Where do more meaningful careers begin?
How do you make your career more meaningful?
This isn't a question that started my career but it's certainly the one that keeps it going. I 'fell into' acting in the same way that many of us fell into our work, I believe we are naturally drawn towards what's most meaningful. Even when we're not sure where we're standing in our careers my experience is always that we have at least one foot firmly stood in what's meaningful for us. The people I work with never struggle to talk about what they find meaningful in their careers. But it’s often expressed in terms of a problem; something that’s missing, lost or wanted.
Numerous studies of artists’ careers highlight meaningfulness as one of the principal reasons they do what they do. It's also sighted as why, if given the choice to start over again, they said that would still choose to be artists. We instinctively know that meaninglessness is well worth avoiding in our professional lives. Meaninglessness in careers is a sense of alienation from ourselves, what we do, how we do it and who for. It's the feeling of being cut off, of lacking power or will. It's unwanted bed-fellow is hopelessness, and together they can stall or de-rail the most promising of creative careers.
So the question of what makes a career more meaningful is one that matters.
Awareness.
The question of what makes something meaningful in someone’s career is subjective, but there are some objective qualifiers. One of which is our level of personal awareness. Awareness is an ongoing process, a cycle of thinking and action that consists of curiosity, experimentation, insight, action and reflection. It's cumulative and builds self-knowledge over time. It looks like the confidence with which people pursue their careers. The clarity with which they know the type of work that is for them and that's not. Who they will work well with and who they won't. To be aware is to be acting from a place of informed self-knowledge and when it comes to making your career more meaningful, this is where you must always start.
This type of awareness-building is not passive; it's an active, conscious practice. You can approach this type of awareness-building in many ways but as a career coach I'm most interested in the approaches that work best for the person in front of me and that have solid research behind them.
Awareness Building One: How now, & why?
Careers are journeys of constant change and adaption. We are changing in concert with the world around us but sometimes we lose sight of this and imagine that we are the same as we always were and that the approaches that have always worked will continue to do so. This is why bringing 'curiosity' to bare on your present experience is the best place to start. Developing this capacity for curiosity is a skill in itself and there are many tools you can use. Journalling has been proven to be very effective in creating enough space between you and your career to see the wood from the trees. There's similar research that says a change of environment can have a similar effect. The long held tradition of the artists’ retreat attests to the success of this as an approach. Personally guided reflection can be very productive too in uncovering fresh insights about what's needed next in your career. Here’s one such set of questions that get the ball rolling. Fundamentally, what you're looking to understand at this stage of awareness building is:
What's wanted?
How would getting there make a difference?
What do you see as getting in the way?
Why is this important for you to get to grips with now?
What are some options you can begin to explore that lie in the direction of what’s wanted?
Every step in our careers can be seen as a cycle of moving from the known into the unknown, and back again. In order to embrace changes and enjoy the experience of your career at every step you need to befriend the skill of curiosity.
I know how useful it can be to have some structure and support in drawing out all the information together, which is why I take a coaching approach working with creatives 1-2-1. The presence of a professional can make the process immensely richer, they can pick up on the non-verbal signals that hold important clues about what's really needed, deepen awareness with questions that highlight personal understanding, bring multiple perspectives to the conversation to broaden thinking, and provide a structure to the session that results in real clarity and concrete next steps. The fundamental skills of awareness building, however, are always available to us no matter where we are in our careers. Just set sometime aside and get curious & creative with some of these approaches or whatever you feel will allow you to get an overview of where you are now & where you want to be.
Awareness Building Two: Values.
For over a hundred years now the most consistently researched and applied tool in career theory has been trait analysis. Your interests, your personal preferences, strengths and values. These are the unique variations we all have as humans. The extent to which we are familiar with our own and incorporate them into our career development is the extent to which we make our careers more meaningful. Research shows that we become more resilient, creative, innovative, ambitious, motivated, successful and experience greater subjective well-being when we are in work that ties in with our unique set of personal traits. Values are a great place to start with this. They are the threads that link our careers journey together and the internal way-markers that indicate the path ahead. They give us a sense of consistency in our ever changing careers. Thinking back to times in our careers that we really didn’t enjoy highlights which values really matter to us and the cost of neglecting them. With every decision we make in our careers, big or small, we have the option of moving closer to or from our values and thus what will be more or less meaningful.
There's many resources that can help you identify or draw out your values. Making them explicit in this way means that when we're stressed, tired or uncertain we can reference a list of personal values for guidance. Simon Sinek’s book ‘Start with Why’ is a good place to begin. You will also find some exercises that cover this and a whole lot more in my free workbook here.
Awareness Building Three: Personality and Strengths
Personality traits sit along with personal values in career theory as individual variations that inform what makes the experience of our career more fulfilling & meaningful. Raising your awareness about your own personality traits and individual strengths means that you can build upon both and put yourself in more situations where you feel ‘perfectly suited’. In the context of a creative career this knowledge can also help you adapt and change quickly when there are sudden or unexpected changes in society or our personal circumstances. Knowing more about both will also help identify key areas of personal and professional development. Given that 50-60% of creatives across the UK and Ireland report needing alternative work as to pay the bills, having a greater awareness of your personality trait and personal strengths will help you to identify which types of alternative work will feel more like thriving than surviving.
For personality traits, the Big Five has the most research behind it currently in relation to careers. But Myers-Briggs has long standing recognition too, you’ll find a free version here. To find out more about your personal strengths I'd recommend Strengths Finder 2.0 from Gallup or their online resources. Neither are free but have a strong body of cross-cultural research to back them up.
Awareness building is a journey in itself but if you’re looking to build a career that’s more meaningful, adaptable and fulfilling it’s the best place to start. Some might say it’s the only place to start. I begin with awareness building in my career coaching work because I’ve seen A) the research clearly and unquestionably attests to this being a very good place to begin and B) having seen the benefits of doing so over hundreds of coaching sessions it’s typically been the most fruitful. If you don’t know what you want next don’t discount this information either. As a form of awareness it’s just as valid, on the other side of not-knowing is knowing. In my experience if you keep curious and keep experimenting the way forward often reveals itself in ways you could never have expected.
(If you’ve read this far, well done and thank you. If you’ve found it rang a few bells or rattled a few cages and you’d like some help in getting some clarity in your own career I offer a free one hour session you can book here. The session is a fun, insightful and human way of looking at where a more meaningful career starts for you.)