I've been blogging a lot lately about careers, passions and dreams. Why am I doing this?
The answer is simple - because they are so important.
For some lucky people, there is the dream, and then all the 'doing' simply follows the dream, without deviation. The dream doesn't change, or if it does, it just becomes bigger and stronger. I'm sure you know at least one person who has a career that fits like a glove, that is just so perfect for them that you wonder how they got it so right!
Unfortunately, for most of us, the path to career success is rarely simple or straightforward. For a start, many people don't have a dream (or at least they don't think they do). This usually manifests as 'I don't know what I want to do when I grow up.'. In career parlance, this means the person has not yet 'discovered' or 'tapped into' what they want to do.
At this point I would just like to reiterate what I said in my last blog post (This was not a gratuitous remark to end the post nicely). We are all in fact already engaged in our careers, but we might not realise it yet.
I know this sounds complicated - but it needn't be, there are always clues.We just have to learn how to identify the clues.
For some people, the clues lie in their childhood dreams. Often our childhood dreams are dismissed as silly, or as 'a phase we are going through'. So, a girl might have spoken about her wish to become a doctor, but was told she was not smart enough, or that she lacked discipline. Even worse, she might have been told, either directly or indirectly, that only males could become doctors. Fast forward and bring this child back to her forty-something reality, and she might realise that she has missed her vocation; that she really should have been a doctor, and now it is too late.
Let's stay with this case study for a while. Do you think this woman - let's call her Marta - has led a false life? Do you wonder that she might have been unhappy? She probably has, at least to a point. Does she feel unfulfilled? Most definitely. She has lived a life, and a lot of it has been good. But, there was something missing.
Something she has searched for from time to time, and the need to work out what was wrong was evident when Marta (not her real name) came to see me a while back. She was not getting along with her boss. She was being bullied, felt trapped, and she wanted to make a big change. She had started out as a nurse (did you see that coming?), and after thirteen years or so had done the rounds of the nursing jobs, including a number of settings, and found her way into policy administration. She was working on cases in which patients were suing hospitals, doctors and nurses for malpractice. She was good at her job, and everyone liked her, but she hated going to work with a passion. On the day she came to see me, she talked about how she could not get out of her car for about 20 minutes the previous day, she just sat in the basement, numb, unable to face the day ahead.
This was, I told Marta, a wake-up call. Her body was telling her she must not do this any more, that she was becoming ill. She felt 'weak and a failure'. I said she was strong and successful. She didn't believe me - not that day, anyway.
Over time, Marta and I explored a whole pile of things: why she wanted to become a doctor all those years ago, what her good work days had been like, and what happened during the bad times. Where and when she felt happiest, and what would make her sad. We explored her 'success' signs, which were when she stood tall and felt in control. We explored her hobbies (she was a very good artist, but had also let this joyful activity slide over the years).
Eventually, we got down to Marta's core 'career success factors' - the ability to be technically excellent and to 'see bodies restored' (her words) though medical intervention. This had made her a competent but unhappy ward nurse, but a great administrator. There was something about this job that wasn't right, though, she said she felt too time-pressured, to process information in time for deadlines meant she could not be thorough. Her her current job was also lacking in 'challenge' - her key career motivator.
Whether she knew it or not, Marta had been building towards her next, big career step for many years. She had developed an incredible knowledge of the latest tools and technologies, just from reading medical journals. Now all she needed was to undertake specialist training and get her new job working alongside doctors in an oncology unit. This job involved high level technical expertise and had not existed until recently, so how could she have dreamed it up all those years ago? Unfortunately, being bullied had made her feel unfit for any role - she had stopped dreaming, and even looking out for other roles.
Had Marta become a doctor, she may have been just as frustrated in her early career. (This often happens, especially in the medical field where high achievers get stuck doing boring, repetitive tasks while waiting for their chance to get into what they really need to do.)She may have become disillusioned with all the chores of a junior doctor, the role wasn't actually anything like she imagined, she now realised, but her 'doctor dream' provided us with the platform from which to develop a solid career plan.
Sometimes, what we call career success doesn't come early in life. The only crime is if we give up too early, and stop being engaged.
What was holding Marta back? Right now, it was, simply, that she needed to give herself permission to move past this stage, to take control and move forward. And the other thing? This was the first time anyone had actually encouraged her to talk about her dreams, rather than pouring water on them. Is it really that simple?
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