Freedom of Choice
I was listening to a radio commentary from a federal official who was lamenting that the COVID-19 pandemic has completely supplanted debate and action on climate change. It’s not as if someone made a declaration that climate change is a less significant global health threat than the coronavirus; people simply had to pay attention to the daily updates of new incidents and total fatalities to give it their undivided attention. So we’ll just add “saving the planet” to the long list of things that we have lost the freedom to choose in 2020 including returning to school, setting a wedding date, flying anywhere, and taking a family vacation.
And what about pursuing your career… is that on your list? If you are one of the casualties of being laid off or furloughed by your company due to COVID, your choice to go to work every day has certainly been interrupted. Yet I would say that it doesn’t have to be a career-breaker. If you are a young professional in your first job after graduation, your brief work experience may have enlightened you to the type of work, style of management, and corporate culture that best fits you. And now you have the freedom to find the next employer who can meet your list of needs better than the one you just left.
If you are a mid-career professional with say 10-15 years in the same industry, you may have discovered that the biggest reason for your longevity is inertia, not a driving passion for your work. Whether you were laid off or still have your job, this is the opportunity to say, “life’s too short to not love what I do” and to proactively choose a new path.
In her excellent book GRIT: the Power of Passion and Perseverance, author Angela Duckworth asserts that personal attitude is highly correlated to professional success and fulfillment. She groups working people into three attitudinal segments: the largest group are those who say “I have a job”, a group that say “I have a career”, and the decidedly smallest group that say “I have a calling” which is shorthand for believing that there is higher purpose in what one does for a living. My reflection on the author’s framework is that you can have your job or even your erstwhile career taken from you, but your calling will always be your choice to pursue.
Many of you reading this may feel, “I’m not that spiritual…I don’t have those moments of pure clarity to guide me”. I contend that with just a little bit of introspection and an open mind, finding your calling may be a lot more practical than you think. Start with your interests: are there things that you’ve always enjoyed but never thought could be part of a “real” career? How about acumen: what skills and talents have you developed that appear to be valued by others? Then think about role models: have there been people in your life that have really inspired you with their higher purpose?
It’s never too late in your professional life to find your calling. It happened to me a couple of years ago, when an old high school friend (now my business partner) approached me with an embryonic idea about using Big Data to gain insights into people’s careers. After many, many discussions in which I was able to take stock of my interests, my acumen and my sense of purpose, I self-discovered the following:
- I have always been more interested in tomorrow than yesterday, and my work assignments involving long-term strategy and abstract goals have been the ones I’ve enjoyed the most.
- My 40 years of being a marketing professional and consultant has trained me to understand people’s functional and emotional needs and finding new solutions that address these needs.
- My mother was in social work for 50 years and was tirelessly devoted to helping the elderly Chinese population in Boston find culturally appropriate nursing care. I always admired her selflessness and wished that I could find a vocation that would enable me to be in service to others.
Long story short, I am now in headlong pursuit of building a company (CareerMap) that can generate new insights into successful career paths, with a specific focus on making career advancement a more balanced playing field: balancing the interests of career seekers and hiring companies, balancing the opportunities for women and men, and reducing systemic barriers for disadvantaged groups. This is more than a business model…it’s a purpose that informs everything that our company does.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then maybe pandemics are the mother of re-invention. Keep remembering that the choice is always yours to make.
Tim Guen is the President of CareerMap and blogs frequently about the challenges of building careers and corporate culture.