Harriet, center, with fellow journalists and a kiwi bird in New Zealand.
Choosing to leave your job can be tough when it’s who you are and not simply what you do.
Harriet, center, with fellow journalists and a kiwi bird in New Zealand.
I met Seattle–based journalist Harriet Baskas in New Zealand. The pair of us, along with four other journos, were invited guests on a media trip covering an Air New Zealand promo (see Sex, Social Media and New Zealand — Part 1).
Sitting swopping stories in the back seat of our mini-bus during one of our jaunts around North Island with our Air New Zealand and tourism New Zealand hosts, Baskas — when I told her that “you are not your job” was the title of one of my blogs (among other things, Baskas blogs on being stuck at the airport) — told me about her personal confrontation with “you are not your job” syndrome.
It happened when she wanted to transition from full-time employment to freelancer some years ago.
At the time, Baskas was general manager running a radio station licensed to a community college in Bellevue, Washington. “I was the one salaried staff member, working with about 120 volunteers,” she says.
She had taken over a flailing radio station at a time the college was thinking of giving up on the license and closing it down.
Nearly a dozen years later, “it was thriving and successful in the sense that it was operating effectively and growing. It wasn’t an NPR, but it was stable and respected in the community,” she says.
“I’d built and fixed radio stations before that one,” she continues.
“What I’m good at is projects. But my work was done in terms of the personally challenging part.”
She was doing some freelance writing and some producing outside of her job at the station. “And I was getting cranky and irritated with the day-to-day things.
“I knew it was time to go.”
Then she discovered a hard truth. “I realized I was scared to walk away,” she says.
Number one, from the benefits.
“It had been my first job with benefits and I was enjoying that.”
And number two, “the identity thing.”
“If I wasn’t the boss of a place, the manager of that radio station, what would it mean to me?”
Please continue to Part 2 of When resigning is harder than getting the boot.
