Help with Your Career
Chapter 4: Who Am I?
This post is the fourth excerpt from my new guide Help with Your Career available in paperback at publisher’s discount on in digital format on Amazon. The guide includes twenty chapters, the first few of which lay the groundwork for assessing your career. Here’s Chapter 4 on how to take stock of yourself before taking stock of your career. Each chapter opens with a brief vignette.
Michelle was confused. She’d spent several more years in school completing a graduate program with the vague idea that she was preparing for a career. Yet after finishing her graduate degree, Michelle felt no closer to a career than when she’d begun her graduate degree. Oh, she had opportunities for which she could apply, not that she stood much chance of getting any of them. But Michelle didn’t even know if she should try. And then one day not long after graduation, when she was still casting about for a career direction, the realization hit her: she didn’t know her career because she didn’t know who she was. Michelle committed herself to do some deep personal reflection to get a grip on her career direction.
Being
Who you are has a lot to do with what you should do. For a career. As a job, too. Now, don’t misunderstand. Your career doesn’t emerge from some inner well of personal identity that you concoct for yourself out of your dreams and fantasies, which are probably only culturally imposed narratives and distortions in any case. That’s a sort of New Age narcissism that you and the world don’t need. You are a part of the world, created by the world’s maker much more than imagined out of your own speculations. Yet you have and are a being, in the world, with your own ability to shape your being-in-the-world, even though the world and its careers and narratives may be shaping you more than you shaping them. And that realization that your being involves, or even evolves out of, your place in the world is the primary guide for discerning your career. A career is a sort of being in the world. Your career is choosing you, as much as you are choosing it. Your key may be to let only the right career, one that elevates you and the world, choose you.
Agency
The idea that a career may choose you, rather than just you choose a career, illustrates a critical insight for navigating with efficacy in the world. We tend to believe that we are the primary actors in the world, that only we have agency, will, and volition. Yet culture, narratives, entities, and agents are constantly at work on us and in us. Advertising is the obvious example. Yet the things that move us are much deeper and more powerful than mere words, sounds, and images that the media conveys to get us to buy their advertisers’ goods and services. The things that move, draw, entice, and direct us aggregate and act out of a myriad of individual experiences, interests, passions, and purposes. You can call them narratives, culture, principalities, powers, spirits, or whatever you wish. But you’re not simply choosing jobs and careers. The spirits of the age are pushing you toward jobs and careers, too. It’s a two-way proposition. Recognize those outside forces, and align with the right spirits or narratives, or you may end up in a job and career that’s awful for you and those for whom you care most but feeds those forces.
Person
To let only the right career choose you, it may help you to appreciate that your being in the world is both general and particular. We all share certain meanings. The world presents itself to us as its maker made it and made us. To have any sense of reality, of what the world truly is, we must align with and participate in its fundamental structures and aspirations. You can’t entirely swim against the world’s current. At least, you can’t exist entirely in opposition to the world’s design. Gravity works right side up, not upside down. Trying anything else is not just foolish but deadly, when you’re standing on the edge of a cliff. That’s the aspect of the general we all share, how the world works. Yet we are also each particular, set not in opposition to the world but each with our own opportunity and responsibility within it. You may do differently than your neighbor does. And perhaps you should do differently than your neighbor does, given your different particular circumstances, even while you align with your neighbor across a grand spectrum of mutual interests the world determines in its own structure, narrative, and aspirations.
Purpose
So, then, what is this matter of purpose and aspiration inherent in both you and in the world? Your ability to discern your best choice of career, or to allow your best career to choose you, depends on your ability to answer that question of purpose, both your purpose and the world’s purpose. The world has a purpose, and so do you. The world’s maker separated and ordered the world’s material, and shared with us the role of naming or describing, and thus giving meaning and purpose to, the world. The maker’s purpose for us and the world is evident from the world’s nature and from our supreme efficacy in naming and ordering the world. We are to join with the maker in promoting that order expressing the maker’s desire to see us flourish in the maker’s partnership. Creation roots your purpose in care for creation, including care for yourself, your family, and others, in honor of the maker and the maker’s desire to steward creation in partnership with you.
Passion
That purpose to care for all creation is precisely where your career arises. Purposes produce passions. Purposes produce directions and the energy to pursue them. Indeed, passion, energy, and direction define purpose in a sort of symbiotic relationship. It’s not simply that you see in front of you the opportunity and responsibility to care and provide for yourself and others through a commitment to a field or sector, in other words see your career, and then your passion and its energy follow. The passion and its energy are also your guides to your career. Neither your speculation over your right career nor your passion and energy are trustworthy. You must simultaneously devote yourself to the high purpose of participatory care with which the maker imbued the world. You must continually ensure that your pursuit of your career serves its highest purpose of participatory care for all creation. Your career is thus at the sacred intersection of the highest purpose and lowest material opportunity to give order to the world’s chaotic material.
Identity
We naturally associate the question of who we are with the concept of one’s identity. Identity, as a self-construct of who one is in the world, is apparently a relatively new phenomenon. Until recently, the world gave us our identity. In ancient Greece or Rome, as in medieval times and even into the early modern world, we were born or early made to be either slaves, soldiers, artisans, nobles, or rulers, while we might through temptation, fortune, fate, or commitment also become mothers, fathers, exiles, or criminals. Today, we tend to believe that we can make ourselves this thing or that thing, shaping and controlling our own identity. Maybe so, but also maybe not. Solzhenitsyn, for instance, desired the identity of a novelist, Orthodox Christian, and political reformer. Yet he first had to acquire the identity of a traitor, prisoner, and exile, and would later acquire other identities his critics imposed upon him. Don’t get too invested in having your career feed your identity. We don’t own our identities, which are instead malleable social constructs.
Values
We can, though, derive values from our understanding of our place in the world and then deploy those values through our jobs and careers to shape both ourselves and the world. For one example, the steadying belief that the world, although distorted, has the greatly beneficial attribute of a sustaining and just order can be a powerful value in discerning, gaining, and shaping a career. We call that steadying belief faith. If you don’t believe the world works for the benefit of those who believe in its working, then why bother? For another example, the vitalizing belief in an eventual reward for our adherence to higher ends, or what we call hope, can be another powerful value in discerning, gaining, and shaping a career. Again, if not hope for a better tomorrow, then why bother? Holding the obligation of caring deeply, even sacrificially, for oneself and others, or what we call love, is the supremely vitalizing belief, generating all other values. If you don’t care, then you’ve already decided not to believe and value, and thus not to bother. Examine and confirm your values. Live out your values to choose and have a good career.
Commitments
Values quickly give rise to commitments. You do the math. Fundamental values to participate in the world with faith that doing so works, hope for your rewards, and care for the goodness of the world and prosperity and security of yourself and others lead to commitments. Those commitments include to apply yourself to each job in furtherance of the most bountiful career for which you are fit, in the context of providing for your family and caring for your neighbors. Your commitment may become to get up early each morning with a smile on your face and bounce in your step, ready to conquer the world’s giants through your sacrificial effort, to capture and share generously the treasure they guard. If you are between jobs, your commitment may be to get the next, best job as expeditiously as possible. If you cannot yet discern your career, your commitment may be to listen with great attention and concentration to every whisper wisdom has to offer, until wisdom presents your career to you on its silver platter. Know who you are, and then live out your full role in the world’s grand and fabulous narrative.
Journal
In your electronic or notebook Career Journal, start a new section titled Who I Am. In that section, try your best to articulate your sense of your place in the world. Start with your most general thoughts of what the world is, how it arose, and what purpose inheres within it. Then do the same for you, describing only in general terms who or what you are, how you arose, and what purpose you have within the world. Once you have that outline in place, move to specifics, first about the world and its purpose, as your philosophical school, religious tradition, or colloquial expression would describe it. You might, for instance, hold a Catholic, Orthodox, or Reformed view of the world’s creation and purpose, a materialist or nihilist view, or a socialist, capitalist, humanitarian, or economic view, or a mix of those views. Then describe the particulars about you and your purpose, as the world has offered and assigned you identities and purposes. You might, for instance, be a single parent, caretaker of a disabled parent or sibling, church deacon or elder, and teacher, dentist, or doctor. Finally, articulate your values and the commitments they generate. Return to this section over the following weeks and months to supplement and refine your view of who you are in the world.
Key Points
Your perspective on who you are influences your career commitment.
You are a particular being in the world, sharing general realities.
The world deeply affects your individual agency and efficacy.
You and the world are each inherently purposeful toward high ends.
You derive passion and energy from your purpose.
You don’t choose your own identity, which the world instead assigns.
Hold to the values that your understanding of the world generates.
Let your values lead you to commitments that you pursue in earnest.
