Richard was absolutely sure about only one thing having to do with his career, which was that it must provide sufficiently for himself and his family. If his career could do more than that, like enable him to be generous with others and even leave his children and grandchildren a legacy, then all the better. Richard even knew the source of his conviction on that score. His parents, while always providing enough for him and his siblings as they grew up, even leading them on various family adventures, had in their later years fallen on such hard times as to come to depend on their children, despite being able bodied. Richard was determined not to let any such thing happen to his family.
Relationships
You should have noticed, from the prior chapter’s discussion of the high purpose in your career, that your discernment over your best choice of careers has a lot to do with relationships. The primary relationship affecting your career choice and conduct is with the architect of that highest purpose and ideal. You also relate to yourself through your career, either meeting or failing to meet your own needs and expectations, and enjoying or suffering the consequences. If you are married, your career can certainly affect your time, reputation, and relationship with your husband or wife. If you have children, your career feeds and clothes them, impresses or embarrasses them, and turns you toward them or distracts you from them. Your career can impact your parents, friends, and neighbors, too. You should and will consider all these impacts on your relationships when choosing, pursuing, and changing careers. Sometimes, you must do what you should, no matter what others tell you. But relationships can still tell you whether you are in the right career or not.
Yourself
You’ve already read in a prior chapter about how your career depends on who you are. Without belaboring the point again here, just appreciate that your career not only shapes you but also deeply influences how you regard, judge, evaluate, and think about yourself. Our careers embarrass some of us. Perhaps you’ve hesitated to disclose to new acquaintances what you do for a living or career, or seen others squirm when disclosing to you what they do. You may even have an indirect or euphemistic way of sharing in polite conversation what you do, to throw others off the track. Or maybe you’ve heard someone else answer I help people in trouble when you later learn they’re a criminal defense lawyer to drug dealers, or I’m in hospitality when you later learn they clean rooms at the local motel. Those careers may be perfectly honorable and fitted to those pursuing them, but the disguised answers nonetheless highlight how those roles made their bearer feel. When other lawyers would ask me what I did before law school, I’d always hesitate to tell them that I was a horse trainer. If you have a similar hesitation, work out why. It may be telling you something important about how you relate to your career and how it makes you relate to yourself. Whether pride or embarrassment, or embrace or regret, it all matters.
Spouse
Your career also impacts your relationship with your spouse. In case you haven’t noticed, a spouse is not a cheerleader. Their role isn’t to applaud everything you do. If, with respect to your career, you’re a fish out of water, out of your league, in over your head, or a prince or princess in a pig pen, they’re going to tell you so. Or at least, you should hope they do. A good spouse, one who cares about you and your marriage to them, is more like a useful opponent when you’re headed in the wrong direction for you, for them, and for your marriage. If you have a spouse who has the discernment in career things and the commitment to your marriage to tell you to consider another career, then maybe you should listen. Spouses can be wrong. Their error may be just the thing you need to buckle down and prove it otherwise, for the benefit of both of you. Yet no matter your spouse’s insight, you should be thinking as much or more of your career’s impact on your spouse than your career’s impact on you. If life forces a choice on you, you’re generally far more right and better off to give up a career for your spouse than a spouse for your career. Just sayin’, you know?
Children
Much of what the prior paragraph says about a spouse and career one could repeat about children and careers, too. A mother or father could hardly do better in a career choice than to choose for the sake of their child or children. Many of us do, and I doubt that many of us regret it. The choice may be to pursue a career as a homemaker or to give up a career to become a homemaker for as long as one’s children benefit. What a gorgeous choice, the blessing of which one will see for the rest of one’s days in the growth, health, development, faith, and prosperity of one’s children. Or the choice may be to go back to school, whether online or at nights and on weekends while already working at a job, to gain a better-paying, better-hours, or more stable and secure career in order to provide, care, and do better for one’s children. I’ve seen a single mom in the military do exactly that and for exactly that reason, earning a professional degree to win a job with far better pay, benefits, security, hours, and flexibility, and no less reputation. You might hear divorcing spouses say that they only stayed together as long as they did for the benefit of their kids. But in some cases, there’s nothing wrong with that. And likewise in career choices: doing something for the kids just isn’t all bad. It might be what you, your spouse, the kids, and your career all want and need you to do.
Parents
After thinking of how a career choice impacts your spouse and children, you may find it abstruse to think of how your career choice impacts your parents. Really? Must you be that concerned with what old mom and dad think? Well, yes, or at least maybe. Honor your father and mother, that you may live a long and rewarding life. Depending on your age, your parents’ age and station in life, and your proximity and relationship to them, your career choice can subtly or substantially impact your parents. That impact can in turn affect you. Give a thought to your parents when thinking about your career. Many of us provide, support, or care for our parents, especially later in their lives when they may be less able to do so for themselves, but also earlier in life when doing so may bless them and you. The availability, income, benefits, stability, security, flexibility, standing, and proximity your career provides can help not just you and your spouse and children but your parents, too.
Friends
Strange to think, but your career choice can affect your friends, too. Your career can strengthen or weaken your old friendships, form and foster or frustrate and forestall new friendships, and serve or burden friends, too. Some of the greater indicators of a healthy life at all stages are the number, nature, and quality of your friendships. Some careers are simply great for friendships, while other careers are not so much. I found law practice to be great for friendships, introducing me to many different people across society’s demographics, many of whom I could serve, opening opportunities for new friendship. Oddly, I found being a professor more isolating from natural friendships, other than student relationships that only properly supply a limited degree of friendship. But also, some individuals are so well suited for certain careers that their career feeds their friendship. Some of my professor colleagues made fabulous friends as professors but were more adversarial than friendly when lawyers. Sometimes it’s the career, but other times it’s you. Consider your friends and your need and capacity for friendships, when choosing and pursuing careers, especially if you have only a small number of proximate family members.
Neighbors
Your career choice also influences your relationship with your neighbors, here using neighbor in the broadest sense of those whom you come across as you move through life in the world. Some careers, and some individuals in certain careers, hold the richest of offerings to incidental neighbors, those people whom you discover have a need you can fulfill, even if they are not your customer, client, or patient. Careers in social work, law, medicine, counseling, teaching, pastoring, personnel, hospitality, event management, food preparation, and administration are just a few examples, depending on the personality, commitments, and generosity of spirit of the individuals occupying those roles. Individuals with the knowledge and skills these professions require can be vital volunteers in homeless shelters, missions, churches, clinics, schools, and other community centers. Sharing your career skills with the homeless, hurting, downcast, depressed, and needful can make a career all worthwhile.
Volunteering
The prior paragraph suggests something significant about the power that relationships hold for valuing your career. Don’t miss your opportunity to choose a career that is good for needful neighbors or to turn your current career toward serving those neighbors. You might find a whole new meaning to the career you currently hold. Consider my experience on that score. I’d been practicing law for around a decade, with mostly corporate and middle-class clients, when I sensed that I was just going through the motions. Circumstances led me to volunteer to provide free legal service one afternoon each week in various rotating community locations that disadvantaged individuals frequented. That service taught me new skills, gave me a new set of friends and relationships, tipped the course of my career in a new and rewarding direction, and revitalized me and my family, all in ways and to degrees that I could not have imagined. Think of relationships when you think of your career. And include volunteer service relationships. You don’t have to be a lawyer or social worker. I’ve seen good folks in many different fields, whether social, scientific, commercial, financial, or otherwise, do so.
Customers
When thinking of your planned, hoped for, or current career, think also of the relationships your career requires or invites with your field’s customers, clients, patients, or students, in other words, those whom you serve within your occupational role. This chapter started with you and family. It could as well have started here with your customers, clients, patients, or students. If you cannot find value in what you do for the individuals whom your occupation serves, directly or indirectly, then you’re probably in the wrong career. You’ll sometimes hear workers say that their work is great except for the customers, or the students, or whomever their work serves. Their quip is supposed to ring as a joke. But don’t let the joke become true for you. Some teachers reach the point of really disliking students, just as some doctors, dentists, or nurses begin to dislike patients, and so on. Indeed, studies of some fields show that almost immediately on entering the field after a program of education, some entrants realize that they don’t respect or like the people whom their field serves, and they very soon move on to other fields. They should, too. Be sure that you are valuing, respecting, and even liking the people whom you serve in your career, and valuing what you do for them, too. It’s all in the relationships.
Colleagues
Careers involve another set of highly significant relationships, those with others in your career field. Most careers require their participants to work closely with others in the same career field. In some careers, you spend more time engaging closely with your co-workers than with your spouse or children. You’d better like and respect your co-workers, and they’d better like and respect you, too. The question isn’t generally the individuals with whom you work. Rather, the question is what your work does to you and to them that makes interacting with them not just tolerable but worthwhile to you. In one career, you might find your colleagues intolerable, while in another career you’d find the same individuals to be your best friends. Yet career fields can also attract personality types that are either good or bad for you. If most everyone in your field seems to you to be unpleasantly or intolerably obsessed, or narcissistic, or thoughtless, or unethical, or insolent, or something else negative and degrading to you, well, then, choose another field. It might be you, it might be them, or it might be the field. Colleagues matter a lot. Don’t ruin a career and life working with others whom you can’t value or respect, and who can’t value and respect you.
Ultimate
The above suggestions make a lot of relationships to consider when choosing, pursuing, confirming, or changing a career. If you’ve been thinking that your career is primarily or solely about you, you may want to think again. Your life isn’t all about you. You live and work within the richest web of relationships. Make anything all about you, and you’ll damage those relationships. And that’s especially true for your career. Listen even to the great performers, and you’ll hear them say that their performance is about the audience and the story rather than about them. The preening performer is ready for a downfall. Your career is not for putting you on display, so that you can look in a mirror and behold the wonder you are. Like you, your career has a maker, too. Live for your maker, and make sure your career honors your maker, too. You can experience the sacred and worship the divine in your career, too.
Journal
Title My Relationships the next section of your Career Journal, after your Who I Am section. In your Relationships section, record how your career or planned career honors the above relationships, starting with your spouse, children, and parents, and working out through your friends and community acquaintances. Then describe how you relate to your occupation’s customers, clients, patients, students, or others whom your occupation serves, and whether you recognize value in what you do for them, too. Then describe how you relate to your occupational colleagues, whether you value your interactions with them, and whether they respect you. Finally, evaluate whether you are confident that your career or planned career honors the highest ideals. Answer whether you pursue your career out of pride, duty, or devotion, and whether you experience the sacred in what you do.
Key Points
How your career impacts relationships should influence your choice.
You should respect what your career requires or invites you to do.
Your career should benefit your spouse, who should value what you do.
Your career should provide for and benefit your children, too.
How your career impacts your parents can be important.
Consider how your career fosters and feeds your friendships.
Careers can enable you to serve others in need, as a volunteer.
Respect your occupation’s customers and what you do for them.
Value the colleagues with whom you work in your career field.
Above all, choose and pursue a career of which your maker approves.