Rejecting the career ladder for a more fulfilling journey
The career river concept offers a liberating lens for your professional life
What if, instead of viewing our professional lives as a race to the top, we viewed them as an essential component of a thriving ecosystem, one whose twists and turns are crucial parts of a larger journey?
The career river is a concept I came up with just after lockdown, in a popular, caffeine-fueled thread I wrote when my kids went back to school. I’d been thinking about how my own work in journalism had zigged and zagged quite a bit, from newsrooms to audience engagement consulting, but as different as the job titles were they all shared similar core values. I described this as a fertile river delta to explore, which felt so much more liberating and accurate as a professional framework than merely climbing a career ladder.
Since then I’ve run workshops and held career chats exploring this idea and people absolutely light up when they begin to consider their careers as flowing rivers. So now, I’m pulling together research, expert interviews and frank conversations into this Substack, examining how to pursue a fulfilling career journey.
Every week, we’ll discuss how to chart your course, find your flow, and navigate obstacles in your professional life. I hope you’ll join the community and conversation to navigate your own wonderful, unique and wild river.