AMBITIONS, CAREER AND OTHER LOW-WAISTED JEANS
When a career doesn’t unfold as expected, the verdict is usually “I failed”. But it may simply be that you changed.
When we look at our old photographs, we often cringe and laugh at the fashions we so proudly wore, but as changes in taste and fashion are the norm, we rarely attach any judgement.
The ambitions and objectives of our 18-year-old selves direct our field of study and our first jobs, and very often we simply keep wearing them, like a pair of low-waisted jeans from the early noughties, never reviewed, because “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
In most cases, we start re-evaluating our goals and desires when the divide between where we expected to be, how we hoped to feel there, and where we actually are becomes somewhat evident, and things are not so great. At that point, we are quick to equate this distance with failure rather than doing an honest audit of what our current desires and inclinations are, asking whether we really got lost or simply lost interest in the destination, and what the alternatives are.
The divide between our present and the ideal version of ourselves we designed in our youth, and still drag along, has several roots. Many of us chose that ideal before we discovered who we really are and where our real leanings lie, or, more simply, before we really tried living it. Maybe we imagined enjoying being a career-driven person, and now we just want to be someone with a lot of spare time.
What we do not see is that the measure we are using to evaluate today is the one we embraced at eighteen, an old one we might have outgrown.
Furthermore, culture and society used to push this idea of making a choice and sticking to it, and this has given us a one-track mind: I wanted this, I haven’t quite got it, or I am unsatisfied; therefore I am somewhat at fault.
We are also more biased than we think, reading everything to sustain the narrative we already have in mind, one that is never kind to us. So even now, when more and more often magazines and media share and celebrate stories of mid-career professionals, especially women, who willingly leave a more or less successful career to do something completely different, we admire their courage and inventiveness. But we don’t give ourselves the same grace and understanding.
In 2020, researchers published a study that began in 1992 with more than 500 students starting at the University of California, Berkeley, and followed them for over twenty years. By their forties, they placed less importance on the goals they had set at eighteen and had narrowed their priorities, and their personalities had changed along with them. [1]
If you’re unsatisfied with your present working reality, ask yourself what you would like instead now, as if there were no wrong answers.
And if the answer means change and letting something go, notice how you feel about it. Watch for what makes it harder: there are several common instances, some obvious, like a resistance to changing our habits, or even useful, like a certain caution that makes us weigh the pros and cons; others less so, like the pain of giving up something you thought you wanted for so long, or the fear of enjoying the relief it brings, because you poison it with the idea that you are like the fox in Aesop’s fable, who decided the grapes he couldn’t reach were sour anyway.
Your 18-year-old self made some of your choices with the best of what they knew at the time, but it is the person you are now, with everything you have learned since, who is best placed to decide what comes next.
This is also why people work with a coach: not to be handed an answer from outside, in place of one that used to be theirs and no longer is, but to find their own solution, the one that is true now, and move forward with what they really want, free of the confusion. If you would like to find yours, I’m here: you can book a free 30-minute conversation with me through the link below.
Notes
[1] Olivia E. Atherton, Emily Grijalva, Brent W. Roberts and Richard W. Robins, “Stability and Change in Personality Traits and Major Life Goals From College to Midlife”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220949362
