Building a House

As we’ve come to understand, career fulfillment revolves around the choices we make based on the information at our disposal. But, choices wrapped around our self-interests only can leave us – over time – feeling hollow and unsteady.

Therefore, how we define and strive for success needs to be balanced against the backdrop of life’s circumstances and what you want from life in the big scheme of things. In fact, there is a deep connectedness in what we want from life and our careers that we often take for granted. So, this month we had numerous exercises to bring our priorities to the surface, but by far - the house exercise was the most powerful for the group.

As we are learning, our careers do not sit in isolation from the rest of our lives – so taking a whole-life perspective becomes even more critical in this chapter. So, we started by defining what a balanced and fulfilled life looks like - using the metaphor of building a house.

Like most building projects, we started by creating a blueprint of the foundation, which ultimately holds the structure for more happiness and success in life. This meant plotting out what rooms belong in their house; family, relationships, career, financial, health and fitness, physical environment, fun and recreation, spiritual, etc. By design, the rooms are not predefined since our priorities are our own. For the same reason, the size and dimension of the rooms were also left to the discretion of each person. If we felt our family or marriage was pinnacle, it received a larger room. This meant we added rooms, took down walls, consolidated, or simplified our blueprint based on the priorities as we see them.

Once the rooms were defined, we also rated our satisfaction in each area of our lives. Though this was an important piece, it was the thoughtfulness that went into the construct of the blueprint that was awe inspiring. One person realized the “work room” was not connected to their house – at all – when she thought about her day job; a clear indication that her career was not feeding her soul and stood outside herself. So, she started to move outside of today’s reality and construct what the perfect structure would look like as she envisioned her ideal career fitting into her life.

Similarly, another participant constructed her house with her family in the largest room, only to discover this didn’t represent the significance she wanted from her marriage. They weren't one in the same for her and I think it's safe to say the group collectively melted when she told us of the conversation she had with her husband when she declared she wanted to “..build a special and separate room for their marriage..”

And finally, we had the person who realized her relationships were historically relegated to the “mud room” and that this was no longer acceptable. She was creating a new vision for this room and declaring the necessary space as she started her reconstruction project.

It was powerful stuff – because everyone was realizing it is almost impossible to look at their careers independent from the rest of life. The reality is – we all want meaning from our work - but this is only possible when we align our vision of success, priorities and values to ensure our careers are an extension of what we want from life, not the other way around.

Now that the house schematic is solid, it’s time to start building...I expect a run on hardhats in the next few days.