#29: You need to date your career choices, not marry them
Choosing a career is a serious business, right? It's something we do only after a lot of sombre reflection, when we're absolutely certain that we've found the thing we want to do forever. It's certainly not a place for fun, experimentation, curiosity, and frivolity.
Except ... no. Deciding that you shouldn't pursue a career unless you're really serious about it and want to do it forever is like deciding that you shouldn't date someone unless you want to marry them. Doing things that way is no fun, and it's bad for you. Your imperfect friend wants you to lighten up.
For the Core Values exercise mentioned in this episode, go here. And for the MoSCoW analysis template, go here.
Episode transcript:
Do you really need a job for life, or do you just think you do?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
In my coaching sessions, I talk to a lot of people who are dissatisfied with their career and are considering what to do next: whether to stay where they are and either put up with the problems they’re experiencing or try to improve things, or whether to leave and switch to a different career, and if so what that would look like. There’s a particular anxiety that comes up again and again during these discussions. I’ll begin to explore with the client what they might like to do for a living, if not what they’re currently doing, and they’ll come up with a few ideas but then stop and say something like: ‘But I don’t know whether I could do that forever’. There’s this implicit assumption that choosing a career is a serious business - and perhaps especially when that involves switching from an existing career that, in some respects or from some viewpoints, might be perfectly decent. There’s this unspoken view that if you’re going to change career direction, It’s something that you need to get right first time - and if you’re not sure whether you’re capable of that, then you have no business contemplating it in the first place. Choosing a career, according to this way of thinking, is not something to be approached playfully, or in a spirit of exploration or curiosity or ‘let’s see if the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence’. It would be a terrible idea to try a new career, decide it’s not for you, and move on, right? Anything other than jumping into some new career that turns out to be more fulfilling than your current career (if you have one), and which you joyfully decide to pursue forever, climbing the ladder and increasing in seniority, equals failure. You wouldn’t want to be a quitter, would you? Or someone so unthinkably irresponsible that you try something new without knowing in advance and with certainty that it is a better option than the one you have now. Or someone who makes a huge change in her life simply because she’s bored and unfulfilled and fancies a change. Perish the thought.
Except: yeah no. All of that is nonsense - and deep down, you know it’s nonsense. In this episode, I want to explore an analogy that I often use in coaching sessions; an analogy between our relationships with our careers and romantic relationships. I like this analogy because it’s intuitive, and it’s really effective at bringing some perspective to thoughts about careers, and about ‘what do I do with the rest of my life?’ type questions more generally. The core idea is this: approaching career decisions with a mindset of ‘I shouldn’t choose a career unless I’m sure I’ll want to do it for the rest of my life’ is like approaching decisions about romantic relationships with a mindset of ‘I shouldn’t choose a partner unless I’m sure I’ll want to marry them’. Now, my mission here is not to convince you that that’s always the wrong approach, whether we’re talking careers or relationships. I want to convince you of something much more modest: simply that it’s not the only viable approach, and that the chances are it’s not the right approach for you.
Let’s start by taking a step back. Many years ago, marriage was the ultimate relationship goal. It was the boss level, especially for women, given the limited opportunities for women to pursue careers or to be financially independent or to be autonomous more generally. Back then, if you were a woman, you wouldn’t want to be dating the wrong person. That was really not a very smart idea if you wanted a comfortable life for yourself. You needed to get on with finding a responsible husband who could provide for you and any children you might have - and you needed to get Project Husband done and dusted while you were still young enough to have children, and ideally still young enough to be as attractive as possible, because slightly older women - ugh, gross, right? No top-notch potential husband is going to want a wife who’s the wrong side of 23. In those days, ‘I shouldn’t choose a partner unless I want to marry him’ was a pretty sensible attitude, actually. Messing around with losers - no matter how hot they were - was a bad idea. Not only that, but back then, you’d better hope that your Husband Radar was pretty reliable, because you needn’t think that divorce would be a walk in the park if your choice turned out to be the wrong one. You got one shot at the target, and you better pray for a good eye.
Things are different today, of course. How do you think you’d react if you found out that one of your single friends was approaching dating in that way - in other words, with an attitude of ‘I’m not going to get involved with someone unless I want to marry them?’ I’m going to guess that you’d view her approach as … non-optimal, at least unless there’s a particular reason for it, as there might be if she wants to start a family and she’s sure she wants to do that from the context of a stable relationship. Perhaps you’d tell her that. Perhaps you’d point out to her that she’s not going to be able to make very accurate judgments about whether she wants to marry any particular person unless she gets involved with them. Perhaps you might encourage her to get involved with a few different people before thinking about marriage. Perhaps you might probe a bit deeper and ask her what the big deal is about marriage in any case - what’s she got against dating different people, even if it’s not forever? Why is marriage the ultimate goal? What if she changes her mind about what she wants? What’s so great about forever - especially ‘forever’ in the abstract, before she’s met a person who she can’t imagine not wanting to be with?
You’ve probably guessed where I’m going with this. Everything I’ve said about marriage also applies to careers. In the past, there was a lot more mating for life, in careers just as in relationships. Even the word ‘career’ suggests long-term. I’m talking mainly about careers for men here, of course - career options for women were much more limited a few decades ago, and in more subtle ways, they still are. These days, the idea of a ‘career for life’ has lost much of its appeal. It’s common for people to change their employer every few years. But despite this, there’s still some residual ‘forever’ mindset in our thinking about our careers. For many of us, choosing a career is a big, important decision that ought not to be taken lightly, and changing career when the one you have is at least halfway decent is something that you should only ever consider after a great deal of soul-searching. Now, sometimes that approach might make sense. Some careers require a lot of investment - training, qualifications, time, money, energy - and so it makes sense to give some serious thought to whether you want the career enough to make the investment worthwhile. But often, things aren’t as serious as that. Often, even if you make the investment and ultimately decide against the career, the qualifications and experiences you’ve accumulated along the way will open up other opportunities for you, or they’ll have taught you valuable things about yourself and what you want. And in the case of most of my clients who are contemplating a career change, there’s no investment at stake. More often than not, I speak to people who are already qualified to do lots of different things. Some of them are academics who are contemplating a move to the commercial world, or to a charity, where they’d continue to do roughly the same sort of work that they do now. Some of them are thinking of starting a business doing something that they already know a fair bit about. In these cases, there’s nothing particularly significant at stake - just their own anxieties about ‘getting it right’ and ‘not being a quitter’ and ‘taking it seriously’. What advice do these people need? What advice do you need, if you’re one of them?
I’d say that the advice you need closely resembles the advice we’d give to our single friends. More specifically, good advice for people who are breaking up with their career is pretty similar to good advice for people who are breaking up with their long-term partner. One sensible thing we say to friends who are coming out of a long-term relationship is: ‘Why don’t you spend some time on your own before getting involved with someone else?’ That’s also fantastic advice for people who are about to leave their job - except that most of us need a job in order to earn money, and we can’t afford to spend too much time in between jobs, no matter how wonderful and enriching that might be. Never mind. Another sensible piece of dating advice, and one that might translate better to the world of careers, is: ‘Why don’t you date a few different people for a while in a non-serious way before you think about another long-term relationship?’ It’s illuminating to reflect on why we dole out advice like this. I can think of 3 reasons. The first, and I think the most obvious, is that anyone who has recently exited a long-term relationship has likely been experiencing far more of the stressful side of relationships than the playful, fun side, and so encouraging them to date people without committing to anything serious is a way of encouraging them to reconnect with the fun side of relationships. The second reason is that by dating different people they will have an opportunity to, well, ‘shop around’ and see what’s on offer, which will help them get a clearer idea of what qualities they want in a partner, and what qualities they don’t want. And the third reason is that dating different people will help them learn something about themselves: what sort of person brings out the best in them, how their personality and temperament change depending on who they’re with, and so on.
Now, I think all of these points apply to choosing a career; in other words, I think there’s a lot to be said for forgetting about the idea of ‘marriage or nothing’ in the context of career change and instead dating a few different careers. Doing that can help a person take a break from the stress of a career that’s no longer great for them, and to rediscover what’s out there and what they want and expect of their career. But I think that third point - the idea that dating a few different people or a few different careers can help us learn something about ourselves - is both easy to overlook and incredibly important. The fact is that who we are when we’re in a certain environment - whether that’s a relationship, a career, or whatever - is not necessarily who we are when we’re in a different environment, and unless you’ve already experienced a handful of different environments, you probably don’t have a good sense of who you are. What you’re capable of in one environment is not what you’re capable of in a different environment. Here’s an analogy: If you try to grow a plant in the wrong sort of environment for it - too dark, too cold, too wet, or whatever - you end up with a pale, weak, stunted plant. But move it to a different environment - to a sunny, sheltered corner of the garden, for example - and it might thrive. You might end up with something bigger, stronger, and more beautiful than you expected. The problem is that if you don’t decide to move it, you might not even realise that it’s actually a big, strong, beautiful plant that just happens to be growing in a not-great setting. You might think that the pale, weak, stunted plant in front of you is just the sort of plant that it is, and that it would look like that wherever you put it. You have to experiment and explore a bit in order to see its full potential - and you might not get the conditions right first time. But if you do decide to experiment by trying out different settings, then, even if there’s a bit of trial and error involved before you find the best conditions, you learn more about what sort of plant it is. You learn about what it needs to thrive and what it doesn’t like. You begin to be able to separate out its true potential from the limitations placed on it by certain non-ideal conditions.
Something similar is true of you. You might think that you’re a certain sort of person with certain weaknesses and faults and limitations, but if you’ve been stuck in the same career or the same relationship for a long time, you can’t really know what you’re capable of. You might, like the plant, flourish in a different environment. But you don’t know what your ideal environment is, and unless you’re willing to explore and try out new things, you’re not going to find out. To do that, you need to let go of the thought that it’s a bad idea to choose a new career unless you’re absolutely sure it’s going to be forever. On the contrary, it’s probably, for most of us, a bad idea to jump from one long-term career straight into another, just as it’s generally a bad idea to jump from one long-term relationship straight into another. Who you think you are, from the perspective of your current career, might not be who you really are. It might be a pale, weak, stunted version of you. You need to play the field, try some new things, find out what works for you, before committing to something else long-term.
So, let’s say you’re open to the idea of dating a few different career options in a casual, non-serious way. If you want a fulfilling, satisfying, secure career eventually, how can you do this without frittering your life away and ruining your CV? Well, I’m going to suggest that you reframe the way you view your options. One way to do that addresses that point I made earlier, that the word ‘career’ suggests something long-term and committed. Perhaps it might help to think of your next ‘career experiment’, instead of the more serious-sounding ‘career change’. Another way to reframe things involves replacing that ominous question, ‘Would I want to do this forever?’ with, ‘What is this going to do for me?’ There’s a few ways that you could answer that replacement question. One involves thinking about the opportunities that your next career experiment would open up for you - perhaps you’d gain a new skill or make new connections that would make it easier to do certain other fulfilling things in the future. Another way to answer it relates to your values. Perhaps the career experiment that you’re contemplating would enable you to exercise your curiosity or enhance your connection to your community or provide an opportunity for travel - and if those things are important values for you, it might be worth pursuing even if it doesn’t have any obvious connection to your longer-term plans for your career or anything else. (If you need some help identifying your core values, there’s an exercise to help with this that you can download from the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website - I’ll put a link to that in the episode notes.) Alternatively, you can answer that question by thinking about what the experience is going to teach you. If you run this career experiment, then perhaps you’ll learn something important and useful about yourself or about what your dream life looks like, or both. To return to an analogy I used earlier - it’s unrealistic and unhelpful to tell yourself that you only have one shot at the dream career target. In fact, you have multiple shots - and if you’re canny, you can improve your aim each time, by trying out different things and improving your understanding of what works for you and what doesn’t. A useful tool for doing this is the MoSCoW method - I’m going to put that on the Resources page too, and give you a link in the notes.
A career experiment, like a romantic relationship, needn’t be forever. You can date. You can be non-monogamous (ethically non-monogamous, of course). You can have friends with benefits. You can take a break. It’s not marriage-or-bust. Find out what works for you.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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