723: (4 of 8) Career Design: How to Build a Career That Fits Your Whole Life (Not Just Your Job) | What Fits You

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Can you keep your work completely separate from the rest of your life? Turns out it's impossible. The work you do shapes who you spend your most time with, who you don't. It shapes where you live, how much you earn, what kind of person you're becoming, and how much energy you have left for everything else when the day might be over.

[00:00:17] Which, of course, means you can't get clear on what you want from your work without also getting clear on what you want from the other areas in your life. If you've listened to very many other episodes of the Happen To Your Career podcast, then you know that we use a Ideal Career Profile, a tool that contains the seven elements of fulfilling work.

[00:00:36] Now, most people are on default for these seven areas. But today, we're going to dig into a few specific areas that are focused on the life that you want to live as opposed to just your career. Today, you start making those decisions on purpose. This is day four of the What Fits You eight-day mini course.

[00:00:55] And if you're just joining us, I want you to go back in your feed, pause this right now, and then start with the introduction episode before working through days one through three, 'cause every day builds directly on the last, and today especially depends on the foundation that you've been laying through the beginning of this course.

[00:01:10] By the way, if you haven't registered for the complete course experience, including the emails and guided exercises, I want you to do that now. Take a moment. You can click into the link right below here in the show notes or description, or you can go to happentoyourcareer.com/8day. After you've done that, let's get into the default setting that nobody talks about.

[00:01:31] Most people that we've worked with in the past, even those who have achieved at a very high level and done some really truly amazing things in their life and career, well, a lot of them have made their career decisions without ever explicitly asking, "What kind of life are those decisions building towards?"

[00:01:49] Put another way, most people are asking, "Hey, does this job or opportunity that's right in front of me fit what I think is a good thing for me?" Instead of saying, "What is the life that I'm trying to build, and how do I want work to fit within that?" One is very much the reverse of the other, and it doesn't happen because people don't care about their life outside work.

[00:02:09] It happens because a lot of times, when you're making career decisions, your career can have its own momentum, so each step when you're in it can make sense at the time. It seems logical. Each promotion might feel like it's a good move for you, and somewhere along the way, you realize that by asking, you know, about each opportunity right in front of you, that's causing your career to make your life decisions, not the other way around.

[00:02:35] Now, somewhere along the way, when you're using this approach where you are asking, "I have this opportunity right in front of me, do I want it or not?" Then you start to realize that saying yes or no to that is causing your career to make your life decisions instead of the other way around. This is called narrow-focused decision-making or narrow-focused framing by psychologists, and it is literally the opposite of trying to imagine where you're going, figuring all that out, and then making decisions that are going to allow you to get there, as opposed to getting to a fork in the road and saying, "Hey, which way do I wanna go, left or right?"

[00:03:13] Here's why. Because where you live, how much time you have, what your health looks like, how present you've been for the people who matter most, or whether you're growing in the ways that you actually want to grow, all of those things haven't happened by accident. They happened because of many of the career decisions that you made, and running on autopilot makes them the default.

[00:03:33] Now, many of our clients who you've heard on other episodes of the Happen To Your Career podcast that have made very, very intentional and meaningful life and career changes, well, they're almost always the ones who stopped and began to name specifically what they want from their total life, not just their work.

[00:03:50] Now, you might have heard us mention on the podcast the Ideal Career Profile, and it's a really simple tool that we use to allow people to become clear on what they want in all areas of work and in life, too. One portion of that Ideal Career Profile, or what we call the ICP, addresses five of the categories that make up your non-work life, and we're actually gonna cover those in this episode.

[00:04:14] Environment, financial, family and social, personal development or growth, physical fitness, health and wellness. Now, this is not the full list of categories, but it definitely is some of the most important ones if you wanted to take a design-first approach to your life and your career. Let's walk through each of these five starter areas.

[00:04:33] You can continue on the paper or document that you used for all of the previous days. And if you don't have that, go ahead and get out a new piece of paper or open a document. And then for each of these areas, I'm gonna define them for you, and we're gonna have you write down the beginnings of what you know you want, as specifically as you can.

[00:04:51] This exercise is vital. I want you to be honest and as thorough as you can, but also recognize that when we're working with this with clients, often it can take, you know, weeks or months to really fully flesh these out. So, first crack at this, you know, in just a matter of 20 minutes or so might just be your very, very first draft, and that's okay. It takes time and practice to get very, very specific on what you want.

[00:05:18] Okay, let's start with the first category. This is environment. And think about this as where do you want to live? Not where your current role requires you to be. Where do you actually want to be? What kind of physical environment do you want to spend your time in? What allows you to do your best thinking? What does your ideal working setup look like? Is this remote? Is this in person? Is it in a specific kind of city or community? For a lot of people, they treat the environment as fixed, but it doesn't have to be.

[00:05:47] Category two, financial. What does financial security actually look like for you at this stage? Not a vague sense of 'enough', a specific number or a specific set of conditions. What income do you need to support the life that you want to build? What financial goals are you working towards in the next five to 10 years? This matters because income can become both the reason to stay somewhere that doesn't fit and the thing that makes every other area harder to prioritize. Naming it clearly takes away some of its power to make decisions for you.

[00:06:19] I also wanna give you a pro tip and just a different way of thinking on this too. You know, when we're doing deep lifestyle and career design work with our clients, and this is not every single client we work with, but when we're looking way, way ahead in the future, part of how we think about finances are very much a tool to achieve what you want in your life. So we'll typically help you build out all of the areas that you want for your life, and then we can start to imagine and put real cost to that, and we can anticipate what those costs and how they might raise in the future.

[00:06:53] And then what happens with that is we can start to have an actual number that we're working towards. And then when we have that number that we're working towards, we can actually work backwards and be able to say, "Okay, you know, what do I need to earn in the next year or two years or three years in order to move myself towards that number?" Okay. That's not what we're gonna do today, but I just wanna give you a little tidbit of where you can go in the advanced version.

[00:07:17] All right. Category number three is family and social. What do you want your relationships to look like with your partner, your kids, your closest friends? What does being present actually mean to you at this stage now that your children might be older or leaving home? My children been in that category. What would you want more of if your career stopped consuming the margins? This area is where the gap between what people say matters and what their calendar reflects tends to be the widest. Write down what you actually want, not what you've been making do with or tolerating.

[00:07:48] Okay, category number four, personal development or growth. What do you want to be learning? What kind of person do you want to become? Are there areas intellectually, creatively, professionally where you've stopped growing because the current role doesn't require it? Naming this growth helps clarify what you specifically need and what you need to look for later on.

[00:08:08] Now, a quick footnote on this too. What we would do in the advanced version with our clients is we would actually help people dig much further in terms of what creates very positive growth for that individual. Now, that can include many things that people often don't think about, like what's the rate of growth you need?

[00:08:23] What is the scope of growth? Do you experience your best growth when you're around certain types of people, certain types of situations, certain types of problems? What are the patterns underneath that? Okay, this can get really complex really quick, so I don't want you to focus on all of those areas now. Just focus on what you know about what creates great growth for you.

[00:08:42] Area number five, physical health, fitness, wellness. What does physical wellbeing look like for you? Not as an aspirational goal, but as a real daily condition. What kind of energy do you want to have? What does your current role cost you physically? Sleep, stress, you know, what do you want in time and capacity to be able to take care of yourself? This one gets deprioritized most consistently at senior level roles. We've seen it over and over and over again. Write down what you actually want, even if it feels far from where you are now.

[00:09:15] As you're asking yourself these questions, try to write down as much context or specifics as you can. Later on, this will actually help you create more vision, more structure, additional clarity as you're going through all of the areas that fit into your life. What we've been doing here over the last four days is we've been building a picture. We started with signature strengths. We started with what your past is telling you, what you actually want, and now a much fuller landscape of life you want to build so that your career can support that.

[00:09:47] These areas that we covered today, they're not separate from the clarity for your career. They're part of you developing a very specific picture of where you're moving towards. A role that pays exceptionally well but costs you your health and what you need for your most important relationships or your growth? Well, that's probably not actually a good fit.

[00:10:07] A role that energizes you professionally but requires you to live somewhere that makes everything else so much harder? Well, you know, maybe that's not a good fit either. Fit is the whole picture, period. It's not just about the work, not just about the career. Without doing this work first, it's gonna become impossible to connect it back to, you know, roles or companies later on.

[00:10:26] Okay, so let's go over your actions for today. I want you to work through each of these five areas. Write down what you want in each one specifically, at least as specific as you can. We're not going for perfection here. We're going for a start. And then I want you to come back and leave a comment. Which area has your career been costing you the most, and what would you want it to look like instead?

[00:10:44] Day five is up next. If you haven't already, click subscribe or follow so that wherever you're listening, it lands in your feed automatically for the next days and all the future episodes of the Happen To Your Career podcast. And some of this stuff is not easy to do alone. I recognize that fully. So if any point in time you decide that you want help and support creating the life that you want to be living and figuring out how your work fits within that, well, then don't hesitate to let us know.

[00:11:12] I can connect you with our team. We can have a great conversation. You can start to understand what a plan looks like to be able to move forward. Okay, all you have to do is email me, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line. I'll connect you to my team. There is no pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and what the right next step looks for you and what the plan looks like to get you there. See you in day five. Until then, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios.