Great Money or Meaningful Work? : How to Have Both

"​Karen, an account manager in a software company complained to me that she’d grown tired of her role and found it unfulfilling. She wanted work that was more ‘meaningful’.“Trouble is,” she went on, “doing something more ‘meaningful’ isn’t going to pay the mortgage or enable me to support the kids through university, is it?"
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​I've found it’s common for professionals in well-paid but unfulfilling roles to believe that a career switch to work that’s more ‘meaningful’ will cost them dear. However, I also know it doesn’t have to be so.

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What is ‘Meaningful’ Work?

​​Findings from studies defining ‘meaningful’ work, point to concepts such as ‘the amount of significance people perceive to exist in their work ¹.  There’s the idea of a ‘calling’ which has deep historical and religious roots and which might lead people to choosing a role within the church or a healthcare environment. Nowadays the phrase ‘calling’ is often more about an inner drive to do fulfilling or self-actualising work².

There’s also the related concept of ‘meaning in life’³. Which suggests that work is meaningful not only when it is judged to be significant, but also when it is viewed as having a distinct purpose or point.

Some argue that you don’t have to have ‘meaningful’ work, as long as you find meaning in other parts of your life e.g. through family and relationships, a hobby, using your creativity, or through your faith.

The late Susan Jeffers, renowned author and psychotherapist, encouraged us to set the bar high. If your work isn’t ‘joyful’ she encourages us to ditch it.
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Ultimately, ‘meaningful work’ is a ‘career value’ which any individual will rank somewhere on a continuum from high to low, according to their own make-up.

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 The Midlife Crisis and Your Career

​Your interest in your career may wane gradually over several years. Or, having been made redundant, you may experience a sudden realisation: ‘I can’t go back to doing that! Either way it can feel frightening when the career that may have paid you handsomely and have reinforced a positive sense of self no longer ‘fits’.

Such experiences are consistent with what renowned psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung labelled as the ‘midlife crisis’. Jung believed such an event to be driven by a ‘search for meaning’, and attributed it to the need to ‘individuate’ at midlife, self-actualise and develop further our unique selves.
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If you made your career choice in your early twenties, perhaps twenty years ago. And since then you’ve changed and grown, and the world has also changed; is it really surprising that you, your career and the world of work no longer fit together like freshly sawn jigsaw pieces?

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How to Get a Better Money-Meaning Balance in Your Career

​There’s no quick fix. However, by starting with these three strategies you’ll be on your way to a better balance of money and meaning in your career at midlife.

1.Update Your Understanding of YOU
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​Uncover your current ‘career values’ by asking yourself the question. What is important to me in a (my) career now?

Take some quiet time to do this and write your answers down. Review them a week later and add new ones that occur to you, remove any that don’t really resonate. Finally, try and prioritise your top five.  Where is ‘meaning’ in this list? How does it relate to your other career values?
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Audit your current skills. People have told me that they find this hard. They take their skills for granted, they’re just ‘doing their job’. Get started by thinking through a major project you’ve completed, what skills did you use to deliver it? Don’t forget the soft or interpersonal skills.

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2. Consider Your 'Business Model'​

​A business model can be defined as ‘how a business makes money’. Your business model is how YOU make money.  As a midlife professional you may see career opportunities in terms of employers and candidates, full-time and part-time. However, nowadays it’s more helpful to think in terms of a global market for skills.

Skills can be sold in any size ‘package’ from an hour’s work to a full time role and every increment in between. Skills can be sold to regular employers or directly to customers, to agencies or through an online platform, to name but a few.

How are you going to ‘package’ your skills? And what type of business model will suit you best e.g. time for money, project fee, retained fee, revenue share from a business, equity stake in a business? As in any market, rare skills or unusual combinations of skills can command premium prices.
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Considering these things will help you explore alternative business models and ultimately help you maximise your income and your return on activity (and investment) from the huge asset that is your skill set.  

3.Keep Focused on Money as you Explore ‘Meaningful’ Career Opportunities.​

​Think, like Karen, that you can’t have money and meaning - then you surely won’t. One of the most important reasons people don't get the remuneration they want is because they are not ambitious enough about money.

Get clear about how much money you want… and then set a goal of significantly more than that.

Madness? No. By setting a challenging goal we send a message to our subconscious that it needs to come up with a plan to deliver the results you desire.

Ultimately, achieving both money and meaning in your career is a creative process. It’s about breaking free from an outdated and constricted view of the ‘job market’ and being open to exploring new options for you in the global ‘skills market’.
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Want to learn more about reinventing your career to have both money and meaning? Download my Reinventu™ process guide here.
Sources
1. (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010)
2 (Baumeister, 1991; Hall & Chandler, 2005)
3 (Steger & Dik, 2009)

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