Becoming Fiercely Feminine is looking forward to the future and taking agency over your life and career. You will want role models, mentors and your community to help you out. Historically, women’s career and job options were limited, but today, the choices are wide open; to the point of being daunting. It’s common for people to change jobs often and even change careers several times in their life. Furthermore, life and careers are not necessarily linear.
Women are flexible and resilient; they easily adapt to change. While that’s true, it goes in the category, “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. I have adjusted to the career choices of my husband multiple times, moving to where his best opportunities were because I was up for the adventure and knew I could “grow where I was planted”. That’s all well and good, but I could have asserted my ambitions and done more with my career. What held me back was not believing in my ambitions enough to defend them. I did not seek out role models or mentors to help me, instead I kept my nose to the grindstone and hoped for the best. What would have helped me was to intentionally, visualize where I wanted to be in 5, 10, 20 years.
How often do you think about your career, not just your job? Career planning didn’t seem relevant to me for some reason; maybe I felt that it didn’t matter or maybe I felt lucky just to have a good job and didn’t think I could ask for more. Possibly I didn’t see other women having careers that I could look up to. The only people I saw in management were men which didn’t seem an accessible place for me. There was another element though, I didn’t want to lead. I was afraid to lead and avoided it always deferring to someone else. Every time I’d risen to the level of leadership in a company, I left, choosing a different path. Now I look at the women I know in leadership positions and I know I could have done it and would have been good at it.
Consider developing a set of career values. We often develop values for a company, an organization or a program, but it’s just as important, or more, to develop a set of personal values to work towards aligning with as you chart your career. What is important to you in your career? Is it travel, visibility, upward mobility, flexibility, salary, technical accomplishments, impact, stability? Maybe it’s the type of work; making contribution that to society, easing people’s pain, developing a cancer drug or building a better mouse trap. If you are clear on what you value and you seek out a future that aligns with your values, you will have a much better chance of being happy and thriving in your career.