Not sure why you are where you are in your career? Ready for a change?
Not sure why you are where you are in your career? Ready for a change?
A one-on-one exercise that uses large paper panels to highlight information that can help lead one to a better understanding of oneself, and motivate one to change. Professionally, that can mean slight shifts to a complete career switch.
Find out more by visiting www.thepaperroom.com, or by contacting Taylor Training and Development Inc. in Lexington at (336) 249-3194. You may also visit the Web site at www.taylortrain.com.TextCould you map your work life for the next 20 years on 6 yards of paper? And what if you added in family history, creative goals and even workouts at the gym?
That’s what people seeking career advice get from Marilyn Taylor. She’s a licensed practitioner of the PaperRoom approach to career counseling. Taylor helps people who are seeking career transitions by mapping their goals, family history and past decisions.
“The PaperRoom is about making choices,” says Taylor, president of Taylor Training and Development Inc. in Lexington. “We tend to go through our days making choices based on goals that we have and results that we want to get.”
The PaperRoom is a creation of Sydney Rice, founder and president of The Boston Coaching Co. Inc., and author of “Choice Points: Navigate Your Career Using the Unique PaperRoom Process.” The name comes from a room in the company’s office decorated with about 6 yards of paper on three walls, where the original sessions took place.
Rice founded her company in 1987, providing career coaching before the term entered the standard vocabulary of the business. She created the PaperRoom after she encountered a number of clients whose careers had been influenced by subconscious habits and perceptions.
“I set out to create a process that would reveal that to people,” Rice says in a telephone interview from her Boston office. It’s particularly useful, she says, for people who are unfulfilled or even floundering in their current work.
“Either they don’t know what to do, or they’ve tried to change what they do and what they’ve done hasn’t worked,” Rice says. “They’re stuck.”
How it works
Taylor trained with Rice and uses the PaperRoom to help her clients navigate not only their work, but also their lives outside work.
She meets her clients at her street-level office, where she gets to know them. They then set aside time for a daylong examination in her downstairs space that’s reserved for PaperRoom sessions. Track lighting fixtures on the ceiling shine down on “panels” — paper charts that she writes on with colored ink, mapping out people’s lives from childhood to adulthood.
“This allows us to communicate visually,” Taylor says. “We want to shed light on things that help us to make choices.”
It’s not always an idyllic picture. “Sometimes we make what we think are good choices and things don’t turn out like we want,” she says.
The entire process averages about six hours, but Taylor offers clients the option to break it down into three sessions. Either way, it’s essentially up to the client to fill those blank sheets with help from the career counselor, who guides the client through a variety of life experiences that help identify a person’s work style.
Deeper than a résumé
The PaperRoom even touches on some areas covered in traditional psychological counseling, such as emotions from childhood and early family life. It is not a substitute for therapy, but at times may resemble psychological counseling, in that it looks at the whole person rather than just the dry facts on a résumé.
One former client admits he dreaded having to go through it. “I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to almost a full day of talking about my life,” says Mickey Sharpe, 44, who walked into the PaperRoom in 2004.
He had his doubts staring at those blank sheets. “I thought, these are lifeless pieces of paper on a flat wall. It was kind of bland.”
But Sharpe credits the PaperRoom for a life and career turnaround. He went from being an account executive with a contract furniture company to a self-employed residential and commercial designer. As owner of Sharpe Design in Lexington, he has worked on the interiors and exteriors of upscale and historic homes, as well as on commercial properties such as an art gallery.
On the first day of the PaperRoom, Sharpe talked through his childhood, relationships with parents and grandparents, past jobs, as well as best and worst work experiences. He ended up looking at a wall of paper that told him things he’d forgotten about himself.
“She (Taylor) didn’t give me a set of goals,” he said. “She didn’t give me a check list. It was a personal discovery.”
The importance of life stages
The technique is inherently optimistic, assuming longevity and productivity far beyond that of previous generations. The PaperRoom views clients passing through four “life quarters,” or stages of work and life.
Whether a client is 25 or 45 may make a difference in what he or she wants in life. Younger workers generally try to build their careers and families. People closer to the traditional retirement age often try to switch to a track that allows them to seek personal fulfillment, perhaps at the expense of more lucrative work.
Taylor says she’s talked to psychologists who are surprised at a career coaching system that goes so deeply into clients’ backgrounds. She encourages people to talk freely about what they learned from childhood, how they interacted with their mothers, fathers and other role models.
But her goals are different from those of a therapist. “We don’t go deep on (personal history), we don’t spend an hour on the sofa with it,” Taylor says. “We just get it up there (on paper).”
The next step is to use the insights gained from the sessions to evaluate new career options and alternatives, Taylor says. Sharpe, who completed the PaperRoom in one day and returned for follow-up coaching during the transition to his new career, keeps his original panels on a wall in his office. He considers them a guide to who he is, as well as a reminder of what he wants. His design work is centered around aesthetics, but he desires even more creativity in his personal life. He wants to draw, perform and sing as well. These goals, too, are part of those panels.
He says the PaperRoom techniques have anchored his views. “You can build your house on sand or build your house on rock,” he says. “I feel this has helped me build my house on rock.”
