Stuck in mid-career? Here are some thoughts.
Last time I wrote to you about Imposter Syndrome and today I am turning my attention to career success and decision making. Arguably the topics are connected since how you see yourself often affects what you decide to pursue or not pursue in your career and how successful you feel.
I have been helping people navigate their careers ever since I qualified as a psychologist and that was a long time ago! I recall the early days of career counselling (before career coaching was a thing) in partnership with The University of Cape Town, helping prospective students to make early career choices. From those early days to now, times and the world of work have changed dramatically, however what has not changed is that we still spend more than half our waking lives working and we want this to matter.
Whilst I no longer counsel students to make early career decisions, I am still passionate about the role work plays in helping my clients find more meaning and satisfaction in life. This often means our conversations explore their levels of career success and satisfaction at various stages in their leadership journey and especially so if they engage with me when they are at a career crossroads.
So, for today, I wanted to start this theme of career success by asking you to think about where you are in your career, and how are you evaluating your success. I will share two ways of thinking about career success and share a mini case study. I will invite you think about what criteria you are using to evaluate your current levels of career success and satisfaction and offer you my favourite career reflection exercise to help you appreciate your own gifts, values, and unique career journey to date. In the next article, I will share a model of career decision making that I hope will offer you a practical way of identifying the combination of factors that will help you find more fulfillment and satisfaction at your current career and life stage. This article is a bit longer than usual. I hope you will find it worth the read.
Before we discuss success, it may be helpful to define career. The meaning of the word career has evolved over time and this evolution is particularly relevant in today’s world with blurred boundaries between home and work as hybrid working models become the norm. If you are curious about this shift in the meaning of the word career across history, read my previous blog. Career can be seen as a lifelong journey of progress towards achieving goals. Success in this context is not defined as a static destination rather it is a journey of successive phases of growth and advancement that encompass our lives.
There are two main ways to think about career success according to career research. The first is a traditional view of success and refers to external standards and visible criteria (mainly determined by others/society/culture) that most people find themselves defaulting to when evaluating their own success. This is referred to as objective career success in the career literature. These criteria are linked to job level, title, income, status, salary, and occupation. In the corporate world this often implies hierarchical progression and the metaphor of climbing the ladder fits with this conceptualisation. These traditional standards of success are often influenced by our early childhood at home with siblings and at school with classmates academically and in other competitive sporting and cultural activities and are a function of the expectations we have, in many cases, assumed without critical or deliberate thought.
Subjective career success on the other hand involves a more personal inner interpretation of success that can look different at different stages of our lives. It is a function of our own internal standards and perceptions linked to our goals and what we value most. This subjective success can change over time as we evolve, and our personal circumstances change, and it requires critical inquiry and self-awareness to make these explicit and centred in our minds. Without doing this deeper reflection work, we become unconsciously subject to others/the organisations/our cultures criteria that in the long term comes home to roost. On the other hand, being clear about our own subjective career success can help us craft a way of working and living that fits our own unique circumstances and is therefore more likely to lead to long term satisfaction.
I am not suggesting objective success is not important or valid, however relying solely on objective criteria without clarity on your own subjective criteria inevitably leads to the comparison trap with the emotional roller coaster that this entails and I know well. LinkedIn doom scrolling has the unhappy knack of raising, to the front and centre, the objective criteria of success as we check out others’ visible markers of success, often blinding ourselves to our unique combination of talents, knowledge, experience, values, interests, and skills.
In my practice clients are apt to over-emphasise external standards and expectations as their benchmark given the dominance of social media, and the culture of competitiveness and high performance in the academic and work contexts. At some point this either no longer works and they sense something is amiss despite all the external signs of success or they get fed up and exhausted by being ‘blown around’ emotionally when their evaluation against these standards falls short leaving them striving to achieve the next visible sign of success while feeling not quite good enough. After all, what is enough, and when is enough, enough? And how can we enjoy the journey if we are striving to achieving goals that we hope lead to greater success but have come from the outside in and not from the inside out? We can find ourselves inevitably operating with a destination mindset and forget that this is a journey and one to be enjoyed.
Take for example John (names and details have been changed to project the person’s identity) who came to see me when he hit a career crossroads in his mid- forties. He was no longer finding it easy to progress up the corporate ladder in his leadership role in a large multinational. After early success in leading a new unit and amidst organisational change, his view of the strategic direction for his unit and his bosses did not align. Furthermore, he was a challenger of the status quo and had no time for corporate politics. He felt side-lined and stuck and at first worked harder to deliver more and prove his worth. This started to take a toll on his emotional well-being and relationships and as this continued, he began to question things that he had not questioned about himself before. He found his feelings of anger and irritation, veiled beneath an outer demeanour of control, bursting forth unexpectedly and he wondered what was wrong with him, what was he missing and how might he find his mojo again.
In our work together, one of the things we did was explore his career story to date, how he made career decisions, and what were his personal success criteria, what were the things that were easy, effortless, and enjoyable for him. We homed in on those sparkling moments of success that stood out for him. Our work reconnected him with his younger self, and the hopes and dreams he held growing up and how these were built on an intuitive understanding what he was good at and truly enjoyed. With time and the increasing responsibilities of adulthood, other’s expectations and the competitive context, his connection with those early knowledges had faded to the background and were no longer visible to him.
This approach orientated him, in the first instance, away from blaming his bosses and inwards to what really mattered to him, to reflecting on his gifts and talents and how to bring these into balance in a way that would serve him well in the next phase of his career. By making more explicit his overall definition of career success with a greater focus on his own subjective criteria, he was able to make some important short-term decisions, both on the home and work front, that shifted his focus and attention. This enabled him to adapt his approach to his current role and at the same time start to invest time in developing a longer-term strategy anchored around his uniqueness, stage of life, personal circumstances and what he values. This surfaced multiple possible pathways that he can explore in a constructive and proactive fashion overtime, whilst focusing on enjoying the present. He learnt strategies to drown out the noise and manage the comparison trap that threaten to take him away from the path he is crafting whilst at the same time to pragmatically take care of his core responsibilities in a way that is not at odds with his values. Through the process of self inquiry, exploration, making sense, he developed his own compass to navigate with more consciousness and optimism.
Having read John’s story, it’s time to reflect on your own career journey.
How do you evaluate your career success: Questions for your reflection:
Which has played a more dominant role in how you evaluate your career success: Objective or subjective success?
What has been the impact of the emphasis of one over the other on your career satisfaction?
Who/what has been your biggest influence in your career choices?
On a scale of 1-10 how satisfied are you with your career?
Given the number you allocated above, why have you not rated it higher or lower?
What are the key criteria that are important to you now in evaluating your career success?
Share your answers with me. I always reply to the emails I receive and in this way hope to offer you some personal insight to your situation.
For those of you who like deeper reflection, here is My favourite Career Stories Exercise.
As an Associate Career Coach with The University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business and an Executive Coach and Psychologist in private practice I help leaders recognise and align with their deeper calling to contribute to the world. I like to call this soul work, as the inspiration “to do good work well for the right reasons”, as Jerry Colonna (author of Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up) frames it, comes from deeper within us and requires attention, patience, time and nurturing to find the right ground within which to root, grow and bear fruit. A key route to this comes from knowing our stories, how they have shaped us and how they no longer serve us for the next stage of our life.
If you are at a career crossroads or want to do the critical self-inquiry that will help you live and lead better, please reach out to me for conversation.
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