Seasoned

When past learnings support a new learning process.

The metaphor:

I really hate feeling new. I love the feeling of making connections and improvements, which both require lots of context and vision. The feeling of being surprised sometimes makes even good surprises unpleasant, like when my mom got my sister and me a kitten, and I cried because that hadn’t been the plan. Being new is no context and connections, all surprises that you don’t see coming – like a step down where you thought the ground would be flat. So after I got assigned a new responsibility at work, I braced myself for all the surprises that come with learning – then realized with pleasure that I wasn’t starting from scratch.

The story:

I’ve been staying at a friend’s house, right on the shore of Honeoye Lake. I’m writing in a big armchair pointed at a picture window. There’s an oak tree just outside with electric green leaves, fresh from the bud. A warm breeze is bouncing the branches and crinkling the lake, wave-tops glinting in the sun. At the water’s rocky edge, there’s a little brown-and-white bird, maybe an Eastern Phoebe, staring towards the far shore while I’m watching it: both of us distracted, soaking up the long-awaited spring.

Dang, it’s been damp! It feels like 4, 6, maybe even 8 weeks of cool, rainy days, and this past week’s warmth was a revelation to both me and the birds. I’ve seen so many of them: a bald eagle soaring, then swooping down to fish. A merganser teaching eight hatchlings how to dive. Three pairs of geese waddling with at least twenty goslings, yellow-brown bodies outlined in tennis-ball fuzz. When I peered into the evergreen shrub by the door, where a cardinal kept disappearing, I saw a nest in the branches full of translucent-skinned babies, sleeping with their beaks pointed up. None of them moved, exhausted by the effort to grow.

Through these past weeks of waiting for the weather to break, as the trees and birds have been making buds and eggs and feathers, I’ve been working hard, too. In mid-April, as I hit the six-month mark at my new job, we reorganized and I took on a new area of work. I was hired to manage HR, but now I’m responsible for finance too, like I was at my old job. I liked that job, and I’m glad to get back to it, but I’d just started to feel like I was hitting my stride. I was open to the long-term, but loath to go back into onboarding.

Learning one new thing is interesting. Learning a lot of new things at once has been a challenge to my skills, stamina, and even self-image. I’m generally a curious person – it’s satisfying and exciting to click new concepts into place – but I’m more tenacious in planning or influencing than I am in gathering new information. As I try to wrap my arms around how finance works in this new setting as fast as possible, I find myself taking so many notes in meetings that it’s hard to sort through afterwards, having to admit to all I don’t know yet. It’s humbling.

During this process, I’ve been thinking of a joke from Mitch Hedberg. It’s part of his deep catalogue of substance abuse humor (may he rest in peace). “People are always telling me, ‘Mitch, don’t use liquor as a crutch,’” he says. “But I can't use liquor as a crutch, because a crutch helps me walk. Liquor really screws up the way I walk: it’s not like a crutch, it's like a step I didn't see." Learning a new area of work feels like constantly stumbling on steps I didn’t see.

Staff message me daily with questions I can’t answer yet, like how consultants should submit invoices and which codes to use on their timesheets. These are questions I knew cold at my last job, but the processes and software systems are different here, and I’m deciphering documentation created for someone else’s mind or not at all. Every day, I can feel the pressure of new information squeezing my temples and stomach. I had a meeting with my boss two weeks back where I was sharing my screen – you know how you can never type as well when someone’s watching your screen? – to walk through a new process. She asked how I was feeling. I told her that my brain felt stretched beyond capacity, like a snake unhinging its jaw to eat something enormous.

It takes longer to do things with an overloaded brain, and my storage systems get faultier. I got on a call with our accountant last week and had to pause in almost every sentence for a word that wouldn’t come: “Let’s start with the, ah, the invoices, because I wasn’t sure about the, you know, the um, allocations…”

After a couple of minutes, I just admitted it: “I’m stressed! Sorry to be forgetting things, I’m just thinking a bit slower from all that I’m learning.” It was a relief to say it out loud, and to realize as I did that it felt simple, like a fact – not a shame or a failure on my part, just information about a temporary state. Then, another surprise: “I’m not worried, though,” I continued. “I know it’ll all come together, it’s just a matter of getting there.” I was smiling with this realization – certainly not feeling cocky, not even sure yet how I would do several tasks that were due by the end of day. Even if I succeeded, there would be more questions like that tomorrow, and more the day after that.

But this state won’t last forever, and while it’s hard, it’s working. It’s already mid-May, and nothing too dire has happened. Even though much of what I’ve been doing are guesses, which items to prioritize and how to get them done, I’ve been largely guessing right. Even though each time that I’ve onboarded, it’s felt like I’ve only survived by the skin of my teeth and fervently hoped that I don’t have to do it again for years, I’ve always made it through; in fact, I’ve onboarded in finance before, at my last job, and I’ve already onboarded at this organization, in my original HR scope. I have context and resources, good relationships and a good reputation. I’ve seen seasons like this before.

One of my early jobs was at a think tank that held a lot of convenings: we were always organizing taskforces and councils, marketing the insightful leaders and seasoned professionals who’d sit at our tables together. I loved that expression, “seasoned professionals.” Every few years, when I update my resume, the phrase comes to mind and I wonder how well I’ve been seasoned so far. I’ve been picturing sort of a professional stew, braising for hours with carrots and onions, building a depth of flavors that can only be built over a long time at low heat.

It’s only just this past week, when I realized I was stressed but not worried, when I was reveling the finally-warm weather, that I wondered if I’d misdefined “seasoned.” I googled it and, sure enough, a seasoned professional is not one who’s well spiced, but one who’s seen many seasons. Not a depth of flavor but a depth of experience.

It makes so much sense that, back in my twenties, I thought the strongest professionals brought a taste profile that would make work delicious. I thought about work in outcomes and achievements, in saving the day and getting things done. These are important, but by my early thirties, I’d come to see my value as less about what I knew and more about what I could figure out. Thinking this way helped me stop pointlessly wishing I already had the answers and start building better networks so I had places to ask questions. Then, having these resources helped me resill through challenges that felt like they’d last forever – though they never did.

Knowing that the process is finite doesn’t make it easy to learn a new job. It takes a lot of self-management: shifting my thinking when it sours, sticking to my schedule of sleep and workouts when my impulse is just to keep working. I don’t always succeed. I’m dreaming of spreadsheets again. Some of the work is tedious or frustrating, and I don’t know enough yet to change it, so I’m stuck forcing myself to do it how it’s been done. Still, my time in similar seasons helps me guess how to weather this one.

Not every spring is as rainy as the past few months have been. Maybe next year’s will be, too, and maybe not. Maybe this summer will be as spectacular as the one we had last year, full of lake paddles and friend visits and brewery backyards. Maybe it will be more like the one a few years back, when Memorial Day and the Fourth of July were both wet and cool.

Maybe this coming week at work, I’ll get the sense that the pieces are coming together, that I know what I’m doing. Maybe that’s still a few months and hidden steps away. I’ve learned that if I want to bring my best self to something, I have to do the things that produce my best self: it’s not something I am, it’s something I make. And making things – like resilience, like knowledge, like buds and eggs and feathers – takes a whole lot of energy and a fair bit of faith.

I just looked back up, and the lakefront is empty. The phoebe is gone. Maybe she’s hard at work building a nest, like the one full of cardinals in front of this house. Or maybe she’s flying out over the lake, the sun in her feathers, just because she can.

The question: What have you been trying to learn lately?

Thanks for reading! If something resonates, please consider clicking the heart, replying with a public comment or private email, or forwarding to someone else.