Career Wise

Career success has its downside. The same charm and skills needed to propel you to a high octane career can keep you mired and trapped in a rut of expectation. Your drive to succeed can turn against you leaving you feeling frustrated and alone.. Your charm may have supervisors and employees eating out of your hands, but that same charm can leave you trapped by their unreasonable expectations of you. Do what I have done lately. Examine your own strengths, the ones that helped propel you on your career path. List those qualities you feel have been most responsible for your success, and then pray and with God's help examine what the negative or shadow sides of your strengths are or might become.

Keep in mind that the obsessional parts of one's personality are hard to grapple with since they have paid off in one's success.

Here are a few things God brought to light in my own life:

Confidence can morph into a false sense of infallibility. Dedication left unchecked can easily become workaholism. Commitment breeds impatience. A sharp wit is a training ground for an abrasive personality. It takes little for acompetitive personality to become addicted to winning. Having high standards can be a camouflage for being perfectionist. The ability to multi-task breeds an inability to relax. And, finally, have you noticed the fine line that separates being charming and being manipulative?

One of the paradoxes of success is that it generally brings freedom from the kind of dehumanizing, repetitive labor that results in feeling stuck and without purpose. But it doesn't necessarily free you up to spend your time as you would like. Typically what happens is that as your career becomes more demanding and work more stressful your personal and spiritual lives begin shrinking and taking a back seat to the pressures of work. When the cost of excellence is giving up relationships, vacations, time with friends and family, weekend play and hobbies, time for prayer and worship, and all the other things that keep you and spiritually nourished – then small wonder that the inner woman begins to shrink and atrophy.

Work will never work unless you change the way you value success and the way you judge your progress toward it. The only way you are going to find work that works is by making your career only one tile in the larger mosaic called your life. It's most often when we find ourselves looking down the barrel of "your career or your life" that we find the motivation to reevaluate work and our personal life.

Stop trying to make work live up to some unreasonable expectations that never had you in mind in the first place. Rethink work. Start working according to your values and what matters most to you instead of complaining about how inhumane, anti-family, anti- homelife is your company or line of work. Enter into a new contract, a new relationship, with your work- a relationship with some new rules. Start at the outset of your career committed to striking a balance between money, ambition, power, and position on the one hand, and family, friends, fun, and independence on the other hand.

Finally, if you can't find meaning in your work , then find work that has meaning in it.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.