ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: CANNON THOMAS

Could you tell us who you are and what it is that you do?

Sure. I am an executive and career coach who works with people and organizations that are trying to put a clear purpose at the center of their work. I trained as a clinical psychologist at U.Va. and at Stanford, and I started an evidence-based psychotherapy practice in San Francisco with some colleagues about 20 years ago. Over the last 8 or so years, I shifted to the work I do now. I loved psychotherapy, but what I always cared most about is what people can discover and build with their lives. I wanted to be a part of helping the people who care about discovering the best that they have to offer do their best work.

 What do you love most about the work?

The people -- their heart-felt visions and their brilliant ideas for making them happen.  Getting to be so close to people’s work, I often get to see that moment when ideas come together from the inside. Or I witness that moment when a team discovers what they are capable of doing together, leaving the members feeling they are part of something that is bigger than themselves. There is nothing better than that.

 What are you currently working on?

 One thing I’m working on right now is getting together a group of Charlottesville leaders from a wide range of fields who share in common a desire to have a positive impact with their work. Our community is in flux, and we need leaders to be intentional about bringing the best to what our generation is building here. My hope is that seeing other’s great work will bring the best out in ourselves. And I hope that some of the skills and tools I teach people will help everyone get traction and momentum.

How did you arrive at this place?  Was there a light switch moment, a turning point for you?

One of the things psychology forces you to think about is how easily people get stuck in a familiar way of doing things when a lot more is possible. As a psychotherapist, I was aware that most people fall into a groove in their professions, becoming more confident over time but not becoming more effective. In the first year or so of their work, they discover a familiar way of doing things. That way of doing things feels more “right” over time, because it becomes so easy and natural. The problem is that, when you look at what people actually care about achieving, they are usually staying the same. They are getting entrenched in their groove.

Psychotherapy is a great example. Psychotherapists tend to get better for about a year at helping relieve suffering, and then they usually plateau. Talking about your life makes most people feel better in the short run, so they really like therapy and feel grateful to their therapists for new perspectives and so forth. But that does not always add up to them making the changes that would lead to them suffering less and thriving more in the long run. I was well-respected as a therapist in my community and received a lot of thanks from my clients, but one client gave me a gut-punch about ten years ago that made clear that, despite my best efforts, I had fallen into this sort of a groove. She was someone who loved coming to therapy, and I loved the work I believed we were doing together. But after five years, she brought in her journal that she had written right before we started working together. She read passages from it, and she could have written them the day before that final meeting. She realized that after hundreds of hours of time and tens of thousands of dollars spent, she had not actually changed in any of the ways she had come to me to change. She fired me on the spot. Good for her. I cared a lot about her, and I still believe the change she wanted was possible for her. I think I had just fallen into a groove with her that had become familiar and comfortable for both of us. And I realized I did not want to live my one professional life in grooves like that. I wanted the difference I could make to be real, not just perceived.

 Of course one of the grooves I had fallen into was doing psychotherapy at all. It was not the kind of change I cared most about. That is when I started setting ambitious objectives and holding myself accountable for achieving the ones that were most inspiring to me. And that is when I changed the whole focus of my career.

 Could you share a memorable story?

 I feel like my job is nothing but stories, but here was one that touched me just last week. A client of mine had spent a year leading the engineering department at a large startup with a mission to help shift society towards a sustainable relationship with the environment. It may not sound like the most inspiring job in the world to some people, but for him it was being part of designing a system that works for everyone. For him, systems that thrive by taking everything and everyone affected into account are a move towards beauty in the world.

But most days that was an ideal he thought about around the edges. What got him up in the morning was the need to get tasks done, to take care of the urgent needs… to survive. This got worse as his company’s leadership started to lose focus on its mission as it struggled to survive during COVID. He found himself disillusioned a lot of days and just cranking through tasks on a lot of others.

But he didn’t settle into despondence. He did not allow his crumbling “why” to slip away. He looked for what was still possible and kept his team turning towards the question of what they could do that would still make a real difference. He gently but firmly kept the big picture in focus for senior leadership at the same time he fully embraced their challenge of building a sustainable and profitable business that could support it.

He also started to realize that working with others to build something good was maybe the most important thing for him. He described the experience when his team turned seeds of ideas that he had had into something that he never could have imagined. He felt the electricity of people working together seamlessly to build something they all cared about, and he loved how they took care of each other.

But a point came when there was a need for a dramatic cut in his team, and he stressed for weeks that it might shatter what they had built together -- afraid that the narrative would become, “There is a lot of lip service about taking care of people; but, at the end of the day, it’s all about the company.” He thought that this family he had helped build would feel chewed up by profit motives that always win out in the end.

They didn’t. In the meeting after the layoffs were announced, people who had been laid off were standing up in tears -- but not for themselves. They were worried about what would happen to the rest of the team, and what would happen to the work they were doing together. My client said he teared up too and didn’t try to hide it. They were together, and nothing could touch what they’d built together. He told me that he realized many of these people would move on with this experience in their heads and hearts -- looking to create it wherever they went. And he was more clear than ever that this was the heart of the experience he wanted to create with work. He reminded me that, when it comes down to it, the reason we care about creating at all is our connection to the people who care with us.