The Key to a Fulfilling Career in 2024 & Beyond
It’s 4pm on a Tuesday and you are staring vacantly at your computer screen, wondering how you’ll make it to 6pm.
What once was your dream job, now causes you more stress than anything else.
What once was a challenge, now you can do with your eyes shut. That's if you wanted to.
Your motivation has vanished, you don’t feel inspired and you begin to wonder: is this it?
You could try for a promotion, but you aren’t even sure it’s what you want either. Not here anyway..
Let’s make another cup of tea.
Current State of Play
Recent statistics show that on average over 38% of employed people are burnt out. That is a shocking number and a noticeable increase from previous years; and it’s even higher for women alone. But why?
There are two possible reasons for this:
Men are less likely to identify themselves as burnt-out and therefore less likely to report it as such
Women feel more pressure to over-perform, due to long held inequalities faced by women in the workplace
Whatever the reason, something's gotta give.
And the number of people dissatisfied with their jobs is much higher (around half, depending on the country).
But why do we stay in jobs that don't fulfil us and cause us so much stress?
Conditioning
Back when our parents grew up, it was the norm to pick a career path and that was what you did for the rest of your life. That was what you did until you retired, love it or hate it.
We were told to make such decisions solely from our heads (not our hearts). For reasons such as: what it would look on paper; what our parents did before; what is considered a stable job and what pays well.
Such head based decision-making led to a whole bunch of people ending up in jobs that didn’t necessarily play to their strengths, excite them or align with their values, but because it seemed like the right thing to do.
The True Reality
These days, people can have multiple careers and hustles in their lives. It’s actually a strength to have more strings to our bow and actually, the skill of having multiple skills is an essential skill in itself.
Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari recently said:
“For the first time in our lives, we have no idea what skills are going to be needed in 10 years. Coder? Nope, AI will do that. Translater? Don’t need that either.”
What we need more than anything is to be flexible and harness the ability to shift careers with the constantly changing landscape.
But many of us still haven’t shifted the old school mentality of our parent’s generation. Why is that?
Resistance
The idea of trying something new brings up a whole load of fears and resistance. They often sound like this:
"What if I fail?"
"I’m not capable of doing anything else"
"But my earnings will go down"
"How will I make it a success?"
"But I am comfortable.."
Fear of failure and fear of the unknown are the biggest causes of resistance to changing jobs and the single biggest reason people stay in jobs that don’t make them happy.
We fear we are not capable, we fear uncertainty and we fear not knowing exactly how we’re going to get there.
The thing is, it’s impossible to know how to get there until we start putting one foot in front of the other. The beauty of doing something new, is learning as you go along.
We must learn to revel in this uncertainty, lean into the resistance and trust ourselves to figure it out, step by step, bit by bit, in order to survive in this ever-evolving landscape.
And know that it isn’t the finished article, but who we become in the process of following our dreams is the most exciting part.
We have more access than ever to information and tools that allow us to grow, all we have to do is trust that we can do hard things and that we’ll figure it out along the way.
3 Steps to Success
I created the 90-day Career Accelerator, to give women-identifying people the tools, strategy and confidence to create fulfilling and successful careers.
I believe there are three crucial elements to success here and each of these make up one month in the coaching programme:
Clarity: Awareness of your unique strengths, values and desires
Confidence: Having unshakeable self-belief, confidence and the mindset to succeed
Commitment: Resilience, determination and taking empowered, practical action towards your goals (including building an authentic personal brand)
If you’d like to find out more about it, simply message me the word “purpose” to receive an information pack or get in touch to arrange a free career clarity call where we’ll explore your personal challenges and questions.
If you are considering a career change, you might want to also read How to Navigate a Career Transition, part 1 and part 2.
