only does it pay the bills, it also gives you time to review your plan, to take stock without giving up your dream entirely. You don’t have to chuck it up because it didn’t work. It may have been the right thing at the wrong time. Maybe you are not ready for it yet, or the market isn’t. If it’s still important to you, keep working at it. If not, let it go.

13. Ask for help

An important carpet weaving activity is asking for help. Nowhere is it written that you must do it all on your own.

Seek advice. Find a mentor. Ask for help from people who have skills you don’t have. It could be a doctor or a good therapist or a friend, a colleague, your family. Have a conversation with someone who listens well so you can hear your own voice.

In my case it meant asking for help from a good copy editor to turn mounds of loose writing into something you may want to read. Just because you personally can’t do it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

But inviting the help and opinions of others doesn’t mean you give away your choices. Other people will have valuable opinions about the carpet you are weaving, so listen to them carefully. But just because they regard your carpet as ‘wrong shape’, ‘wrong colour’, ‘will never sell’ doesn’t mean it’s wrong for you. Be careful too who you ask for help, the ‘yes buts’ and armchair critics may have valuable advice, they also might not.

Hear their advice, but don’t ignore your own heart and intuition. No need, either, to make it their problem. 

Remember it’s your carpet, not theirs.

14. Take stock of what you have already

In my early career I was involved in presenting a corporate personal development programme. It started by posing some open questions to the group. One of them was ‘What would you do if you won a million Rand?’ After people had suggested a few things, almost without exception they realised they didn’t need to win a huge amount of money to start creating what mattered to them.

You don’t need to sell up everything you own, or win the Lotto, to start, or design your carpet. You can start just where you are with what you have. 

That means appreciating what you already have. Look at the things you have learned, the experiences you have had, those things you have achieved, the difficulties you survived despite the odds. Look at your photograph albums, your box of letters and cards, commendations you’ve received along the way. Consider the resources you have, including time and skill.

My friend John Marsden always reminded me that, when you climb a mountain, it’s important to stop once in a while, turn around and see how far you’d come. It is easy to become so goals obsessed, so focused on the next thing, that we fail so stop and consider what we have already achieved. Perhaps it also time to let go of what you haven’t achieved, the things you planned but didn’t get around to doing, and work with what you have now.

If you are putting off starting because you don’t know where to start or are waiting for your ship to come in, see what you already have, and what you can do with that. There is always something you can do, so do that.

15. Develop new skills

Developing skills is a great ongoing carpet weaving activity. Skills are still the hundred-dollar bill in the workplace.

Take a less-than-ideal job with a less-than-ideal salary that offers you skills you may not learn anywhere else.

Learn general skills that will be part of your work life in any environment. No matter the job, you will always need some level of administrative skills, working with people, selling, working with money, setting up systems. Find a way to develop those, anywhere. Take a job that teaches you how a business works, how marketing works, how administration works. Don’t wait for a formal qualification, there is lots to learn along the way!

Seek out opportunities to learn the skills to complement your knowledge and technical skills. Learn to speak up, negotiate better, listen better, lead yourself and other people in a proactive and productive way. The adage ‘We hire people for their skills and fire them for their behavioural faults’ is still alive and well. The way you manage yourself around other people and the attitudes you bring to work can sabotage your work life or set you free.

Embrace courses on emotional intelligence so you can deal better with disappointment and power through when it gets hard. Just as a butterfly can’t fly unless it gains the strength through fighting to get out of its cocoon, you too will need to develop the emotional resilience to make it through a world where things won’t always go your way.

16. Learn from your mistakes

If you’ve ever looked at the underside of a handmade rug you will notice the colours are dull and there might be joined threads or even a sewn patch. The upper side of other people’s careers may look perfect, but the underside has some war stories and failures.

You don’t have to get this right every step of the way to succeed. You might have taken some turns that in retrospect you regret. That’s how it goes. There is no perfection this side of heaven, so cut yourself some slack as you learn and grow while you discover things and make mistakes.

You might have become discouraged because things didn’t work out or you feel you have failed. That’s standard stuff for anyone who has achieved something great or important for themselves. There is the famous quote from Thomas Edison who developed the light bulb: ‘I have not failed – I’ve simply found 1000 ways that don’t work’ he said. Richard Branson said: ‘Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again’. Tom Watson, the CEO of IBM went further to say: ‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate’. And Henry Ford said: ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’.

Failure can be tough, but not fatal, so consider it part of your journey. After all, failure is not falling, it’s not getting up again. How did you learn to walk? Imagine saying after a few weeks ‘You know this walking things…I just don’t think I’ve got what it takes…’ So just because you are failing, or have failed, doesn’t mean you are doomed. ‘Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor’, said Anne Lamott. Aim for excellence and let go of perfection.

You may be stressing about how old you are and how far you haven’t come. Appreciate the timing in your life and don’t let your age stand in your way, now may be your time. In the movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the enthusiastic but desperate owner has advertised his rather shambolic hotel in India as a place ‘for the elderly and beautiful’. Amid the chaos and things going wrong, the owner reassures his guests, as I hope you will be reassured now. “Everything will be all right in the end. So, if it’s not all right, it’s not yet the end.”

Liz Stone, co-founder of Twitter said that “Timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.”

Keep going and learn as you go.

17. Enjoy the weaving process

If you are not enjoying what you are doing, life may be passing you by. If you are only weaving your carpet because one day you will be rich, or successful, or whatever, you may not be any happier when you get there.

Very often, less is more. I believe that carpet weaving is about creating a life that matters to you, not just a bigger one. There is a freedom in simplicity that doesn’t mean aiming low, it means aiming higher for the things that matter to you and not those things that might define success but don’t speak to your soul.

You can everything and have nothing, or you have little that matters to you and be utterly content. I believe carpets are about working towards those things that make your heart sing, work that makes you feel alive and the rewards that make life worth living.

I was on my way to stay with dear friends in Sicily a few years ago. I watched as so many young travellers within minutes of take-off, pulled down the blinds and pulled out their mobiles. It made me wonder why they were travelling at all. And why they weren’t more interested in the journey and looking out for Mount Etna smoking away. If you are not enjoying the journey, you may be going places, but missing the view and the fun along the way.

18. Let your carpet help you make choices

If you are considering a new job, a new home, an investment, a change in your field of study, rather than create a pros and cons list, that can be more confusing than helpful, simply ask yourself: ‘How does this choice help to weave my carpet?’ What could I learn from this? What exposure will it give me? What people would it connect me with? What new competencies will I gain? ‘What will I learn from this?’ What will it provide that I don’t already have?’ ‘Will it help me make a better contribution, or a contribution I care about?

It might be giving up a specialist role to get into general management because of the experience and learning it offers you. You might elect a sideways or even a downwards move that takes you closer to where you want to be. It may mean moving to a different country. It may mean staying longer in a role or job that is not ideal, but which may be important for your career ahead. A client who gave up a hugely generous package to take on a new and untested role, told me that no amount of money could have compensated for the experience, the opportunities to travel and the stimulation that the role had given her. The are many ways other than up!

When you are faced with choices about how to spend your money, consider whether buying a car, paying for studies, or attending an overseas conference serves you better. A consultant I worked with sorely wanted to buy a farm. ‘I can just see the farm’ he said, ‘that stops me from spending money on just about anything I don’t need.’

19. Carpet weaving is an alternative

Carpet weaving is an alternative to waiting till you are brave enough to jump from one career or one lifestyle to another. Or being so immobilised by the obstacles and the demands of daily life that you do nothing at all. It is easy to be taken in by the need to be an overnight success, but careers take time and effort and demand many choices to achieve what may, from a distance, look effortless. That doesn’t mean you should avoid taking any risk, life is a risk. It simply means working with rather than against it. When you begin to actively weave your career carpet, you get to move closer to what matters to you, one step, one stitch, one action, at a time. I don’t expect that anything in this chapter is new to you. The purpose is not to provide new ideas but to encourage you to begin in the smallest ways to move closer to what you want.

20. When nothing is clear

The Mariners of old had to follow the stars that would give them only a general direction to move in. Sometimes you only have a general sense of where to go next. All you can do is move forward the best you know how.

Our friend Johan who wanted to ‘jump’ had a great plan, but he needed to do a fair amount of carpet weaving before he jumped. He needed to focus what his business offered, do some informational interviewing with others in the industry, build a financial backstop, get connected with potential clients, update his online presence, test some of his products in the real work, set up an office at home, create a routine that would allow him to get and stay productive, trim some of his current expenses that would be under threat as he built his business. He had eighteen months of work to do before he could, what he called, jump.

Maybe you do too.

©Andrew Bramley, 2022