🧭 Your values compass
Finding True North in our work, and outside it
I just said no to a work opportunity and it felt fantastic.
I was recently accepted into a months-long training cohort, and the organizers were very clear that if you couldn’t commit to attending every session, your spot would be given to someone on the waiting list. And as it turned out, one of those sessions landed on my daughter’s birthday, while we would all be on vacation together.
Technically, I could have made the session. Instead, I gave up my spot. There will be other professional development opportunities, but this birthday’s only going to happen once.
As I’ve been talking to people about their careers, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on how we develop and pursue our values. We use our values compass all the time when making decisions about where to put our time, what opportunities to pursue, and how we show up, for ourselves and others.
Chat update:
As of this week, I’ve talked with 75 professionals about their Career River questions! Thank you to everyone who shared my invitation to connect. I’m on track to reach my goal of 100 chats by the end of the month, and there are still a few slots left on my calendar — if you’d like to enter or share the chat giveaway, you can do so here!
One question that keeps coming up is whether our values can change over time. Do we still follow the same compass as when we were starting out?
This week, I was giving a talk to a group of college students and one of them asked me whether I was still doing the work I had wanted to do when I started out. I said yes, even though my job now looks nothing like the reporter job I landed after college. I said yes because the work I’m doing goes much deeper than just reporting or even journalism.
“At its core,” I told her, “my work is about connecting people to information.”
I could do that work in any number of ways, in any number of jobs. At this moment, it looks like supporting newsrooms in engagement and this Career River project. In 10 years, it will probably look completely different. But I’d be willing to bet the heart of it will remain the same.
A big theme that has been coming up over my conversations about navigating uncertainty or the unexpected in our careers is the influence of our responsibilities outside of work on our career choices. When I was starting out, my choices only affected me. Now they impact my family of five. I talked to one person this week who just got a mortgage; another who took care of an ailing relative. These experiences shaped their career choices.
What might be the right career move can feel like the wrong life choice (and vice versa). How do we balance the two? We combine them to find the direction that will get us closest to where we want to go.
Finding True North
Connecting people to information may be the guiding direction for my work, but it’s only part of my compass. Because I am more than my work, and the decisions I make about my work overlap with my personal life.
At the conclusion of his book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, journalist Neil Irwin points out that “winning” can have many different definitions in today’s economy. It might mean clambering to the top of the organizational chart, but he notes that professional success comes at the expense of other life goals (as so many “stepping back to spend more time with my family” announcements remind us). He estimates we each have about 250,000 waking hours during our working years for everything – work, family, fun – we want our lives to contain.
As Irwin writes, “What really counts as winning in the winner-take-all world? It is being thoughtful and making a series of choices that ensure that after your quarter-million hours are done, you can look back at the trade-offs you’ve made – between work versus leisure, money versus personal satisfaction, and so on – and be comfortable with your choices.”
When I look at who I want to be outside of work, and add that to the direction I’m pursuing in my career, that’s when my True North becomes clear. I want to show up and support the people in my life. That’s why it felt so great to say no to the cohort so I could say yes to my daughter.
It’s not always easy to align what we want out of our work and our personal lives. This same daughter is the one who I left for a weeklong leadership course when she was a baby. It was the first time I was away from her and she cried for hours every night until she wore herself out. I felt awful. But I had a reason for taking that course, and not just for myself. It was part of the master’s degree that landed me my first newsroom consulting job. That job offered my family more support, more stability, and allowed me to be more present in their lives. It was a tough week, but it’s been worth it for every school event, “how was your day” pickup and weekday library visit it made possible. Even though it was hard, I was still following my values compass. I was showing up for her that week, just in a different way.
As she would advise me years later, I put my feelings into the future.
A compass will point you in the right direction, but it’s up to you to choose the path that will bring you closer to aligning with where you want to go. For me, I try to choose ways I can work connecting people to information while being able to show up for the people I care about. If I’m heading in that direction, even if it’s not always perfect, then I know I’m doing what I can to follow where my values lead.
💭 Reflection: What’s Your True North?
For your work, what are you hoping to accomplish — for yourself, for those your work touches, and even for the world? What would you like your work to make possible?
In your life, how do you want to be remembered? What will people say about where you put your time and energy?
Combine your work and life values into a values compass statement:
I want to work ________________________________ while being able to ________________________________.
Happy navigating,
Bridget