Spoiler alert: You need to practice self-love to sustain love in your work life.
Remember when you were a teenager and people were asking you what you wanted to do as a grown-up and they weren’t looking at you with that smirk reserved for cute little children. They were looking at you waiting for a well-thought out answer, so they could tell you why you shouldn’t do that thing, why it wasn’t suited for you, why it was too hard, why you’d be poor, or that you’d have to do too much school.
I’m sure there were good responses too, but it’s the negative ones that stand out.
So making the choice about choosing one job for the rest of your life was a stressful thing. It felt blasphemous to imagine that maybe you’d do more than one thing to make a living. You were supposed to choose one. One major, one career, one path.
So you either did one of two things…you chose something you loved (or thought you’d love) or you chose something that would give you the lifestyle you wanted. My dad chose the medical route, but then he realized in his training that he couldn’t handle blood. I chose writing, but then I realized that the path I chose, which I thought was the only path was too personally demanding for me, and I wasn’t patient enough to go through all this education, when I really needed to be writing.
I chose what I loved, and I never stopped loving it, but I did stop choosing it as a way of making a living. I remember also wanting to be a teacher, but being told teachers don’t make enough money, I moved away from that path. It wasn’t until much later that I went back to teaching, because I loved it, I have a special skill in working with children and it offers stability that writing doesn’t always offer. In fact, teaching and writing are also very complimentary in many different ways, depending on the types of options the teacher accesses.
There are many incentives in organizations, companies, etc. to do both. But I didn’t know about this until I’d already struggled for 2 decades in the working world. Luckily for me, I also had children and stayed home with them during the first few years of their lives. During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to research options I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
And now, I have a child (actually 2) at the same age in high school where you’re supposed to get serious about what path you’re going to do after high school. This post is really not about my parenting methods (though a family-friendly work life is important to me). I think this is also relevant to adults already in the middle of a career path, wanting to pivot, start something new or just reassess your work life.
My advice to my daughter is to think about the things you love, research all the different ways you could work in that field and try to get hands-on experience in all of them as early in your life as possible. That includes job shadowing, internships, workshops, jobs assisting people in a similar field, watching documentaries, doing research/reports, planning out your path if you did choose a particular path. It doesn’t hurt to map it out, even if it isn’t what you end up choosing.
I have my own experiences to draw from and they are as diverse as my interests. Like I said, I started out wanting to be a professional writer, in every way. I had many ambitions: to be a playwright, to write for SNL, to be a songwriter, to write poetry and fiction books, even to write intellectual nonfiction like an investigative journalist, to write music reviews, to help people write their own books, including children.
I started directly after high school trying to put together my own business centering on the latter concept, and trying to get poems of mine published in literary journals. I had no idea what I was doing, so I went to college at the insistence of my family, the following semester. I went through college in survival mode and rebelled against my academic advisors instead of getting authentic advice from them. It didn’t really matter anyway, I was too sick to be in college.
But I went through a number of career paths since, somehow trying to also have a healthy body and personal life. I didn’t really succeed because I didn’t know much about balance. I knew about requirements and doing what was right. So my suggestions to my daughter, my clients and anyone else trying to navigate a career path you can feel good about is consider your needs, your preferences, your strengths, dreams, goals, long-term plans, personal life, health, family, environment, abilities, everything. Don’t make your decisions based on what you hear from others, get experience!
Also travel, ask questions, be honest and be thorough. Act as if the universe is rigged in your favor and don’t give up on having the life you want to have. Don’t just settle. Compromise between your dreams and reality… somewhere in between you might find something that brings love, balance and growth to your life, while also getting you paid.
Are you ready for a case study? If you’re not subscribed consider joining or send me a message for a sneak peek. Would you like to be considered for a case study?