The Grief of Outgrowing a Successful Career and Feeling Unfulfilled

Welcome And The Big Question

Eric Dickmann 0:01

Welcome to Beyond Expertise, a podcast about identity reinvention for professionals ready to explore who they are beyond their titles and careers. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.

The Grief Of Outgrowing A Career

Eric Dickmann 0:13

Let's get ready to go beyond expertise Today I want to talk a little bit about the grief that comes from outgrowing a successful career On this show, one of the common threads that I find talking with different people is that the thing that they thought they most wanted to do early in their career, maybe right after they graduated from college or graduate school, was not the thing that they ended up doing as their full-time career. And it makes a lot of sense. When you're young, when you're inexperienced, you often take the first job that's available to you. I know in my own story, I wanted a job when I graduated from college. I did not wanna go home for the summer and feel the pressure of having to search for a new job. I wanted to be able to graduate from college and say, "I have a job lined up. I'm ready to start

How You Drift Into The Wrong Path

Eric Dickmann 1:11

my life." And I think for many people this is true. They started with an opportunity whether or not it was what they envisioned as their perfect career. And sometimes that sets you on a path that isn't necessarily your chosen path, but a path that begins to create new opportunities that unfold along the way. You f- seek advancement, you get more responsibility, you go to competing companies doing something similar, or maybe you start to work tangentially in a new field, but it's still related to what you started out in. And before you know it, 10, 20, 30 years have passed and you realized that that thing that you thought you wanted to do when you graduated from school is not at all what you ended up building a career on. And even though you may be financially successful, you may have awards and achievements, you may have a lot of responsibilities, a lofty title, work for a great company, have built a fantastic personal life with a great family, a nice home, and nice cars, many people that I talk to get to a point where they almost feel guilty for not feeling better about the success that they've achieved. That they look back and somehow still feel a sense of deep unfulfillment because they h- did not follow that idealistic

Success That Still Feels Empty

Eric Dickmann 2:44

path that they thought they might early in their career. And I think for many people, myself included, you get to a point where that really starts to weigh on you. You start to look at your life and say, "I've had this success, I've done well in my career, I'm recognized by my peers," but yet something inside feels unfulfilled. It feels like there's a misalignment, and this is often a point where people start to decide What is my next act? What is my second chapter? What do I want to do from here? And I think unfortunately, many people have these thoughts but never act on them, and they continue on that path, getting deeper and deeper into the career that wasn't the path that they had originally decided upon, and that lack of fulfillment begins to really grow and fester deep inside of them.

Layoffs And Forced Reinvention

Eric Dickmann 3:43

I think other people are forced to make a change. Maybe they're laid off, there's a workforce reduction, there's a merger, and there's no longer a place for them in the new company. Or maybe things just change. The politics inside a company change, you get a bad boss, you feel like you're no longer valued. And whether it's forced or you just decide you can't take it anymore, people leave the corporate life that they had built And I think for a select few, there's actually a very intentional move that they decide, "You know, this isn't going the way that I had hoped it would go. I still have a lot of very valuable productive years ahead of me. I want to move in a different direction and so I'm going to start making plans to do that." And whether they start off with a side hustle, they take advantage of an opportunity that they see, maybe they buy a, a franchise or they discover something along the way that's a business opportunity and they start creating a new business. Maybe it's they get together with, coworkers and form a new company. Whatever it may be, they decide to take that proactive step along their career journey to do something different, something that they feel in control of, something that they feel more authentically aligned to. But I will tell you, in my conversations with people, especially on this podcast, I find that that's the rarity. Most people are forced into a moment somewhere along their career timeline where they need to make a decision, and oftentimes people are woefully unprepared for that decision When you experience a layoff, and I speak from personal experience here, it's jarring. All of the sudden, you feel a tremendous amount of resentment, you feel anger, you feel a sudden sense of insecurity. You really wonder about what the next steps are. You're bitter. And during this moment when you are wondering, "How am I gonna pay my bills? What's next for me in my life?" You look at the daunting task of trying to find a new job, it's a tremendous amount of pressure that is placed on someone, often suddenly. And when so many people don't have a backup plan, they really have very little choice but to just jump into it and try to find that next opportunity, oftentimes something that is also not really aligned with what they wanna do because they're desperate. They need to find something quickly.

Plan Your Next Chapter Early

Eric Dickmann 6:25

And so one of the things that I'm hoping as part of this podcast series is that for people who are getting to the point in their career, and this may be early or late, everybody is different, but if you are in a career and you are feeling that misalignment, that sense that the work that you're doing today is not really lined up with where you envision your life going, where there's a values misalignment, where the things that your company is doing or the management is doing or the way that they are valuing their employees just doesn't seem lined up with what you believe is the right thing to do, my advice to you is to start thinking about that next chapter. My advice to you is simple. It's start thinking about what you might wanna do if the world was completely open to you. Now, that's not always the case, and sometimes it's really hard, but how could you use the expertise that you have built in a way that you feel is more aligned to where you wanna go in your career? And that's not an easy thing to do, but it takes some soul-searching and reflection to really figure out what that might be. And the best time to do that is before you have to do it, and I think that's where many people miss the boat, is they wait until they have to do it, and that is often a very stressful period because of financial obligations, family obligations, et cetera. Do it while you're still gainfully employed, and you can use your extra bandwidth to start to think about what that next chapter might look like Because I think for so many people, they are deep down grateful for the careers that they've been given. They are grateful for

Gratitude Versus Fulfillment

Eric Dickmann 8:18

the financial security, grateful for the connections that they've made, grateful for the status that they've achieved, grateful for the opportunities that they've had to build a family and build a life. But that doesn't mean that they're fulfilled. And I think that is often a real conflict with people, feeling like are they truly grateful if they aren't fulfilled? And so my hope to you, and the coming episodes of this podcast, we will certainly explore it more with people, is that you start to think about what that next chapter might look like. And as you start to think about it, what are the things that you need to do today to get ready for it? Because I can tell you that the next chapter can be truly fulfilling, that you can find your real purpose. You can align your values to the value that you want to bring to other people, and that can be an incredibly exciting time in your life.

Reach Out And Keep Listening

Eric Dickmann 9:19

So I hope that you'll continue listening to our podcast. Please feel free to reach out. There's a link in the show notes if you wanna ask a question, if you're interested in being a guest on this podcast. If you have something to say, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening to Beyond Expertise. You can find show notes, resources, and links mentioned during this episode at podcast.ericdickman.com. If this conversation resonated with you, I hope you'll join me again next time as we continue exploring what it means to reinvent ourselves beyond our careers, titles, and expertise.