How I Got Here: Can your personal life create success at work?
Spirituality and culinary school as ingredients to successful careers in business
I recently started playing tennis after an almost ten year hiatus from playing competitively. Almost immediately, I was reminded of all the ways in which playing the sport had helped me in school and at work.
Through hitting volley after volley, I learned about the power of repetition in getting closer to mastery; through managing my nerves during match point of a game as my teammates watched on, I learned how to operate under pressure; through losing, I learned humility.
Our two stories this week highlight how interests that seem unrelated to business careers can, in fact, be the best preparation for them.
Our latest podcast guest, Meredith Whipple Callahan, seriously considered joining a convent instead of going to college. Meredith was drawn to religion and spirituality because she wanted to understand how people thought about living good lives (i.e., making good decisions, doing things morally, finding meaning). However, instead of becoming a minister, Meredith embarked on an almost 14 year career at Bain & Company as a management consultant.
But about ten years in, Meredith realized her heart wasn’t in the job anymore. She transitioned away from consulting work and started working on Bain’s internal leadership development programming. She realized leadership development was an incarnation of spirituality in the business world because it wrestles with similar questions: What do you want? How do you get there? What’s your personal purpose?
Meredith’s early practice of spirituality helped prepare her for what became a gratifying and meaningful career in leadership development and executive coaching at Bain, Bridgewater, and Evolution, where she guides executives through questions like the ones listed above. In fact, today Meredith is also asking herself those same questions, as she currently grapples with a career transition that may lead her away from the world of business altogether.
Listen to Meredith’s episode here.
Here’s a quick run-down of the episode:
Our guest: Meredith Whipple Callahan, Partner at Evolution, Executive Coach, Author
Career highlights: Consultant and Leadership Development at Bain & Company; Executive Coach at Bridgewater Associates; Partner at Evolution
What this episode has got us thinking about: Since before Meredith could even write, she has had a reflective practice that was primarily focused on journaling (when Meredith was five years old, her mom would write down what she dictated!). Today, the top two questions she asks herself and seeks to bring into alignment are: “What do I want?” and “What am I doing?” This episode has got us thinking about our answers.
The author of this week’s blog post, Elizabeth Chrystal, also laid the groundwork for her career in an unlikely place. After attending culinary school in Paris, Elizabeth became a management consultant. But she credits her interests in cooking and French as apt preparation for her career in business.
“While I also got extraordinarily lucky, I really do believe that that disparate set of interests prepared me for what was to come. While not quite in the ways I might have predicted, there was crossover between trying to time six different components of a dish for a tasting in cooking school, and finishing the presentation of an organizational redesign to a CEO. This did not make for a very obvious job application, but as a college senior, I was confident that my winding road would make sense in hindsight, enough to convince a partner that it really would. Mostly, I still am.”
Elizabeth is the CFO of Momofuku, a restaurant group founded by chef David Chang. Prior to joining Momofuku, she was a management consultant at Bain & Company in Boston. She studied French Literature at Yale and attended the Cordon Bleu in Paris. Reach out to her at elizabeth.chrystal@gmail.com.
- Lara
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