Renee was the consummate professional.  For ten years, her career was the model of upward mobility.  Yes, she had had a slow start, but after her first couple of jobs trying things out, she accepted an entry-level position and soon hit her stride.  She was eager to learn, she worked hard and she found a way to express her natural talents in her role. 

Before too long, she was noticed.  She found herself tapped for extra assignments and was offered different opportunities.  Within eight years, she was the leader of a team and enjoying increased responsibility, recognition and compensation.  She was considered a superstar, and this was her period of stellar career progression.

It was at this time, in her mid-thirties, when she had her first child.  She was sent off on maternity leave showered with flowers, gifts and a giant teddy bear.  Convinced she would transition back without too much problem, she was unprepared for what a wrench she would feel when she left home before daylight and returned after dark five days a week.  As well, she was unfortunate in that her work environment at this time also suddenly changed. Not only had her boss moved on, but also her company’s culture became a more noticeably difficult place in which to work as the economy went through one of its turbulent periods. She started to dread going to work. 

To solve these immediate issues, she reluctantly sought and found another position more amenable for a working mother, but it came at the cost of a significantly lower pay scale.  Clearly mommy-tracked, she now had the benefits of a more balanced work-family life, but she was saddened by her more limited role and the constraints to her ability to contribute.  And, so several years passed — her period of career stagnation.

Renee’s circumstances eventually changed again, and she found herself moving to a different city. With the pent-up energy and unrealized potential of the previous decade, she felt inspired to re-launch her career.  To update and upgrade her skills, she enrolled in graduate school, and she looked forward to a vigorous career renewal after graduation.  Alas, once again, she was caught in the cross-winds of a foul economy.  A year of pavement pounding, resume rewriting and job seeking proved fruitless.  She felt demoralized and deflated. She needed a new strategy.

It was at this low point that someone gave her some good advice: “Just figure out what you want to do, work out what the world needs, and where they intersect, that’s where you will find an abundance of work.” It sounded easy.  She set out to follow her nose (to ferret out opportunities), her heart (to discover what exactly she really wanted to do) and, to some extent, her head (to apply some of the analytical skills she learned).  With this approach, she was a little luckier, but all she was able to cobble together was a series of short-term projects. All were slightly different; none were completely satisfactory.  Her guiding principle became, “If I like it at least a little, and it pays the bills, then it’s ok.”  She kept going, but, in reality, she was languishing. 

A few more years passed which became the period she came to think of as her “career white-out”.  On the face of it, she was making little progress, and she felt as if she was treading water.  Through trial and error, she experimented with different formulas, types of work and types of organizations.  Through it all, she tried to make sense of her oddly shaped career and to define, out of the confusion, her true sense of purpose.

Slowly, she started noticing how she gravitated toward some situations and away from others.  She realized how some types of work seemed effortless and pleasurable while others felt like lugging rocks up a mountain.  She learned to orient herself more toward the former.  She fashioned her descriptions of what she did and what she was looking for in words that resonated with the kinds of people with whom she liked to work. And then, she had the greatest realization of all; she did not actually want to go back into the world she left behind. Perhaps her lack of success in her earlier job search led her to consider self-employment, or perhaps she had been unconsciously sabotaging her own efforts without recognizing it.  Either way, she now saw she was responsible for finding and executing a series of projects, and, when she did them well, she was asked to do more.  In essence, she was self-employed. It took quite a while through much self-doubt and many dry spells for her to officially accept her new employment status.

With the pieces of her career in place, she finally had time to process her journey. And, one day, she woke up with a blinding sense of clarity.  She felt completely calm but empowered and strangely elated.  She realized her white-out was finally over.  Through her process of experimentation, reflection, being open to different possibilities and eliminating the ones that didn’t work out, she found her next career path. She discovered the power of taking the reins of her life, of taking some risks, of surviving turbulence and of an awakened sense of purpose. She was finally doing the work she felt destined to do, and no-one could ever take that away from her.

In what phase is your career?  Stellar progression, stagnation or white-out?  And, what can you learn from Renee’s story to accelerate your discovery of your own sense of purpose and career fulfillment?

Fredia Woolf , founder of Woolf Consulting, blogs to help people improve their workplace effectiveness and optimize their careers.  As an organizational consultant and leadership coach, she works with clients to increase insight, inspiration and impact. She can be reached at fwoolf@woolfconsulting.com.

Last updated on November 10th, 2010 at 03:20 pm