Creating a Career that Feels Sustainable
A sustainable career is one that will help carry you into the future and provide you with options. A sustainable career is a career that you enjoy, rather than a career that you wish you could escape.
There is a strong upward trend of people tired of simply waiting and wishing things would change, and instead, taking action. Tired of counting the months until holidays, tired of counting the days until Friday, and tired of deflated Monday mornings, week after week.
With longevity on the rise, it’s likely you will be working longer than ever before. This makes having a sustainable career particularly important in the modern world.
Four Hallmarks of a Sustainable Career:
Your Career Supports your Wellbeing. Ensuring your career supports your health and wellbeing is the most important consideration of all. The Dali Lama was once asked what surprised him most. He famously replied; “Mankind, because they sacrifice their health to make money, and then they sacrifice their money to rebuild their health.” If your career is taking a toll on your wellbeing, or worse creating burnout, it is not sustainable.
Continued Relevancy. Stop and ask yourself what options your career is currently creating for your future and the various life stages you will travel through? Are all your eggs in the one basket or, have you created multiple options or avenues to suit your future self and what you and the changing work world around you may need? Ensuring you and your skillset remain relevant in a rapidly changing professional (and often personal) context is key.
You Feel Both Effort and Ease. A sustainable career is one where you can continually grow, challenge yourself, and add to your skillset over time. However, you also want to feel some level of ease, where you are operating in your ‘zone of genius’ at least some of the time. Your ‘zone of genius’ is where your natural talents, strengths, and what you passionate about, overlap.
Your Career is Aligned to your Personal Values. When your career is aligned to your values you feel inner harmony and flow. You feel you can be yourself, rather than feeling like you have to hide a secret…that you really do not enjoy your job. When you know your job or career are not aligned to your values, you feel incongruency and this over time, this ultimately chips away at your confidence and happiness.
A sustainable career will ensure you remain highly employable, continually learning, and engaged in what you do, whilst also supporting you to achieve optimal fulfilment and wellbeing.