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Key points
- The pandemic has provided time and reasons for people to re-evaluate their work lives.
- A successful work life can be defined from multiple perspectives, depending upon one's priorities.
- Reflecting on our gifts, biology, experiences, wants, needs and values can help guide us in making work choices.
- Conscious choices can help craft a rewarding work life.
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are showcasing features about people resigning from jobs. Our understanding and management of the stresses created by the pandemic and its year of confinement offered insights into ways in which we are like all other people, like some other people, and like no other people, a perspective that can help people rethink their work lives.
As a retired clinical, academic and research psychologist who has pivoted, I offer questions for others to ponder. They helped me embrace courage, joy, and integrity as guiding principles for making choices. Defining my “life purpose” as "teaching, healing, and inspiring through listening, loving, and writing", clarified my goals. My decisions embraced “impractical” or “least strategic” alternatives. The best one was 25 years ago: my husband and I initially bonded over our match in values, having consciously walked away from "fame and fortune" to honor truths that were in our hearts. Decades later, I told our story in a memoir, adding a whole new direction to my career and identity.
How do we navigate the thoughts and emotions that lie between here and there? The universals are straightforward: we must manage getting what we need from the world around us such as food, shelter, roles. We must find ways to relate to other people that provide human connection, participation, commonality and intimacy. And we must honor that which is internal to us, our intrinsic motivation. It can bring meaning to our lives on a higher level, through the liberation of energy that comes from an honest examination of our personal truths, forged through the mish-mash of biology, experience, and possibility. Eight questions may be helpful in the quest for clarity:
What work and why? What external rewards do you want: income, work setting and conditions, time and place flexibility, recognition, opportunities to learn and/or change roles? What culture best suits you? What internal rewards do you want from your work? Feelings of competence? Of growth? Of support? Of recognition, perhaps admiration, a chance to lead or to follow? To what extent do you seek or prize “meaning” in the work that you do, either from the nature of the work itself or from your role in the end process, goods or services that are provided?
Disposability versus endurance? Do you hope to carve a place for yourself over time and through changes within a type of work, an industry, a role? Or are you comfortable with high rates of change, cross-training within or across settings, exploring new roles? Does the opportunity to live in many locations appeal to you or would you prefer a more stable setting, with the benefits that only shared history and tradition can offer? Examine your temperament.
Compete with self or others? Do you more naturally compete with others, measuring your choices
through the lives of others, giving weight to their real or imagined judgments? Or do you compete with yourself, listening to internal cues that tell you when stretching is good for you and that announce hazards of pushing too far? How accurately and consistently can you identify your window of tolerance? What happens when you move beyond it in either direction and how do you then correct? Our level of "field dependence" or "field independence" was identified by Witkin in the 1930's and tends to be stable through life.
Adapt or change? As you examine your situation, do you tend to accommodate to its demands beyond what is good for you, leading to physical distress or psychological anguish? Or leave before you have truly tried? What factors make you quick to abandon ship or persevere? Are you naturally attracted to what is novel? Do you have a strong need for change, perhaps adventure, risk? Where in your life do you gravitate to meet those needs?
Important relationships. When do you choose personal growth or comfort and when do you defer to a “we” you belong to, realizing your behavior has consequences for others and for your relationships? Or do you avoid close relationships because you fear they may limit your personal growth? Can you identify the impact of your relationship choices on your thoughts, feelings, impulses, behavior?
Autonomy? How do you learn or grow or perform with various levels of external structure? When do you find standards or rules confining and when are they liberating? To what extent are you internally accountable and when do you need structure, feedback from others, or external rules to do your best work?
Distinguish between wants and needs? Are you comfortable with the idea that a Porsche, a compact car and a bicycle can all be responses to transportation? Have you considered the biblical notion that “the truly wealthy person is one who is happy with what they have” and answered the question, “How much is enough?” Studies on happiness show that material wealth is at best a single component of subjective well-being. Beyond a certain point, the burdens of and expectations that accompany wealth can be their own sources of stress. What balance do you need in your use of your most precious resources — your time, attention and energy – to allow you to acknowledge your wholeness?
Loving and being Loved. What priority do relationships that bring warmth, compassion, understanding, support or guidance into your life have in your choices? What conflicts between the demands of those you love and your own desires have you faced? How have you addressed those conflicts? What were the outcomes? Might you be ready to redefine “success”?
An artist whose works are now displayed in museums intrigued me. When I asked her how she came to do the work she loves, she described a disciplined strategy: “After college, with a major in accounting, I was miserable in the business world. I looked at what brought me the greatest joy, meaning and satisfaction and what brought the least. Making art lay at one end and working in my current job with a large corporation at the other. So each year I eliminated that which I most disliked and added one more thing similar to what brought me joy. It was like keeping a day job (that kept improving) until I could support myself financially with my art. Then I fine-tuned the type of art I created, eventually finding my way to porcelain. I had invested in me. The rest fell into place!”
May your career be a partnership between your soul and the universe in which you live and may your life be filled with the discoveries of courage, joy, and integrity.
Copyright 2021 Roni Beth Tower
References
Hackman, J. Richard (Ed.) (1990) Groups That Work (and Those That Don't). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. An excellent collection of case studies illustrating organizational cultures.
