Going Back to College - As President

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

(Page 8 of 11)

After her brother was killed, psychotherapist Helen Hand found solace and satisfaction running the university he founded.

Helen's Lesson: If you're considering a new direction, don't be shy: Think big. Intending to simply jazz up her job, Helen was bowled over by the rewards of making the complete career change that fate presented to her.

WHEN HELEN HAND got the phone call, she couldn't believe what she was hearing. Her older brother, John, had been murdered the previous night, attacked at random by a young woman wielding a knife. "I was in total disbelief," she says. "It was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me." It was a particularly horrible blow because Helen had always been close to her only sibling. "He was the big brother, the guy who blazed the trail for me," she remembers. As she mourned his death, she could never have predicted that this tragedy would set her own life on a completely different course.

When they were teens, Helen followed John to Duke University. When they graduated, brother and sister both returned to Denver, Helen to graduate school in psychology, John to seek a profession. John was a searcher, a visionary, Helen says. He got a real estate license, became a leader of an ashram, and worked as a program director for Denver Free University in the 1970s. A decade later, John started his own adult education university. "He was the sort of guy who didn't wait until he had the credentials to do something," Helen says. "He'd cast his line way out there, and then pull himself toward it." Colorado Free University, which he founded in 1987, prospered to become one of the biggest adult education schools in the country, offering four hundred courses to more than twenty-five thousand students.

Meantime Helen won a fellowship to earn her doctorate at the University of Denver. In short order, she married a lawyer, opened a psychotherapy practice, and had the first of their three children. She loved her work, feeling she was made for the role. "Growing up, I was the one in the family who tried to figure everybody else out, the peacemaker who always wanted to understand all points of view." Her client list grew, and she practiced happily for twenty-five years.

Then, in her early fifties, she became restless, yearning for a new challenge. A month before John's death, she attended a Boston conference on running psychotherapy workshops. "I was looking to jazz my job up," she says, "maybe starting a women's institute to run weekend workshops where people could reconnect with parts of themselves they'd lost." While she was retooling her profession, a new career presented itself.

Try a driver education day. Take your car out on a local racetrack and hammer. Check the track's Web sites for opportunities, or the local chapter of your marque's owner's club.

"A month after John died, I was talking to his number two at Colorado Free University, who was struggling to hold everything together," Helen recalls. "She said an extraordinary thing to me: 'Why don't you take John's place and run the school?'" Helen was flabbergasted. "My first reaction was, 'I could no more do that than fly to the moon.'" A couple of weeks later, the business trustee for the school mentioned it again. "That time it clicked," Helen says. "Partly it was a sense that my life was already utterly changed. My brother had been my touchstone, my soul buddy. Now the world was upside down and inside out. It felt like a tsunami taking me somewhere, and that I should go with it." She liked the idea of staying connected to John by continuing his work. Still, it wasn't an easy decision to make. Her brother's salary was much less than Helen made, and she felt a strong sense of responsibility to her long-term patients. Helen and her husband talked it over and agreed that she'd take the job, but instead of closing her practice, she'd cut back her hours to ten a week.

At Colorado Free University, she inherited a shell-shocked staff, still grieving their boss's death. Though people were welcoming, the transition was tough. "I had to run the school my way, not John's," Helen says, "and I met some resistance when I changed people's duties and the structure of the staff." One employee left. To make matters worse, when Helen took the reins in 2004, the school had hit a rough patch. Revenue was dropping 2 percent a year, and the balance sheet hovered at the profit-loss line. "It was really challenging," Helen says. In his will, John had left a broad-strokes mission statement for the school, but as the architect of CFU's future she was largely on her own. "A lot of the time I was flying by the seat of my pants, making it up as I went along." It was scary, but exhilarating, too. "It's been amazing to feel my own creativity popping."

Helen's new role answered her restlessness on many levels. Accustomed to doing things on her own, whether it was billing patients or dealing with their insurance companies, she now found herself a consensus builder. "I went back to my roots as the peacemaker," she says. And she learned how productive collaboration can be. "Whenever I interview a new teacher, I come up with a bunch of ideas for courses."

In her first year at the helm, not all of Helen's initiatives have taken wing, but she's learning whether to revamp or discard the ones that don't fly. It's all part of the challenge, part of the fun. "I've been delighted to find out how much energy I have," Helen says. "I can feel parts of my brain waking up. I'm discovering all kinds of dormant knowledge, things I've picked up through life experience. We all have this stuff stored away, but we don't realize it until we use it. As a psychologist, I know that different parts of ourselves come forward when we interact with different people - our spouses, our co-workers, our friends. When we take on new challenges, a similar thing happens: Different dimensions of ourselves step forward. Feeling a new skill set awakening gave me courage to believe in myself.

"Being fifty-three is a great help," she continues. "I don't think I could have done this in my thirties. Back then, I didn't see myself as a leader." Now, Helen says, she's drawing on her life experiences and coming into her own. "The challenges of a blended family with stepkids from my husband's first marriage prepared me. We had to invent things as we went along." She also credits her psychology practice with providing the knowledge and confidence she needs. "There are moments with clients when you think, Oh heavens, I don't know how to deal with this. There's an old joke among psychologists that you'll sit there with a patient saying to yourself, Boy, you need professional help, and then you realize you are the professional help. Life-and-death issues, suicide risks - the buck stops here."

Helen's family has given her great support. "All my kids adored my brother, and they can see that I'm into the new job." Even the friends who were concerned that she might be doing it for the wrong reasons, out of grief or a misplaced sense of responsibility, have been won over by her excitement. "Most days, I'm having a blast," Helen says. "I hope to be doing this a long, long time."

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.