Coaching in Analogies #24: Gov. Edgar in the back seat

Governor Jim Edgar was an Illinois politician known as a capable man with a less-than-magnetic personality. I was a young TV reporter in 1999 when Gov. Edgar gave his last round of interviews before leaving office.

I’m quite sure now that he used the exact same line with a dozen other reporters, and that a staffer wrote it for him. But I still remember it decades later:

“I’ll know I’m not governor anymore when I get in the backseat of a car and it doesn’t go anywhere.”

It was an elected official’s apt reflection on returning to private life after more than three decades in the public eye. He would go from being responsible for a multibillion-dollar budget and tens of thousands of employees to being a college professor. 

For most of us, no transition will be quite as dramatic as this. Yet we would all be wise to think about what we’re about to give up and what we’re about to gain in a transition.

When I left television news not long after Gov. Edgar’s retirement, I became a former reporter and anchor. I thought I would miss having important people return my phone calls. I later discovered I don’t like talking on the phone that much. My station gave me a $500 a year clothing allowance, a princely sum for a guy in his early 20s. But it wasn’t long before I made enough money to buy my own clothes, and I was in my 40s before I decided not to wear ties for work anymore.

Preparation makes any transition more successful, and a lot of that preparation is mental. It can help us decide whether certain trade-offs are worth the trouble, and help us adjust to the new stage when the transition is complete.

Coaching prompts:

• What are three elements of your current role that you’d miss most if you had a different role?

• How can you prepare to replace those elements yourself in a new situation?