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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
3
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.
4
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.