Different Grass

A couple of years ago, right at the start of the pandemic, prior to a lot of reorganization and resulting (really amazing) opportunities, I was "done" with my then current position. Despite showing that I was capable of much more than I was being asked or allowed to do, I felt blocked from growing into the next step in my career. I volunteered to take on more responsibility without the pay. I felt my salary was pretty darned good for an instructional designer role in Higher Education. I can't say I didn't care about the money, because that's just silly, but what I really cared about was being allowed to fix problems, make things easier, and improve relationships. I volunteered to do this for free and was blocked from it because "it wasn't my role." Basically, it was my understanding that I didn't have the right job title to do those things. It turns out that it was a bit more complicated than that (isn't it always?), and there were a few more avenues available to me then that I wasn't aware of, but the end result was that right at the start of the pandemic, I'd made the decision to look for different grass.

The pandemic delayed that decision. Everything was unstable. No way was I making a change at that point in time. However, I was committed to taking advantage of job postings when I saw them, but only if those job postings were exact fits for what I knew I wanted.

My husband and I have a saying we use as a guidepost in situations like these:

"The grass isn't always greener on the other side of the fence. It's just different grass, and that's what you need sometimes."

In this situation, I needed different grass, and it would have seemed greener to me as long as that new position gave me the agency to solve problems. (See the "What are you good at" page for more on this.)

I was under no illusion that I'd take a different job and that all of a sudden all the problems I was dealing with and all the things that were making me unhappy in my role would just disappear. If they did, I knew they'd be replaced with different problems. That's just the nature of life. One benefit of staying on your current side of the grass is you know where all the cow patties are. You know what they look like, what they smell like...what they feel like if you step in them. That's a bit of an unknown in new positions that you have to learn. There's literally no way of seeing all those cow patties ahead of time.

[That analogy took a decidedly messy (and smelly) turn. Moving on!]

In this story, my caution in moving on to something new was rewarded with an opportunity to move up to a leadership role, made possible by a recent reorganization and expanded service offerings. It turns out all the ways I'd pushed and shoved to solve problems, improve relationships, and struggled to make things better had been seen by someone. I was in the right place at the right time for sure. But just being myself, my true self, all of those years before, I'd unknowingly situated myself to be qualified for exactly what I wanted. By recognizing that there aren't better opportunities everywhere else, just different ones, I didn't exit stage left in a hurry. Which meant I was still there, still ready for more responsibility when that opportunity came up. It also meant that I didn't give up those things that made me who I was. I still solved problems and pushed for change. I tried to make my perception of the grass I was in greener every day.

The point of my sharing this isn't to explain how lucky I am. It's to emphasize that you need to make decisions for the right reasons. Things on the other side of the fence might look way better than where you are now, but often the things on the other side of the fence are just different. Sometimes different is what you need, and if you see that, you should go for it.

-Lynn Wahl