I was born in the Year of the Tiger on the Lunar calendar.  I always thought it was really cool to be a Tiger.  I mean, the Tiger is considered the King of Beasts in Lunar Astrology!  Tigers are described as a symbol of strength and braveness and loyalty.  Specifically, this is a Water Tiger year, the same as the year I was born, and since those only come around once every 60 years, you all now know how old I will be.  This has to be special, right?  And, lucky!  But the last Tiger year, 12 years ago, was a very rough year for me and that got me thinking.  As I looked back over my Tiger years, I realized that while in some ways they were indeed lucky, all of them were—for lack of a better word—formative.  Big things always happened in Tiger years.  So, what happened and how have those years changed me?

My first Tiger year was the year I was born—about as literally “formative” as you can get.  No need to dwell on that further.  My second Tiger year was at 12 years of age when I was in fifth grade.  My Mom remembers this year well.  It broke her heart.  Many of us have a “hurt child” story to tell and this is mine.  I’ve spent most of my adult life dealing with healing her.  The details are unimportant.  Suffice it to say that I went from being a fairly happy-go-lucky kid, totally unaware of 12-year-old social dynamics, to a total social outcast.  The dregs of this followed me all through high school to a certain degree.  It was painful in a “kids can be cruel” kind of way and, while I have my suspicions, I never got to the bottom of why this happened.  In a positive way, this situation kickstarted my development of empathy.  In a negative way, it made me paranoid of being blindsided and left me with a desperate need to be liked.  The former can be turned into a productive drive to always do your homework and push for clarity.  The latter is an unfortunate liability for many a manager and leader.  Knowledge of that hurt child is significant.  I can never truly heal her but I can recognize her voice in my head.  She’s still there but mostly reminds me to be kind to others, to remember that everyone is human and has feelings and value.  That’s not such a bad thing.

My third Tiger year, at 24, found me in grad school working toward my PhD in Chemistry.  My education had been a glorious ride up until then.  I was a good student.  I picked things up fairly quickly.  I had few real challenges—Advanced Organic Chemistry being one of them.  But in this Tiger year, I came up against my Oral Candidacy Exams.  At Penn State, this was really your test for the PhD.  Pass your Orals and the thesis defense was essentially a formality.  Fail and you’re out.  At this exam, you present your current research, an original research proposal, and defend them both against questions from your committee.  I faced two headwinds for my Orals.  First, at the time I was developing my original proposal, my advisor was being courted by another university.  He was not around much physically and not at all mentally.  I developed that proposal all on my own and it was admittedly weak.  Second, my advisor just happened to be instrumental the week before my exams in failing one of the students of his chief rival in the department—who happened to also be on my committee and was seeking retribution.  It was a very long couple of hours and I almost failed.  It was a VERY humbling experience.  It brought me down off of my high horse.  It taught me that maybe I wasn’t quite as good as I thought.  It also taught me a bit about office politics and collateral damage.  The “celebration party” afterwards is also the reason I can no longer drink Jack Daniels.

My fourth Tiger year, at 36, brings us to the beginning of my international assignment in Mexico.  Talk about formative! Moving as a single woman to a foreign country, where I didn’t yet speak the language, and had a nearly impossible assignment was the bravest and possibly stupidest thing I’ve ever done (surpassed only by the assignment I took upon repatriating).  But it was also the most spectacular experience I’ve ever had.  Just reread the title essay to this blog.  No period in my life has ever challenged me more, expanded my mind as much, or provided the richness of experience.  I will forever look back on that time as a period of exponential growth that did more to form the person I am today than any other period of my life.  And that Tiger year was the most intense year of that time in Mexico.  Incredible highs; incredible lows.  And I wouldn’t change a moment of it—including getting robbed by a cop my second week in country.

If you are paying attention, you are probably noticing that each Tiger year I experience is more intense on its impact than the last and my fifth Tiger year at 48 was no exception.  I had two of the most momentous and formative experiences of my life in that one year.  After 22 years at my first company since leaving grad school, I changed jobs and companies.  I went from being a mid-level manager of a support function deep within the bowels of a $10Bn global company to becoming a business manager who owned the P&L of a small business within another global enterprise.  I had long since gotten used to owning the cost side of the equation and fighting the internal battles to support my organization.  Now I owned the revenue side as well and boy did that change things.  I grew more, professionally, in that first year than at any other time in my career.  And less than three months into that transition, I went home to watch my father die from colon cancer.  I grew more, personally, in those ten days than I ever want to grow again.  There is no aspect of life that I do not view differently from before I went home that September day.  I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it here.  Those of you who have gone through this know what I mean.  Being there for the passing of a loved one changes every fiber of your being.

So, here we are on the cusp of another Tiger year.  “Water” years are supposed to be times of extremes.  Big highs.  Big lows.  I am excited and nervous about what this year will bring.  (And after reading this essay, Trish is very anxious!)  It’s not that “formative” experiences ONLY happen in Tiger years; it’s that they ALWAYS happen in Tiger years.  Regardless, I’ve got all the lessons from my previous Tiger years to prepare me.  The hurt child is there to remind me of the humanity of all those with whom I cross paths.  The scientist who almost failed her Orals is there to remind me to be humble.  You are never as good as you think you are.  The brave soul who ran off to Mexico is there to remind me to push outside my comfort zone because the reward is worth the anxiety.  And the introspective soul who whose life changed so profoundly twelve years ago is there to remind me to breathe deeply and be grateful for every single day.  Bring it on, Water Tiger!