What we do is a fixture in our society, instilled in us from a young age. It feels like we rush from the childhood imaginative stage of ‘what do you wanna be when you grow up’ right into high school, when you begin to receive career advice and become pressured to pick a career path before you’ve even left ‘the nest’ and explored what the world has to offer.
I, like many young people, felt the pressure to pick a path before I had even explored what the world outside my suburban bubble looked like.
Add onto the fact that if you’re a creative – an artist, designer, writer, an entrepreneur – you likely won’t ever feel like you ‘fit in’ to this world around you… But you may try – I know I did. I strived, I achieved… and I burned out of a corporate marketing job. I climbed the ladder towards what I thought I had to accomplish for so long that when I got there and it didn’t make me happy, I had nowhere left to go but to confront what I really and truly wanted. Sound familiar? Keep reading.
“Traditional” career advice like ‘just pick a path and stick to it’ or ‘climb the ladder’ may inspire some, but for bold, creative thinkers with big dreams, this type of advice can actually feel confusing and constricting.
This blog post is for you – the brave, the different, the creative soul. I’ll unpack why traditional paradigms and career advice often fall flat for us creative folks and offer alternative, grounded strategies for building a fulfilling creative career that suits you and lights you up inside.
5 Reasons Traditional Career Advice Fails Creatives
1) A linear path doesn’t fit a nonlinear, creative mind
When you’re a vibrant, creative thinker with unconventional dreams and desires, a linear, conventional pathway won’t always feel right for you! Trying to put pressure on a creative to pursue a strict, linear path without detours (aka advice like “just pick a path and stick to it”) doesn’t allow for experimentation and reinvention.
2) It doesn’t always account for fulfillment
Alot of traditional career advice focuses on security and stability; don’t get me wrong, these are essential things – but there are many different ways one can create these feelings for themselves. For creatives, metrics like fulfillment are much more meaningful and will allow them to feel deeply aligned with their work for the long term.
3) We’re not all designed to “pick one thing” and stick to it
Many creatives (especially those who are manifesting generators in human design) are multi-passionate by nature. We’re not all designed to simply pick one thing or path and stick to it.
There’s also a significant generational difference. How long someone stays at a particular job depends on many factors (like the economic state and situation), and every generation looks at this and operates differently. While Baby Boomers stayed at a single job for an average of 10-15 years, Millennials tend to change careers every 3-5 years.
At the end of the day, trying to confine a creative soul, especially a young creative soul, to ‘pick one thing and stick to it’ can be incredibly stifling to their creativity.
4) It Doesn’t Personalize Our Success Metrics
General, traditional career advice doesn’t account for how we individually feel ‘success.’ For creative souls, traditional metrics may not be as meaningful as the qualitative feelings of making an impact, feeling the freedom of their creative expression and time.
5) It Doesn’t Account for Our Nervous System & Mental Health
I burned out of corporate marketing because I was feeling absolutely creatively stifled – any idea I had was either shot down or claimed as his own by my boss. Anxious, depressed, unfulfilled, anemic, burnt out and having daily panic attacks at my desk, I felt so lost from who I was and the impact I knew I was born to make.
I had strived to get to this place for years, and once I got there, I realized it wasn’t what I truly wanted, and I absolutely crashed, bang, burnt out.
Traditional career advice that pushes us to go out and chase the fancy promotions and titles, or value ourselves based on our output and productivity, doesn’t account for things like our neurodiversities, the health of our mind and nervous system. It’s hard for us to regulate when we are constantly in a state of striving.
What Actually Works for Creative Careers
Ok, so the traditional advice to go out and get it, continually striving, and measuring our ‘success’ with outdated metrics isn’t working. But what actually works instead?
- Think of your creative career as an evolving path, rather than a pre-drawn map.
- Define your own metrics for success – like creative freedom, autonomy over how you spend your time, fulfillment and meaning – even if these aren’t ‘traditional’ and ‘quantitative’ metrics, it’s about what matters most to you specifically.
- Live attuned to your human design – so that you’re honouring your own unique energy and how you’re designed to move about the world to experience ease and success.
- Embrace the cyclical nature of creativity by making time for exploration, learning, play, and rest, and understanding the value that each phase brings to the overall picture.
- Seek support from coaches, mentors and communities who embrace the beautiful nature of creatives – who celebrate you and meet you where you’re at to support you along your particular path.
A Career Mindset Shift: The Spiral, Not The Ladder
Instead of thinking of your career growth and evolution as climbing a ladder of sequential steps and achievements, think of it as a slowly winding, climbing spiral. As you make your way up the spiral, you may revisit past challenges or reengage with past passions and skills. You will shift directions and evolve, but you’ll still be moving up along the spiral, at your own beautiful pace.
As you travel along the spiral, allow your sparks of curiosity to direct you to new things to explore. Allow yourself to change course when need be, without the pressure of having a final, fixed destination. Because when you’re so focused on some final destination, you miss out on all the lessons and beauty that come along the way.
Throw Out The Rulebook … Lean Into Your Magic
It’s time to discard traditional career advice and rules, and instead, embrace what works for you specifically. Rooting yourself in your human design allows you to lean more into your unique magic and embrace your specific creative flow. Get started with this free guide on understanding your human design.
