Hi Friends,

My therapist and I have been working on helping me be less helpful. As a compulsively helpful person I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to solve other people’s problems. I don’t think I want to completely stop helping people, but through therapy I’ve accessed more freedom to choose when and how I am helpful. This is just one example of the way therapy can be, well, helpful. In today’s post we’ll look at how therapy can help you if you’re having a hard time getting yourself to do an informational interview.

Hugs,

E

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Therapy can help you succeed at informational interviewing

It is a truth, almost universally acknowledged, that inter and intra-personal relationships are challenging and often in need of therapeutic attention. People like to say “marriage is hard.” And relatedly, it is often acknowledged that family-of-origin relationships are hard, and even friendships can be tricky, causing emotional, intrapersonal and psychological challenges. These types of relationships—kinship or “discretionary” social relationships—are understood to be complex, emotionally fraught and in need of occasional supportive therapeutic intervention.

Not so with vocational relationships and experiences. Instead, I have noticed an underlying assumption that work-based relationships and experiences should be straightforward and anodyne because they are professional, which as everyone knows, is the opposite of personal. And it’s only in the realm of the personal that things like feelings that therapeutic intervention becomes necessary.

This is not how things work in real life. In real life, the professional realm is a minefield for many people.

A few reasons professional life can be an emotional minefield

1. Work involves money and money is fraught. People’s survival and self-worth are at stake.

2. Work involves negotiating differing and even competing needs with other people.

3. Work involves power dynamics.

4. Work involves being seen and making yourself vulnerable.

In fact, professional life can be so emotionally fraught, that some people who have lovely friendships, a great partner, and a tolerable relationship with their family-of-origin can still completely flounder in the professional realm.

But because we insist on representing professional life as primarily impersonal, it can be hard for these people to fully acknowledge, or even see, how much they are suffering personally in their professional lives.

So here is a litmus test: If you are not sure if you are a well-adjusted professional voyager, you can ask yourself this one very simple question: Do you find informational interviewing doable?

And now you’re like, omg Emma, enough with the informational interviewing already. But no, I am serious. If you can do informational interviewing, you are probably doing okay. Here’s why: Informational interviewing requires the following, all of which signal good (vocational) mental health.

Positive beliefs that make it easier to do informational interviews:

1. You believe that you are worthy of other people’s time and attention: You think to yourself, “I’m a pretty nice person. People tend to like me okay. Sometimes I really hit it off with other people. I’m curious and engaged, and I have a lot to offer. I think if I reach out to a bunch of people, at least one or two of them will want to help me, or keep talking with me, or point me in the right direction.”

2. You believe that you deserve to succeed: You think, “I have a lot to offer the world. It would be a good thing for me to step into my power and use the gifts I was given in the world. Like all humans, I deserve the chance to flourish in this world and actualize my own unique vision of what a beautiful human life looks like.”

3. You trust that other people will treat you with respect: You think, “Sometimes people are cruel, but mostly they are respectful. I’m reasonably confident that the people I reach out to will be thoughtful and respectful in their response. And if they’re not, I’ll be okay because I trust my own strength and I know it’s never personal.”

4. You have a reality-based sense of optimism about what is possible professionally: You think, “I know I may never be a Supreme Court justice, and we live in a challenging economic reality that is rife with systemic injustice. Economic mobility is not what it used to be. But still, I know from experience that if work smart and hard, I can usually improve my experience or my situation.”

Negative beliefs that make it harder to do informational interviews:

1. You don’t feel like you are worth other people’s time. This is so common. I want to say that it’s more common for women, but tbh I know a lot of men who feel this way too. You think, “Who am I to bother this important person? How presumptuous of me to ask them to spend their precious time on little old me.” This is an issue of feeling unworthy. If you don’t feel worthy of other people’s time and attention, you’ll have a hard time doing you informational interview.

2. You’re scared other people will exploit, abuse or otherwise mistreat you. If you’ve had traumatic experiences with other people (especially caregivers or people who had power over you), you might have some major fears about what could happen to you in the vocational realm. You might think that if you put yourself out there you will be disrespected and mistreated. You might think people will try to get you to do things you don’t want to do, or treat you unkindly. Of course it’s true that people are mistreated in professional settings sometimes. But if you don’t have confidence in your ability to protect yourself, and if you believe that it is likely that you will be mistreated, you will have a really hard time doing your informational interviews.

3. You don’t feel like you deserve to succeed. Many people, usually because of how they were treated as kids, feel like they are bad or there is something wrong with them and they don’t deserve good things. This is so heartbreaking. Of course you deserve to succeed, but I highly doubt that reading this article is going to make you see that. This belief is poisonous and will hurt you in many ways, including in your professional life. You won’t be able to do your informational interviews if you don’t think you deserve to succeed.

4. You have negative beliefs about what the professional world is like and what is possible. Maybe you believe that all high-paying jobs involve sacrificing your soul. Maybe you believe that as a woman, person of color, a neurodiverse person or a member of the working class you won’t be able to gain admittance to the spaces you’re interested in, or that you will be treated badly once you’re there. Maybe you believe that doing well professionally will somehow corrupt you or alienate you from people you care about. While many of these concerns are legitimate, and things to watch out for, these kinds of scary thoughts can be a real impediment to informational interviewing.

So, like I said, informational interviewing is a litmus test.

I’m not saying it should feel easy, or that you should be good at it, or feel like a baller while you’re doing it. I’m saying, if you can get yourself to do it at all, then your mental health is probably pretty good.

If you can’t get yourself to do it, then you may be in need of some additional support. For many people support means therapy. But it can also mean talking to a friend, a coach or a pastor.

There’s nothing wrong with needing help. In fact, the Art of the Informational Interview is all about the deep interconnectedness of the vocational world (and all of life as well). When it comes to interpersonal wellbeing, intrapersonal wellbeing and vocational thriving, we all need help. That’s why we do informational interviews: to get the help we need.