Your struggle to choose a career is the predictable outcome of competing, misleading influences. There’s another way: holistic career change strategy.

This quick essay will help you process the feelings you’ve been having about not being able to choose the right career. And: it will direct the desire you have to choose a career that honors you as a whole person.

Why it’s so damn hard to choose the right career

Published January 2025
by: Laura Simms 

If you have ever felt the frustration of “I’m smart, I’m capable…why haven’t I been able to figure this out?," then you’re about to understand why. 

There are four main cultural influences that inform how you choose a career. Your choices may have been shaped by one or all of them, without your awareness.

I’m writing this essay/public service announcement because epidemic levels of capable, talented people are wasting their time and gifts in careers that are both too much and not enough.

The world is in an all-hands-on-deck situation and we need what you have to offer, even if you don’t know what that is yet. You could be doing something that feeds your life AND makes the world a better place; a way for you to come alive AND put something good into the world. 

You’re going to miss out on it if these cultural influences create the tools you use to choose a career.


There’s no reason you should know how to choose a meaningful career on your own.

It’s not just that an effective way to choose a career has been withheld, but that you are actively taught misleading, insufficient, and contradictory ways to choose.

So, before we continue, you may be wondering:

WHAT IS THIS ESSAY?

Four cultural influences on career choice that are essential to understand so you can put your personal career struggles in a larger context and stop using tools that don’t work


WHO IS THIS PIECE FOR?

People who want to do meaningful work but haven’t been able to figure out the right career for them, even with help from professionals like college advisors and career centers, therapists, life coaches, and career coaches. 

The truth is that the career coaching industry is in crisis because most of what is taught is founded on these 4 influences, making it very challenging to find effective resources and support.


"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."

 - JOSEPH CAMPBELL

From the rise of therapy, life coaching, and personal development, there’s a belief that knowing yourself is enough to base your career choice on, and that the better you know yourself the better choice you will make.

The assumption is that if you look inward, the answer will come. If you know yourself or your type, you will know the right career. If you “get deep” or develop self-awareness, the answer will become apparent.

This can make choosing the right career even harder, because you put your trust in tools that seem to have solid foundations and are used by kind, well-intentioned professionals doing their best to help. But these tools are incomplete, and often lead to more confusion than clarity.

Let’s look at some examples that you might be familiar with:

Personal development has become a dominant cultural influence that makes it harder to choose the right career. 

Influence #1: Personal Development 

1

Working with a therapist, you experience a lot of personal growth, you develop healthy coping mechanisms for dealing with stress from work, you learn to set better boundaries, your outlook on life improves, and your self-esteem strengthens. However, you still don’t know what career to choose.

Therapy

HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

Using therapy for career change may leave you with a “I feel more empowered…but now what?” feeling.

Therapists can help people in remarkable ways, but therapists are not trained in career strategy. It’s literally not their job or their skillset to help people pinpoint the right career. 

If therapy helped you as a person but didn’t give you the answers you need for your career, know that that’s normal.

Therapy provides a strong foundation for career change, so don’t feel like you’ve wasted time. The self-work you’ve done in therapy will pay off when paired with effective career change strategy.

WHAT IF THERAPY MADE YOU FEEL WORSE?

If you have been in career despair, you’ve probably gotten through the day/week/year by avoidance, numbing, or distraction. 

Then, when you finally let yourself acknowledge the fullness of your situation - the anger at yourself, the disappointment that this is where you are, the rage at the people who have been hurtful - there can be an increase in pain. 

This “awakening pain” make may you want to turn right back around into numbing. 

But know that awakening pain is temporary and a predictable, necessary stage on the path to something greater. Something joyful. Something whole. 

When the awakening pain comes, take it for what it is: not a destination, but a milestone towards something better. 

You take a life coaching program or use a guided workbook that promises to help you do something like reclaim yourself, live out-loud, find your truth, live your best life, be your authentic self, or get more of whatever you want. 

You probably build a better relationship with yourself, so that’s a win. But you still don’t know what career to choose. 

Life Coaching

HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

You learn more about yourself, which weirdly makes it feel harder to choose a career because you don’t know what to do with all that information. It might feel like having puzzle pieces but no roadmap forward. 



Additionally, some life coaches work from a principle of “clarity comes through action" and encourage you to just get started and try stuff. There are many circumstances in life where this is true, but for trying to choose a career it can be a DISASTER. 

Because let's talk about the ACTION you may have taken. Have you…

Started a blog, taken a class in one of your interests, researched going back to school, started a side hustle, brainstormed job titles, taken on new responsibilities at work, applied for jobs you don't even want, rewritten your resume, networked in LinkedIn, done informational interviews, volunteered, listened to podcast interviews of people doing inspiring things, yoga teacher training, life coach training, coding bootcamp, signed up for marketing courses when you don't even know what business you want start, travelled the world to try to Eat, Pray, Love yourself into the right career…

Did all that action help you confidently choose the right career for you? 

Or did all that action leave you more confused, drained, and discouraged than you were before? 

So when it comes to choosing a career, here’s your new catch phrase: Clarity comes through analysis. 

You need a process of analysis backed by career change strategy BEFORE you go taking aligned action. Life coaching doesn’t provide that. Like therapy, it's not even designed to.

A lot of what’s billed as career coaching looks strikingly like the life coaching examples above. 

You journal about yourself, collect a smattering of trivia about yourself, figure out your ideal day, and try to assemble a career from those characteristics, values, and desires.

You end up with a self-knowledge word salad rather than a clear choice and path forward.

Career Coaching

HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

The accumulation of self-knowledge does not help unless there's a way to apply that knowledge into making an actionable choice. 

And some of the self-knowledge you've gathered won't even apply to your career. So how do you know what's relevant? 

You might also run into questions like “What would you do if the money didn’t matter?” and “What did you love to do as a kid?” as the backbone of the coaching approach. 

I’m guessing you’ve already asked yourself these kinds of questions. These career parlor games aim to create a lightbulb moment you can use as a springboard toward your entire career.

But what happens when the light doesn’t go on? Or what if you don’t want to be a ballerina-archeologist like you did when you were 7? You’re back to square one.

You take a personality test, and it gives you a list of career choices for your type. You don’t feel excited about any of them. Some of them you’ve already tried and had a bad experience with.

Self-Assessments

HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

You are a type but you are also much more than a type. 

Let’s say you’re an INFJ in the Myers-Briggs schema. But you are also the parent of two young children or have a chronic illness that limits your capacity to work or you don’t want to work in the male-dominated field that the test recommendations said would be perfect for you, or ALL of those? An assessment system is designed to assess aspects of your type, but not you as a once-in-the-universe being with specific gifts, needs, and limitations in this season of your life and career. 

Also, a list of options without the criteria to choose between them does not lead to clear, confident choices.

Conclusions about the influence of personal development on career choice: 


The big lie of personal development is that knowing yourself will help you choose the right career.

The big truth is that self-knowledge alone is not enough. You have to know how to apply relevant self-knowledge into making an actionable choice.


If you have learned a lot about yourself but still don’t know what career to choose, you have not done career change strategy; you’ve done personal development work.

Personal development is NOT career change strategy. 

Before you trust a resource for career change, ask: Is this designed to facilitate the outcome I am seeking?

In the standard American-style, factory model school, learning is segregated by subject and interdisciplinary learning is not given more than lip service via a couple projects a year. 

Subjects AND SKILLS are separated. You use one set of skills when you go into music class, and you have to toss those and pick up an entirely new set of skills when you go into math class. There is some necessity and practicality to this, but the education system takes it to the extreme. 

Learning is tailored to the herd rather than to individuals. Really good teachers, bless them, can disrupt this system but they're still working within it. A demand to teach to the test has teachers asking students to learn the same answers to the same questions that have always been asked.

You succeed by getting a good grade and advancing to the next prescribed level. There is a linear, predictable path for advancement. You’re told if you just work harder, you will be rewarded.

The education system creates linear and siloed thinking, which constrains how we choose careers and the pathways we see as viable to get there. 

Influence #2: The Education System
Probably your education! History majors become historians, geology majors become geologists, and acting majors become waiters. (haha that’s a little “follow your passion” humor for you; more on that soon)

You’re encouraged to do more of what you’re good at, based on subject matter. This probably starts when you’re very young and continues through higher education, if pursued. 

  • “You love LEGOS; you should be an engineer.” 

  • “You argue all the time; you should be a lawyer.”

  • “You’re great with kids; you should be a teacher.” 

You get these messages from parents, teachers, coaches, college advisors, and more traditional career coaches. 

But these "obvious" career choices don't always work out. You might feel like you just took the next thing in front of you instead of making intentional choices, like you're not using your most potent gifts or creativity, or that you have to abandon yourself to keep doing a thing you're good at but drains you.  
HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 

The Silo Problem

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

Having been taught to think in buckets rather than webs for your entire upbringing, you continue to think in siloes when it come to your career, like a kid making sure the mashed potatoes and peas don’t ever touch on the plate. 


Good at math = do math jobs.

Good with people = client facing work.

This has you miss entire swaths of careers that might be a good fit because you can only make subject matter connections. In human history, some of our greatest contributors have played across disciplines rather than pigeon-holing themselves into one subject.

What’s more: you think you have to “start from scratch” or will “waste your education” if you make a change. Take it from this career coach with a BA in history and an MFA in acting: no education is wasted and you will use it all, just in different ways. 

2

The Over-Emphasis on Transferable Skills

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 

It’s not that transferable skills don’t matter, but your skills are just part of the equation when it comes to choosing a meaningful career.

When you over-focus on your skills, you end up applying for the same kinds of jobs you’ve already had and know you don’t want. Then you end up in interviews for jobs you don’t want. It ends up being an enormous frustration and waste of time.

The Skill Acquisition Fallacy

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
You may think you don’t have enough skills, because in the education system there’s always that next level of study to take. 

You think: 

  • “My skills are too niche.”
  • “My skills are too general.”
  • ”Maybe I need to go back to school to add more skills.”

You most likely do NOT have skills problem. It’s much more likely that you have a CRITERIA problem.

Meaning: you don’t know HOW to choose a meaningful career because you don’t actually know what would be fulfilling for you. If you’ve been brainstorming job titles, or if you’ve been hyper-focused on “what career can I turn this skill into?” without getting down to the substance and circumstances of the work, this will ring especially true.

If you keep applying for jobs you don’t even want, start and abandon business ideas, and change your mind about what you think you want to do over and over again then FOR SURE you have a criteria problem.

So before you go off and acquire more skills (I’m looking at you, people who think you need to go back to school, or do a certification program, or taking some kind of bootcamp!) make sure you have the criteria with which to choose a career.

And then, once you’re certain you know what you want to do, and certain that it will require additional skills, you can look into ways to fill any skill gaps that you have.

Remember this: Skill acquisition is for people who KNOW what they want to do, NOT people who are trying to figure out what they want to do.

The Devaluing of Inherent Skills

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
When you think of your skills, you may exclusively think of your formal education and what you do in the job you have now.

If you don’t like the job you have now, you may be using all kinds of skills you don’t want to keep using. Things that feel unnatural to you. That make you feel incompetent. Or that you’re really amazing at, but completely drain you to do. 

So it’s not going to help to identify transferable skills if the skills are part of what’s making you miserable.

We also need to know your inherent skills - those things that are so inherent to who you are and how you operate that you’re going to do them in ANY role. So let’s make sure we put you in roles and environments where that thing you naturally do is valued and rewarded.

If you want work that feels like a natural extension of yourself, this is one of the secret ingredients to figuring it out.

But, this can be hard to do. Because your inherent skills come so naturally to you, sometimes you don’t know they’re there. Or you think “everyone just does this.” 

Or most insidious, you think that because it comes naturally to you, you don’t deserve to be paid for it. And that you should only be paid when you’re “working hard” and breaking a sweat.

This is another reason that your skills alone are not the cornerstone to choosing a career. You’ve also got to adjust your relationship to work or you will continue to repeat old patterns. Listing the transferable skills you got in your formal education won’t save you from that.

The Whole Human Problem

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
Since the education system can be so myopic on skills and subjects, it often loses sight of the whole person

Traditional career coaching borne of the education system treats you as a list of transferable skills rather than a complete person full of hopes, dreams, fears, and needs that sometimes conflict with each other. It hones in on one skillset and tries to shoehorn you into a narrow selection of pre-determined careers that only satisfy a tiny sliver of who you are, what you want, and what you have to offer.

Conclusions about the influence of the education system on career choice: 

The big lie of the education system is that you have to advance linearly according to subject AND that you should do more of what you're good at. It also assumes meritocracy; if you’ve ever worked harder to prove yourself and got “rewarded” with more work instead of more money and support, then you know what I’m talking about. 


The big truth is that skills and strengths can be repurposed across different subjects AND that ability does not obligate you to pursue something. 


Some of the people with the most rewarding careers have non-linear paths.

Where you’ve been does not have to be a mandate for where you go when you learn a more fluid, holistic way to think about your career options. 

Perhaps as a backlash to the rigidity of the education system, you heard messages from your more free-spirited parents and teachers like: 

"Do what you love and you will never work a day in your life.”
”Do what you love and the money will follow.”


Then you get older, and influential people like Oprah say things like: 

”You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job and not be paid for it.

”If you don't know what your passion is, realize that one reason for your existence on earth is to find it."

Anybody see Oprah doing her job for free? Last I checked she was worth three billion. 

And no pressure, just the entire reason for your existence on earth! Better find it!

This advice is genuinely meant to be encouraging and help people find something they connect to or care about.

TODAY, advice to follow your passion is not coming from career coaches, counselors, and mentors who have spent years helping people successfully transition into meaningful, sustainable careers. It’s bumper sticker advice from people who have followed their own passion, want to help you build a business around your passion, or parents/teachers still running this old encouragement script. It’s a nice thing to say when you don’t know what else to say. 

The follow your passion model puts high value on personal enjoyment, self-expression, and doing an activity you love. To follow your passion, you do what you love and put your happiness first. Money? That will just happen.

Your enjoyment of an activity is not enough to base a career choice on. 

Influence #3: Follow Your Passion 
HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
Stumbling into something you enjoy and trying to make your living from it with mixed results. 

Possibly falling out of love with your passion and no longer enjoying it. Being resentful that people won't pay you to do your thing. Feeling like a failure because you were told if you loved hard enough things would work out.

Here’s a tricky thing: follow your passion CAN work! We have lots of examples of athletes and artists who followed their passion. It can absolutely work. It worked for me in my previous career as an actor. If it’s working for you, keep doing it. But it’s not a reliable, repeatable career choice strategy and it doesn’t work for most people.

3

Passion Problems

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
What if you:
  • Don’t have a passion
  • Have too many passions to choose between 
  • Can’t monetize your passion
  • Don’t want to monetize your passion because that would take the joy out of it for you
  • Just aren’t that good enough at your passion to do it on a professional level
  • Don’t have a demand for your passion
  • Are great at your passion, but not a good business person

Your passion is about your enjoyment of an activity or belief in a cause . Those are not enough to base a career choice around, either for YOUR needs OR to ensure there’s enough need or appetite from others for you to make it your livelihood.

Love Is Not Enough

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
Do what you love and the money will come. Do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life. Tricky thing about love: it takes work. 

Marriages don’t survive on love alone, not every moment of parenthood is bliss, and even work you love sometimes feels like work. There will probably be stuff you gotta do that you don’t like: dealing with difficult personalities, working on a weekend, or handling numbers. 

Just because you run into things that feel like chores and have-to’s doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong work. Expect some tough work and not liking it sometimes.

Combining Your Passions Solves Your Problem, But No One Else’s

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
The follow your passion model will also encourage you to combine your passions. This can work but...imagine trying to cook a meal using only your favorite foods as ingredients. I would end up with an apple/ice cream/dinner roll/nacho mess. I wouldn't want to eat it, and I certainly wouldn't be able to sell it. 

The problem with the Combine Your Passions model is that the focus is on individual activities that please you. They don't always mesh well when it comes to providing something valuable to potential customers.

That's why when people ask me something like "I paint and make soap and am into aromatherapy and think I want to be a life coach. Can you help me combine my passions into one business?," I say no.

Passion Does Not Guarantee Income

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
Do what you love and the money might come, but it’s not a guarantee. You loving what you do does not mean that it’s valuable to other people, or that your passion and the earnest intent of your heart will bend the will of the universe for you to succeed. 

Conclusions about the influence of “follow your passion” on career choice: 

The big lie of "follow your passion" is that you should do what you love and monetize your passion.

The big truth is that following your passion does not lead to a sustainable career for most people.  


Don’t let that discourage you. You can still do meaningful, joyful work without following your passion. 

There are a lot of spiritually-inspired thoughts about careers you may not even realize are influencing you. They link back to god, the universe, morality, and the idea of being a seeker. They can be incredibly confusing and disempowering when you'd think spirituality would do the opposite. These aren't as organized or systemized as the education system; they just seem to be out there in the zeitgeist and come up frequently in career conversations.

The idea is that the answer is out there, and if you do enough meditation, prayer, tarot cards, pendulums, or some other kind of seeking, the answer will reveal itself to you. There is one right answer, and it’s your mission to find it.

Your spirituality might be getting in the way of your career choice. 

Influence #4: The Spiritual Zeitgeist
HOW YOU MIGHT EXPERIENCE THIS: 
Going on a spiritual OR secular quest to find your destiny, gift, calling, or some other cosmic thing outside of yourself that will tell you who are and what you should do. Waiting for a sign. Adopting a spiritual practice with the intention of downloading divine instructions about what to do next.

Not getting a clear answer and wondering "what does it mean?" when you perceive hints and nudges from another plane. Lots of second-guessing. Turning to feelings as your primary compass. 

4

Abdicating Choice to Objects

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
I am not here to take away your crystals and tarot cards! I think people should have whatever tools resonate, guide, and comfort. 

AND…I bet you don’t draw a card when your faucet won’t shut off and it starts flooding the bathroom. I bet you Google that or call an expert, because it requires processes and tools that are specific to that situation.  

You know that whole “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail” quote? Apply here. That amethyst doesn’t know if you should be a project manager or an event planner.

But I do understand the appeal of having a beautiful object give you the answer: it relieves you of the responsibility of choice. The fixed answer is out in the ether, and you, the seeker, have only to find it. You are one cosmic game of hide-and-seek away from being complete. 

Instead, you need to learn how to choose.

If you use spiritual tools to help you access your intuition, know that there is a place for intuition in career choice but it needs to be in partnership with career change strategy rather than a substitute for it. 

Find Your Calling

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
If worry about finding your calling, here’s my stance: If it's a calling, it will call you. You don't have to go out and find it. 

A couple other things about callings: You can have more than one, and your calling does not have to become your career. If you feel really pulled to help abandoned dogs, you can do that without turning your home into a for-profit dog shelter.

Career Soul Mates

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
Another thought we can attribute to the spiritual zeitgeist is the idea that “I have a career soul-mate.” There’s one right career and if you find it you're set for life. The truth is, there are many careers that can make you happy. But the pressure to find “the one” can throw you off the trail of options that could be really wonderful for you. 

The Virtue Trap

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
The spiritual zeitgeist also favors options that sound virtuous. It’s the belief that you have to have a "do-gooder" career to do something meaningful. Not so; any career can be meaningful to the right person depending on the person's personal connection to it. It’s the connection, not the content that makes it meaningful. 

Think about being a doctor or aid worker or teacher. We can make the argument that those roles objectively make a difference, but if you don’t personally connect with them then they won’t feel meaningful enough to you. They might even be miserable for you.

You Don't Have a Purpose

WHY IT DOESN'T WORK: 
When it comes to your career, I find the concept of having a purpose extremely damaging. 

Now, if you wanna tell me, “Laura, but I do have a purpose. I am here to love others and leave the world better than I found it,” then ok. That’s pretty broad. That doesn’t pigeon-hole you into a specific career. 

There’s a big difference between saying “I’m here to love others” and “I’m here to be a graphic designer.” You got more going on than that. Would you ever turn to a graphic designer and say, “Well, you’ve found your purpose! You’re here on this earth to make logos.” NO. We are all complex, beautiful, capable people, and our work is just part of who we are. 

When you put the pressure on yourself to find your purpose, you give yourself an impossible task. So don't worry about trying to find your Purpose. You can claim a sense of purpose. You can want to make a difference. You can have themes that run throughout your life and motivate you without having to reduce your reason for existence into a tagline or  job description. 

Conclusions about the influence of the spiritual zeitgeist on career choice: 

The big lie is that your career is a cosmically pre-ordained, star crossed, one-ring-to-rule-them-all destiny that you have to go out and seek. 

The big truth is that your career is entirely your choice. 


Instead of figuring out what is written in the stars, you have to learn how to choose.

I hope this helps you understand why your very earnest, even professionally assisted attempts to choose the right career have not worked out. 

You may have had advice coming from all four influences, which results in a cacophony of confusion and never-ending series of double-binds that make it nearly impossible to make a clear, confident career choice. 



It’s worth noting that these are just the strategic ways that you get thrown off track. If you layer in personal challenges with self-trust, visibility, worthiness, or meeting family expectations, the confusion to choose and hesitation to act only intensifies. 

I hope this can be a turning point where you stop feeling that YOU have failed and acknowledge that you’ve used tools that have failed you. 

It’s time to use tools that were made for the job and learn how to choose what’s right for you.

Inside The 5 Keys to Discover Your Meaningful Career free training, I take you through the steps and strategy to make a wise career choice.

  • We can’t rely on Old School approaches from the education system. 

  • We can’t do what we love and hope the money follows.

  • We can’t be passive and turn it over to signs from the universe. 

  • We can’t even rely on personal development resources because self-knowledge is not enough. 


You and your career deserve a career choice model that acknowledges the complexity of making a choice as a whole human being, and helps you APPLY self-knowledge into making a confident, actionable career choice

Thank you for reading, and I’d love to see you in The 5 Keys To Discover Your Meaningful Career Free Training. 

People who want to make a great living doing meaningful work have got to use a holistic career change strategy and learn how to choose the right career. 

Find out more about the free 5 Keys Training here