Leaving Corporate America: Tevis Gale

Tevis Gale is the founder of Balance Integration and a member of the New York Incubator.

That I left corporate America is surprising, but perhaps not as surprising as having ever worked there to begin with.  My parents were the hippy family, the Montessori teacher and philosopher, the Rolling Stone loving family who never knew a grass roots cause they didn’t like.  I wasn’t really the Alex P. Keaton of the family, but I was interested in being active, being challenged, and seeing what sort of mark I could make on the world.  Somehow the combination of these factors led me to corporate America, or rather, Global Business more specifically.  I got a masters in international business from the leading program at the time, and found myself quickly climbing the ranks at Coca-Cola, UPS, IBM, Korn-Ferry, and finally AOL.  Fueled with passion for testing myself and a conviction that business is just a bunch of people getting stuff done together, I loved to work.  But I took my hippy past with me:  the caring for the human factor, the propensity to meditate or breathe when stressed, and the discipline to practice self care even in the most chaotic of times. 

 

As I wandered the halls of corporate America, after 13 years of kicking-butt, being promoted, taking on larger and larger challenges, there was one challenge I couldn’t ignore any longer:  why didn’t most people like their work?  I saw it everywhere I looked, and heard evidence of it everywhere I listened:  from collective water cooler talk slamming the company or boss to the always evident toxic folks we all avoided. Something seemed to happen between landing the perfect job and leaving the hellhole for another.  I saw that once the reality of managing human dynamics crept into view, our own lack of skills in navigating challenges or taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, and professionally seemed to let the steam out of our engines, feeling truly powerless in our own worlds. 

 

I took the leap because this mattered.  The loss of human contribution mattered.  The disconnect between company and employee mattered.  The impact on family and friends mattered.  The disconnect between self and work mattered.  All of these things began to matter to me, especially when viewed both in economic terms as well as in quality of life terms.  After all, here we are in the land of opportunity, of self determination, and limitless possibilitly: With all our amateur psychology, new age tools, ancient wisdom, AND social/trade mobility, the moment for asking hard questions about why we hate our work and just who we had to hold responsible for liking it was imminent. 

 

Around that time, I saw a documentary about New York city in which they showed the building of the high rise slums at the cost of traditional neighborhoods.  Like a war, you’d see the destruction of one great block after another.  The powers-that-be drove the machine onward, fueled by greed and bureaucracy, but one woman stopped them.  A little old lady in the west village saved the best parts of New York City. Then I thought about other great leaders who changed the world, and then the reality that every great accomplishment begins with a question, requires risk, movement into the unknown, and what’s more, FAITH.  I wanted to feel myself take those types of risks.  I wanted to watch what happens in the unknown. And more importantly, I was starting to know exactly what questions I wanted to ask.

 

Could I have done exactly that in Corporate America?  Certainly. Given the right structure, I might have even been able to do so within the timeframe my insatiable passion was demanding.  But the reality of being 33, out of debt, and feeling this true hunger to see what my life might bring forward in the world had me toeing the line in favor of freedom.  The morning of 9/11, 20 minutes before the airplanes hit the World Trade Center, I told my boss we had to either give me a role that would prompt these evolutions, or I needed him to fire me and give me unemployment to supplement my existence for a while.  Several months later, no path for passion surfaced, and blissfully, I was free.

After several months of reflection and clarity, my last employer became my first client.  I started a company called Balance Integration and let the questions around our work relationship drive development of work/life satisfaction programming ranging from Creativity in Business to yoga.  We grew from just me, to now operations in LA, 30 teachers, and more expansion to come.  There have been times of flourish, and times of agony over client invoices unpaid due to new accounting systems, paperwork whatever.  Since leaving, I can’t say I’ve ever looked back, not even for health insurance, a paycheck or the security of a great job title to brandish at cocktail parties. 

My learning is this:  some, like me, leave not because we know what lies out there in the unstructured, unknown.  Certainty is a ruse.  We leave because we want to discover what lies out there for us, and we want to see exactly what we create out of our own passions. 

Comments

[Nance L. Schick]

This is the Tevis I am SO proud to know. I am honored to be a part of the Balance Integration team. You are AMAZING!

[Steven Orr]

Very inspirational. Thank you.