When The Going Gets Tough, Don't Get Going

You might feel as though you’re at a crossroads in your career, where choices seem limited and the options unattractive. If you feel at this crossroads, wondering if the only solution is stopping work altogether, pause first to ask yourself whether you have explored all the options.

How Did We Get Here?

If we consider traditional career paths, they are linear and often represented by a ladder. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and author of “The Start-Up of You”, says that the career escalator has jammed, and we need to think differently about our careers. Mainiero and Sullivan offer us an alternative kaleidoscope career model based on what Generation Y want from their jobs. They describe an ongoing interplay between balance, challenge and authenticity.

Striving for balance when our caring commitments are high does not prevent us from wanting a challenge or authenticity in our roles. Still, when we can’t meet our need for these goals, we reach a tipping point.

An added factor is the weight of the “mental load” many carry. The mental load is the thinking behind it, rather than the doing of domestic chores, child care, and life administration, all of which are unpaid mental labour. Many say that women carry more cognitive load and that while men take on more chores at home, they don’t always predict what needs to be done. In her book, “Work Like a Woman”, retail expert and broadcaster Mary Portas claimed that “mental load” expands ten-fold as we become parents. This load can lead to feeling overwhelmed and “failing”.

How to Handle the Tipping Point

In my experience of coaching parents at this tipping point, I recognise how tempting it is for them to look to leave as a way of alleviating the immediate all-round pressure. I’m always keen to have them stand back and look at the long term. After all, when children are, perhaps a full-time job is relatively short compared to our whole working lives. Leaving is a short-term solution, but looking at your life’s longer-term arc is vital. I can cite many examples of working parents I have coached who initially told me that they felt they had no choice other than to resign. Instead, after talking it through objectively with me, they come up with several alternatives. Here are a few they have pursued.

Redefining Your Role

• Influencing how success is measured, i.e., outputs vs time spent at work.
• Renegotiating responsibilities at work and at home.
• Finding opportunities for greater flexibility in when and where you do your role.
• Making a lateral move.
• Agreeing reduced travel expectations.

Keep Hold of What You Love

If you need to make changes, ensure you don’t cut out the things you love or are most talented at doing. If you lose these, there is a risk that you will lose motivation and your sense of fulfilment.

Ask yourself the following questions as a reminder

• What aspects of your work help you be happiest and why?
• What makes you least happy and least motivated, and why?
• What have you built your success on so far?
• What do others tell you are your key talents?

Take Back Control

A working parent recently told me, “I feel like I’m not doing any of my jobs well – my day job, being a mum or running the house”.  I asked them who else they knew was holding down three full-time jobs. My advice is to regain control and take pride in being a parent, caregiver, housekeeper, and devoted employee, all rolled into one. Reset the boundaries of what is possible and review your expectations of yourself and those around you. Consider yourself a role model to the next generation who will likely be in dual-career households. Redefine what co-parenting should look like in your family unit and set new parameters around work.

Set yourself a timeframe. Don’t continue to be unhappy or at breaking point. Mentally fix a time in the future, say three to six months from now, by which time you will have discussed all your options and had conversations with your partner or boss which have borne fruit. Often, these adjustments can be presented as a trial period or pilot for a defined period. But ensure you review again in a further three months to see if more adjustments are still needed.

Tips on Making It Work

1. Play to your strengths – by focusing on work or activities that play to your strengths, you’ll find that you perform better, they’ll give you energy, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like work at all. This approach is the foundation of Positive Psychology theory and lends itself beautifully to managing your career successfully.
2. Talk to your partner or support system – some quick wins might release some steam from the pressure cooker situation. Get domestic help, re-assign domestic chores, change the child-care arrangements, share the mental load, and re-assess the short and long-term financial goals. In other words, vocalise your concerns and ask for help.
3. Talk to your boss honestly about what is and is not working for you. At this point, what have you got to lose? Ask for their advice and support; what would they do in your shoes? Tell them what would make a difference today, next week and next month. Managers would much rather hear this than receive a seemingly unexpected resignation.
4. Parental guilt is optional! – Who knew?! I’ve learned, albeit late in life, that not every working parent feels guilty. I am learning to recognise my “guilt” as an unhelpful and energy-sapping emotion and to re-frame it with a more helpful perspective. Instead, I should be proud to show my kids what it takes to be a working parent, the financial difference, talk freely about my achievements, and the sense of pleasure, camaraderie, and identity I derive from my work.
5. Put down the mental load– it’s too heavy! Ask yourself what load you have to carry. What can you delegate or, better still, put down entirely? What decisions need to be made today, and what load or worries can be parked or shared?
6. If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit – a wise quote from an unexpected source, the street artist Banksy. There are no prizes for being “everything to everyone”; that’s not a role model our children can reasonably aim for. Take a day off from both work and domestic stuff, muzzle the inner critic, saying perfection is over-rated, and embrace “good is enough”.

Advice from the Wise

Take courage. The pressure we put on ourselves to be “superhuman” is unfair. As parents, we have incredible superpowers that we rarely apply to ourselves – resilience, kindness, problem-solving, and multitasking. Apply your superpowers, draw upon and play to your strengths, have honest conversations with those that matter, put down some of your mental load and know that you always have a choice about what happens next.

Additional Resources:

• 2012, Reid Hoffman. The Startup of You
• 2006, Mainiero and Sullivan. The Opt-Out Revolt: How People are creating Kaleidoscope Careers outside of Companies
• 2019, Mary Portas. Work Like a Woman: A Manifesto for Change