Midlife career soul-searching is exhausting and confusing work. You’ve worked 15+ years to build a career you thought would be fulfilling and sustainable, only to find out it’s neither. You find yourself thinking, Is this really what I want to be doing for another 20 years?
And though you want fulfillment in your work, you also have kids relying on you, an expensive mortgage, and student loans and credit card debt. How do you navigate your way through the unhappiness and figure out how to live an intentional, fulfilling life?
We can feel lost and empty at different points in our lives when the way we’re living isn’t aligning with what makes us happy. That confusion can cause a person to stay stuck — almost paralyzed. Here are four ways to help you figure out the next move:
Step back
Spend some time assessing your career. What roles and positions have you loved? What did you love about them? In your current career, are you feeling challenged and motivated? Or are you bored and uninspired? Through this exercise, you’ll begin to see patterns of what you value and what makes you proud. During this time, let go of thinking patterns and phrases like “I can’t…” that are keeping you stuck.
Explore
Once you’re aware of what you’re feeling, you can begin to answer the question of how to create more alignment and intentionality in your work. This could be actualized in a couple of different ways:
Talk to your manager
Maybe you can delegate parts of your job that aren’t fitting anymore. Or, maybe you can take on a new project with new responsibilities.
Try on
Career coach Kathy Caprino suggests investigating the pathways you’re most excited about. “Try on — behaviorally, emotionally, and physically — through microsteps, the top three directions that excite you most, to help you determine if these new pathways will in fact be what you really want.” This might mean taking on a small freelance project or shadowing a friend whose work interests you.
Network
Seek out people who have a made a similar change in their career. Think of this as research, not sales. Take a class, join a networking group or invite a friend to coffee.
Make a list of people you respect and admire who are attainable — meaning they’re in your community, your church, your workplace, your gym. Each week, reach out to one of them and offer to buy them coffee.
Spend an hour picking their brain; how did they know they were ready for a change? How do they find success and fulfillment in their current role?
Invest in yourself
Invest in yourself to avoid stagnation. This could mean volunteering, taking a virtual course, or earning an advanced degree.
Brendon Schrader, founder and CEO of Antenna, a Minneapolis-based marketing company says, “Maybe it’s making time every week to review blogs and podcasts about your industry. You are your biggest asset, and you need to invest in yourself to grow over time and avoid stagnation in the latter part of your career. When you’re trying to make a shift in your career, you don’t want to be out of date. If you’ve been in a bubble at your company, it’s time to get current.”
Schrader himself made a career change after chasing success and checking all the right boxes in the corporate world. He says that while on a vacation, he was forced to spend the day handling a crisis happening back at the office. That day, he realized that he wanted a better life balance. He decided to begin finding ways to make a change.
By taking a step back and evaluating what you want your life to look like, you can begin to live an intentional life with fulfilling work.