Sometimes we can feel like something is missing in our career, and we can’t quite put our finger on it. We might be feeling like we’re drifting, or our performance has plateaued, or we’re no longer feeling happy in our career.
When this happens, one area to take a look at is to come back to your career values and see what need is currently not being met in your career. But do you know what your career values are?
Here is a list of values to take a look at and identify which ones are important to you. You want to get down to about 6-8, so keep asking yourself which ones matters most to you. Then ask yourself is your career enabling you to live these values? If not, which one is missing and what can you do to bring it back to life in your career?
- Achievement
- Adventure
- Aesthetics
- Autonomy
- Being outdoors
- Challenges
- Change
- Collaboration
- Competition
- Community
- Connection
- Contribution
- Creativity
- Environment
- Equality
- Freedom
- Fun
- Goals
- Helping others
- Independence
- Inspiration
- Kindness
- Knowledge
- Leading
- Learning
- Making a difference
- Making decisions
- Money
- Physical work
- Purpose/Vision/Mission
- Quality
- Recognition
- Reward
- Security
- Service
- Spirituality
- Stability
- Structure
- Support
- Teaching
- Team
- Variety
- Work/life balance
(If this list still doesn’t quite identify what’s missing, have a think about a time in your career when you’ve been the happiest and most fulfilled, and identify what was present at the time.)
Our values can shift over time, depending what’s going on in our lives, the order may change. For example, you might have loved challenge and variety and change, however if you currently have a lot of that going on in your personal life, you might now be looking for stability, security and support in your career. This can give you the insight to then manage what you take on in your job at this point in time. Or you might have been attracted to your current job because you had a strong connection to the organisational purpose, but you’ve been so caught up in the day to day of your job you’ve lost that drive. You may need to reconnect with how your job is connected to the purpose. I had one lady whose top value was making a difference in the community. She’d shifted jobs and the actual work she was doing hadn’t changed much, however she could no longer see the direct impact of what she was doing and how that was making a difference in the community, and felt unfulfilled.
So if you’d like to delve further into discovering your career values, my It Starts With Clarity online program will walk you through the process, or you can reach out to me for some 1:1 coaching.
