Should you consider both your personal and professional values when making a career change?

 

Is it even possible to have a career that is in alignment with your personal and professional values? When you’re thinking about making a career change, do you consider both your personal and professional values?

In this video, Jenna and Phil share their opinions on this issue.

Phil:  We've talked about the importance of identifying your values before you kind of make a next move or identifying the next move. Is it really possible? Should you consider both your personal and professional values?  And can those co-exist?  I mean, is that really a thing?

Jenna:  Yeah, I think if you know your personal and your professional values and you know them well, I think they have to coexist, right?  I don't think you can uphold a high personal value if it conflicts with a professional value.   Or I don't think you can uphold one if it conflicts with the other. 

Do they have to be the same thing?  No. Like you could absolutely love in your personal life, like, you know, being alone and having alone time and that sort of thing.  And in your professional life, love, collaboration and things like that. I wouldn't say that those are conflicting.  But if at the core of it, if it's like I truly enjoy having free time on the weekend and free time in my day, and you agree to a job where that's just not possible.  Yeah, I don't I don't think that that's a good choice for you.  But I think you can find jobs that help you uphold your values. 

So, if flexibility is a high one for me, teaching is a high one for me, and variety is a high one for me, right? So those are like my professional ones.  They're also partly personal, too.  So the job that I'm in lets me be flexible with my time, lets me teach and lets me have variety in what I do so that I can uphold my personal ones.  So I think that the ideal job for anybody lets them live both.

Phil:  It is, and I'll say I think it's the number one reason that people are dissatisfied is because they put unrealistic expectations on their jobs. . . and I'll use a you know, a pro sports example. I keep using this over and over again, but they put that as their ideal, not recognizing that that's not really a value, that that's a that's a goal.  And you say pro sports. Well, if they also put spending every weekend and every night with family as what they think is a value, when you put those things together, they can't coexist. So immediately you cause conflict and dissatisfaction. There's no chance to win at that game. 

Now, if actually what pro sports means to you is being respected as an expert or being respected as a clinician or at the highest level of your game, you can have that as a value while family being a huge value too.  And you just recognize that it's not manifest in pro sports, it's manifest in other ways.  And that's why getting your values really dialed in is so important.

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