We recently connected with Tom Andre and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Tom thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?
We do not always recognize the moments that define our career when they happen. My mind keeps going back to a moment when I was working in advertising sales, sitting at the table of the ad agency whose business we were pitching.
I gave our spiel, explaining who we were as a company and what we offered. Our product was essentially the same as that of several other companies in the market – maybe worse – but we had come in good faith, with a strong presentation and ideas that we hoped they would want to buy. Everyone had been kind and friendly and engaged, and now we were in the Q&A part of the presentation.
An earnest young man who had a good position at the agency asked a long, detailed question that had something to do with floodlight tags. I remember at the time that it seemed like a mostly irrelevant question, but it was clear that he was asking with sincerity and enthusiasm. I gave an answer. Or maybe my colleague did. At the time, I had some notion of what floodlight tags were. The director seemed somewhat satisfied, and we moved on. It was all very cordial and professional
After the meeting, I couldn’t stop thinking about the level of knowledge and enthusiasm the young man had shown. He was much better at his job than I was at mine.
My whole life, I have tried to hold my work to a high standard. If I am going to attach my name and reputation to something, I want to be able to be proud of it. Like most people, I don’t like to feel like I stink at something. I don’t like to feel like an empty suit, having just enough knowledge to get through a meeting. If I wanted to be great at this job, I had a long way to go. And to get there, I’d have to do a deep dive into mobile advertising technology.
Before I took the job selling mobile advertising, I had been the proud owner of the cheapest smartphone I could get my hands on. Before that, I held on to my flip phone until it literally fell apart.
Now that I was working in mobile tech, one could argue I had come a long way. But that would be dead wrong. It took a while to process, but I realized I hadn’t come anywhere at all. I was selling mobile technology and there was absolutely no way I was ever going to care about anywhere near as much as the people around me, because I didn’t care about it at all. I couldn’t fake it and I didn’t want to fake it. I wasn’t just in the wrong job; I was in the wrong line of work completely.
That question felt like just a little tremor in the moment, but in hindsight it was tectonic. All my denial was blown up, and in the absence of any cover, I knew I had to find another career. Being able to say, “I don’t actually like this and I don’t really care about this” was freeing.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a marriage and family therapist working in private practice. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to do this work. We get one shot on this earth, and doing this job has given me an opportunity to learn more about the world than I ever could have imagined.
I grew up in New Orleans, and maybe in New Orleans you grow up a little bit too fast. In high school a bunch of us hung around in music clubs and learned how to have what we then considered to be a good time. I majored in history in college, and after a short stint working at a p.r. firm in New York City, I went to Brazil and started a New Orleans-themed music festival because it was the coolest thing I could think of to do at the time and because all the “real” jobs I had ever been exposed to seemed to lead towards a mundane life. In my 20s, having a mundane life was a fate worse than anything else I could think of.
Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?
You have to listen to a person’s entire story and not try to put them into a category and assume that you know what is best for them. Having seen something before, or even often, does not mean that the path forward is going to be the same for everyone. Each one of us brings a unique set of circumstances and also a unique set of skills into any situation.
In order to keep doing the work day in and day out, I think it really helps to have what I would simply call “humble curiosity.” That is, you genuinely want to know about people’s lives, and you take the position that even when you think you would have done things differently, you have not in fact walked in the other person’s shoes, and therefore it’s best to reserve judgment. Of course we all have our limits when it comes to this, but having a bit of life experience – by which I mean life has knocked you over a couple of times – helps us remember that we don’t have all the answers. That’s why this is also a great second or third career.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
There are too many to count, and I don’t know if I’ll ever fully unlearn most of them. Like many people, I suffer from the Shoulds: those sometimes deafening and sometimes barely audible voices that tell me how to live my life.
I suspect that my own case of the Shoulds comes from a desire to please my parents and other authority figures, combined with a shyness and desire to fit in that led me to believe that the way most people do things is the right way to do them, and I should do them that way, too. After all, praise feels good. Being marked as different does not feel good for most people.
I think you can use logic to combat the Shoulds, but I’m not sure there is a total cure. Instead, I think the best we can do is shine as much light as we can on them to get an understanding of why we feel the way we do, and then decide whether or not we agree with those feelings. It’s never easy to have a feeling that you disagree with, but I do think we get better at it over time. And being able to look at the Shoulds and say to them, “I know what you think, but I don’t agree with you, and I’m not going to do it your way” can really help reduce anxiety.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tomandrecounseling.com
- Instagram: @tomandrecounseling
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/tomandre