Career plot twist ahead: Seize a pen - embrace extraordinary fulfillment.
In the mosaic of your career, each tile represents a choice, a challenge, an achievement or a lesson learned. Over the years, this mosaic evolved into a complex story, one that's uniquely yours.
Yet, how often do you pause to consider who's been authoring this story?
If you're feeling stuck at work, it might be time to seize the pen and become the conscious author of your career story.
Influences over your career back-story
Your career narrative is more than a LinkedIn profile, a CV or a resume.
It's a deeply personal human story that encompasses your motivations, decisions, successes, and setbacks.
It's influenced by your values and your unique strengths (your “Superpowers” to use my language).
It’s influenced, importantly by how you defined success in the past, how you define it today and what your personalised definition might look like in the future.
It’s also influenced by your childhood experiences, your current and previous peer group, your sensitivities, your inner critical voices and your partners.
So, unsurprisingly, your career story CANNOT be written by someone else.
Yet, I regularly see career stories start with “falling into” a job, a discipline or industry.
And end with “staying there” forever.
Often those individuals are descirbed as “successful” - as defined by those in the job, discipline or industry that they “fell into”.
Twenty years can pass without deliberate strategic choices being made.
Just the next choice: the next job, the next obvious promotion or the next different(ish) job in the same discipline or industry.
It’s no wonder…no one ever taught us how to design our careers deliberately in the past.
If it was easy to design our career to include personalised joy at work, we’d all have done it in our youth.
But it’s not easy.
It’s tricky - especially after 40. (Here’s why career design beyond 40 is hard)
But we now have a choice to either:
Seize the pen and learn how to write the second half of our career story or
Just let the same old story continue to weave through the book of our lives.
I chose the former.
After 19 years, I’d invested almost two decades in helping people be less unhappy in their work by helping them find similar but (hopefully) better jobs.
But that wasn’t enough for me.
It stopped being right for me.
I made all the mistakes. All the muck ups.
I wasted too much money.
And, regretfully, wasted too much valuable life moments trying to figure it out.
But figure it out I did.
And I now show people how to design their next decade of work to be their best ever.
Some of us need something different. Sometimes big changes. Sometimes small tweaks.
The key is deliberate, intentional, grown-up change.
Change that fits with our personality, our strengths, our Superpowers, our goals, our life-style choices, our childhoods, our fears, our inner critical voices and all the other roles we play in life.
I help people find their Joy at Work pen - so that they can author the rest of their own career story.
Here I’ll show you some of the key elements in making the next chapter of your career story more joyful.
5 key things you need to begin authoring your career story to include joyful work.
1. Audit your career back-story:
Conduct a career back-story audit…it’s a once in a life-time exercise that can prompt aha moments that impact every future decision in your career.
Begin by conducting an audit of your career back-story.
Reflect on the pivotal moments in your career:
List the high-points
Write down the low moments
Pull out which roles (or even years) you might describe as the meh-moments.
Then go deeper:
What prompted you to leave X job?
What/who influenced you to move into the first real job?
What was the driving force behind you staying?
What was the recurring story you could hear inside your head (often a story that we heard alot in our youth)?
What values were you living that encouraged you to stay - even if things weren’t all rosy?
Figure out the recurring patterns that emerge from your career back-story audit?
What chapters of your career story filled you with pride, and which ones do you wish you could rewrite?
2. Define Success on Your Terms:
As you delve into your career back-story, challenge yourself to understand what your definition of success was at various points of your career and life.
Has your definition been shaped by external pressures e.g. parental definitions of success, financial pressures, peer pressures?
Has your definition of success been shaped by outdated benchmarks?
In my late 20s I bought a little convertible via the company car policy that was great fun whizzing over Sydney harbour bridge. In my 30s, my boyfriend (now husband) helped me see how much more disposable income I could have if I bought it directly.
What does success look like to you now, in the current chapter of your life? What does success feel like? Who would you describe as successful and why?
2003 v 2023 Success Definitions
As proof that our success definition changes over time - here are two doodle illustrations of my personal success definition in 2003 (Sydney) and 2023 (UK). It’s a really fun exercise and only takes 20minutes - if you’re not a perfectionist…or particularly arty!
Lucia’s definition of success 2003. Extreme work hard, play hard. No family in Sydney. Self-focus. Fitness. Travel. Fun. Ladder-climbing.
Lucia’s definition of success 2023. Time with wider family. Parent. Wife. Friend. Physical and mental health. Community. Business growth.
3. Identify your super-unique Superpowers:
If you’ve done any of the above tasks, you’ll now realise that some of your roles were infinitely more enjoyable than others. Often this is due to the quality of work you performed.
When you do work that is truly enjoyable, it hints that your unique Superpowers were in play somewhere, to some extent.
Pinpoint the activities and roles that hit your pleasure button and leverage your innate strengths. These are your Superpowers – the skills that make time fly and work feel less…like work.
How can these Superpowers play a starring role in the next chapters of your career?
Discovering your Superpowers is often very tricky to do alone - Here’s a little free worksheet to help)
My most common question from clients is “Have you ever met anyone who has no Superpowers?”
I have never met a human who doesn’t have Superpowers.
But every day I meet smart, succesful people who think they don’t have any.
Read more about how to use your Superpowers to get paid well…forever.
4. Embrace experimentation:
One shift that can benefit your joy at work forever is : View your career as a series of work design experiments.
This one skill kissed life into both my midlife and my midlfe career (Read more about experimentalism including a list of weird and wonderful experiments I’ve attempted over the last 8 years)
Consider each new role, project, or skill learned as an opportunity to test hypotheses about what makes you feel energised, fulfilled and engaged.
Some experiments will succeed beyond your expectations, while others will offer valuable lessons rather than the anticipated outcomes.
Both are equally valuable in crafting a career that resonates with you - as a unique human.
This skill is so critical, we spend a whole week in the early learning phase of the Fierce Emporium training on how to design experiments that bring you joy.
And if you choose to work with me one-to-one, we design your experiments together. Here are the ways we can work together.
5. Write Your Next Chapter:
Armed with a clearer understanding of your career back-story, you can begin writing your next chapter.
Set goals or big dreams that align with your new, current and updated definition of success and plan tiny mini-actions to move you towards achieving them.
Remember, this is your story, and you have the power to shape its direction.
Your Career, your Story
By embracing your career story, you're not just making a vague commitment to finding more fulfilling work - you're honouring your unique journey and the person you've become because of it.
This process isn't about finding a quick fix or making a drastic leap into the unknown.
It's about thoughtful, intentional changes that align with who you are and who you aspire to be. In your work-life, forever.
It’s about deliberately choosing to earn as much as you need to earn, doing work that gets you out of bed in the morning, to solve problems that really matter to you, using talents that you adore using.
Seize the pen and begin understanding your past and present career stories. To deliberately design the story of your joy at work over the next decade.
Are you ready to seize the pen and start writing your next chapter?
If the idea of actively authoring your career story excites you and you’re impatient for results and want a proven methodology to use to design your next chapter, here’s what I recommend.
Next steps
Review the career design programmes on offer here.
Book in a 30minute call, fill in my pre-call questions and let’s discuss which, if any, of the programmes suit your personal situation.
Let's turn the page together and begin crafting a career story that fills you with pride, joy and an undeniable sense of purpose.
You’re not just the lead character in your career story - you're the author.
And that excites the hell out of me. How about you?
