Her Career Doctor’s mission is to help you see and recognize how your career is impacting your life and how your career might be derailing your physical health, mental health, and relationships – which I think is very important.
Why? Because too many people ignore the impact of their careers. Things will go wrong in their lives. They might not feel well. They don't stop to think about how the job may be and why they feel that way.
Is that sounding familiar?
For this blog post, I want to flip the script. I share the major benefits of being in a fulfilling career.
I want to paint a picture for you of what it can look like on the other side. To be doing work that you love and enjoy.
I define a fulfilling career as a career aligned with who you are. And at this point, it's important to clarify that a career differs from a job. Your job and your career are not the same things.
That means, a fulfilling career can include multiple aligned jobs. Still, the career is the amalgamation of all your jobs, educational experiences, and volunteer experiences that just tied together to reach your vocational goals.
So, going back to my definition, a fulfilling career is a career path that is aligned with who you are, and because it is aligned with who you are, it allows:
That's how I would define a fulfilling career.
Now that you know what a fulfilling career is, what is the benefit of being in one? What is the benefit of being in a workplace in terms of the work environment and being in a role aligned with who you are?
A fulfilling career allows you to not only feel like you're living a purpose but to actually live on purpose.
As someone who is faith-based, as someone who's a Jesus lover, I define purpose as –glorifying God. I believe we all have one purpose here on earth. It's to glorify God. This is not to be confused with passion. Because too many times, I hear people conflating passion with purpose.
And if you've followed my content, you probably, at some point, have heard me talk about how I define passion. Know that passion is not something that you find.
Usually, when you're actively involved in your interests, passion reveals itself.
So, passion can and does fluctuate over your lifetime.
Purpose, on the other hand, does not change. Purpose is to glorify God and your career is one of the ways through which you can do that.
I believe that our careers, jobs, and the work that we do are one of the ways through which we can live out the abilities and talents that God has placed in us.
And when we are living in alignment with the talents that are in us, it allows us to feel like we are living our purpose, that we're using everything that's been put in us.
Being in a fulfilling career causes you to feel like you have a reason for being here. It'll make you live out that reason, impact people, make a difference, and glorify God in that process.
Being in a fulfilling career causes you to feel like you have a reason for being here, and that you are living out that reason, impacting people, making a difference, and glorifying God in that process. Share on XSo, the first benefit of being in a fulfilling career is that it allows you to live on purpose. And that purpose is glorifying God.
The second benefit of being in a fulfilling career is that you experience an increased level of confidence. Because being in a fulfilling career means that you’re doing work that aligns with who you are. This includes your high-power skills.
So, those skills that you genuinely enjoy using at work?
A fulfilling career is not aligned with those.
And the more you leverage skills that make you feel good, strong, powerful, and confident, the better you feel about yourself.
Over time, when you are doing work that allows you to leverage those high-power skills, you find that you're very interested in the work you're engaged in.
And when you're engaged, you desire to go deeper, to improve your skill sets. You want to attend conferences, take courses, and read articles and books because you enjoy the topic. Whatever it may be, you're interested in it, and you like the skills you're leveraging!
As a result, the more you do that, the more confident you become in yourself and your skillset because you're going deeper into those skill sets you enjoy using.
The third benefit of being in a fulfilling career – and this is connected to the previous one, is that your expertise starts to develop when you're doing aligned work!
As I mentioned earlier, in a fulfilling career, you're improving your skillset and seeking out opportunities to get better at your work because you enjoy the work. It doesn't feel like a chore to seek out those opportunities.
And so, the deeper you go into your skillset, the more your expertise exposes itself, and you'll begin positioning yourself as an expert.
And when that happens, more opportunities will gravitate towards you. Whether it's opportunities within work (leading new projects or maybe taking on a new team) OR even opportunities outside of work (people reaching out to you to consult, write articles, to share your thoughts).
Often, that also leads to high demand for your expertise, which means you can make more money. So, once you establish yourself as an expert, you are more likely to earn more internally through promotions, bonuses, or external opportunities.
And if you're making more money, you'll have the chance to start to build wealth, generational wealth, and support your family, yourself, and the lifestyle you want.
And again, as I shared at the beginning because I'm a person of faith, I'm constantly referring to the Bible. Building wealth is one of the things God has called us to do. If you look at Proverbs 13:22, says that a good man leaves wealth for his children's children.
That being said, when you're in a fulfilling career that allows you to establish yourself as an expert, what'll happen is you'll have more opportunities = more money = less debt = more wealth = a happier lifestyle!
The fourth major benefit of being in a fulfilling career is that it allows you to inspire people around you. When you're in a fulfilling career, it will enable you to inspire people around you because you find that when you're living on purpose, you just shine!
When you're doing work that makes you happy, it shows in how you talk about your life.
You might complain about work occasionally because maybe you're in a busy season of life or something happened just that one day. But generally, when you think about what you do as a whole, you're not complaining about it all the time because you actually enjoy your work, and people feed off of that.
When you're in a space where you can talk about your excitement for a new project or a new contract or a team that you're leading, it shows up in how you speak of work and that inspires people around you.
This is especially important if you have kids who are around you and looking up to you.
This one is so critical! I have worked with many clients who shared how they've been miserable at work for so long, and they stuck it out because of how they saw their parents interact with work.
They saw their parents just working to put food on their table. Their parents would come home, complain about their jobs, and just be miserable. And because of that, they assumed, thought, and internalized the "fact" that work is meant to be miserable.
So, because they have had this wrong idea since childhood, they'll put up with years of miserable work.
Why?
Because they think that's how it should be.
That means, if you want to break that generational mindset and start planting the seeds for generational shifts in how you see work and how you interact with it, it is so crucial that if you have children around you, you do work that you enjoy so that they can see how:
So, by the time it's their turn to go into the workforce, they won't accept terrible workplaces and terrible bosses. So that they're not accepting less than the best.
If you don't want to pass that message on, you need to be in a fulfilling career because that feeds into not just the adults around you but the children around you.
Additionally, I think this is also especially important if you're a woman of color (WOC) in America. Women of color (and I'm saying women now because that's who I primarily work with), especially Black women, are so taken advantage of in work.
I can't tell you how many clients I have who quit their job, and they tell me after they leave, the company had to hire three people to do the job that one woman was doing. Worst of all, she was doing all that work without the pay and title increase.
And so, if you are a POC, or WOC especially in America, being a fulfilling career allows you to inspire other people of color around you to see that they don't also have to settle in their work.
Being in a fulfilling career will show them that it is possible to enjoy what you do, thrive in what you do, and show up as an expert.
That is one of my missions in HCD and my full-time job as a professor. I am so intentional about the Black students I work with. I want them to see me show up as my full self in a "professional setting".
A couple of them have said to me, "You know, you're the first Black professor I've ever had," and so if I'm going to be the first you're seeing, I want you to see what it can look like to see a full-on Black faculty.
I want to be authentic because I know that there are students of color and Black students who see what it looks like to be a professional Black person. And I don't want them to assimilate into white culture and to feel like that's the only way they can show up and be “professional”.
So, when you are in a fulfilling career, it inspires people, especially the children and the other people of color around you.
The fifth major benefit of being a fulfilling career is that you get to live deeper and fuller in gratitude. When the work you do is aligned, you feel thankful.
There are so many times when I'll be sitting on my couch, or I'll be at work, and I'll pause, and I'll just be like, "dang God, thank you!"
I remember when I had just finished teaching a class. As I walked up to my office, I thought to myself how much I love what I do! It felt good to be standing there in the classroom, sharing information, having the students interact, and watching their minds shift.
When you love, enjoy, and thrive in what you do, gratitude overflows. You can't help but feel God's hand on your life when you're operating in alignment.
When you love, enjoy, and thrive in what you do, gratitude overflows. You can't help but feel God's hand on your life when you're operating in alignment. Share on XRemember, a fulfilling career is one that's aligned with you. If it's aligned with you, it's aligned with whom God created you to be. It aligns with the desires, values, talents, skills, and blessings God put in your heart.
When you're in a fulfilling career, gratitude overflows even when it feels like work. Whether it's a busy season or work is getting stressful, or you had that meeting that was draining you, even in those moments, there's still a level of gratitude because you know that those hard parts are just a small part of it.
You know that, for the most part, you truly enjoy what you're doing.
This is opposed to believing that belief and ambition cannot coexist. I'll hear some women say, "Oh, I'm just grateful for what I have. I don't want to want a better career because that makes me selfish. Right? Some people don't have a job out there. I should just be grateful that I at least have a job."
So, you're using gratitude as an excuse to stay in bad situations. You're using gratitude to keep you unhappy, unfulfilled, and stuck. And behind that gratitude is fear.
Instead of using gratitude as a cover for unfulfilling roles, you actually get to live in that kind of gratitude when you are in a fulfilling career. It's the kind of gratitude that allows you to be grateful for what you have. It's knowing that God has more and better for you even when you're still working towards it.
The last major benefit of being in a fulfilling career is that when you're in a fulfilling career, you have more energy for life. You have more energy to do life stuff.
When people talk about work-life balance, so many women come to me and say, "I just want to find a better job because my work-life balance is out of whack. I don't feel like I have a work-life balance. I get home, and I'm exhausted so I can't hang out with my partner or with my kids. I'm just drained."
And I'm like, "Yeah, you're drained because all your energy went into work."
When you're doing unaligned work. It literally is an uphill battle every single day. You're just trying to survive. You're trying just to figure out how to make it through the day, and you are expending a ton of energy trying to keep your head up. You have no energy left for life because you've spent it all on work.
That's why you feel like you don't have work-life balance.
However, when you are doing aligned work and in a fulfilling career, you experience more moments of flow. You're not expending all your energy.
And the other thing is because the work is aligned; even when you're working hard, the work pours back into you because the work is aligned.
It feels good to do the work where when you're done doing it, even when you're tired, there's still this mental joy and uplift of, "I put in the work today, but it feels good. Like, I feel good about what I accomplish. I feel good about the skills I used. I feel good about the outcomes I'm putting out." And that energizes you.
And so, when you are doing aligned work, you have more energy to do life things such as:
I would not be able to run Her Career Doctor if I wasn't in an aligned career. There would be no energy left in me to do this because I would come home after work every day and be like, “Girl, I ain't creating no content! I ain't getting on to an IG live! I just want to lay on my couch and rejuvenate all the energy that I lost.”
But because I'm doing work that is aligned, I actually enjoy what I'm doing because it pours back into me.
When my research clicks, the teaching is going well, and when I hear from students, I have the energy to then pour and transfer that into my business. My business is part of my life.
So, if you're finding that your work-life balance is out of whack, it's probably because all your energy is going into work, and you're not doing aligned work.
Although, I want to put a caveat here that it's very different from when your job is in a certain season where it's busy or a lot is just happening. It's very different from that.
Remember, you have more energy for life when the majority of the work is aligned and fulfilled.
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