How careers shape us for better and worse
How do we stay true to ourselves when we're been institutionalised by industries and organisations?
2010 was a huge year for me, and for our generation of children. It was the year the ipad was launched and smartphones were just about hitting mainstream populations. For me personally, in 2010, I got married, had my first child and started a business. I was working in the market research sector at the time and felt a deep ambition that I could take what I had learned so far and blow it up. I was craving to go deeper, become more of an anthropologist and have a deep sociological, expert understanding of generational shifts and specifically understand how digital media was affecting kids growing-up alongside it. I started an agency and this is exactly what we did, it grew quickly.
I had an unusual personal and professional entwinement. I was studying families and also learning how to raise one myself. 3 years later after I started the business, we had our second child, by this time the agency was now global servicing the biggest brands on the planet who were all trying to understand how to design, communicate and meet the needs of a new generation of young people and their families.
Building the company and growing our client accounts meant I had to become fluent in the corporate world, understanding many nuances and perplexing quirks of how it operates. A lot of my experience ended up being with corporate America versus the UK which was where I started off and this is a whole different beast. Not many people can crack that market, but we absolutely smashed it. I’ve sat in so many rooms, with so many senior leaders, enough for a book. I’ve been part of endless rebrands, overhauls and witnessed enough restructures to last me a lifetime. The corporate world never rests, not even in covid, it just can’t. It’s designed to always be on, and to some extent, that rubs off on those who work within it. I burned out and crashed multiple times, but overall had a blast working with super smart people and being at the centre of some fascinating projects.
Just over a decade of agency leadership I was done. Prematurely by all norms. No one typically walks away from a business like that, at that time and indeed at my age; there was so much more to do (and to earn). But the primary reason I wanted to move on has been something I’ve been reflecting on recently now that I’ve been out long enough to know if this instinct was right. I had a deep desire to ‘consciously uncouple’ from the corporate world. To be clear, I still earn a living from the corporate world, I’m not an anti-capitalist and whilst know there is a lot that needs to change about how the world operates, I also know there are millions of careers in these businesses, careers that many of us would likely feel happy if our kids ended up getting. But these jobs often come at a cost. My relationship with the corporate world these days is very different. It’s much healthier and I really enjoy it a lot more. This makes me recognise that whilst I feel proud of my ability to start and grow things, one of the things I like most about myself is that I know when to move on. I am not afraid to start over when I feel something else is calling me and critically when I feel like I’m losing the essence of who I am.
I’m not sure I exactly realised this at the time, but it’s likely this is what my intuition was trying to tell me: I felt like the corporate world had started to own me, that it infiltrated every fibre of my being. I thought it was the job, but actually it was more the bigger thing I was plugged into. When you create a life from relatively humble beginnings, built on a corporate salary you can end up in a codependent relationship. Since my ‘conscious uncoupling’, I now feel like I have a ‘positively transactional’ relationship with it all. I have a lot of experience and skills to plug in and deliver, which I do (with bells on), and then I’m gone for a bit to breathe and regather energies. I am completely removed from politics and people issues, which I was never very good at switching off from and instead I just focus on the job. I think this is what most people crave and want but it is hard to get at when you’re operating from deep in the belly of the corporate beast. This is actually how I felt when I first started out and found that the deeper I got, the harder it was to find my back there.
In between projects these days, I write, make podcasts, work on creative things that don’t make me any money (yet, always add yet!) and generally have a really good working life balance. For me this isn’t actually always about time, it's about mental load and stress and feeling myself. I can’t underscore this point about balance enough, so much so that sometimes I’m embarrassed, almost ashamed by the quality of it, that I don’t talk about it. Stories of people doing just fine aren’t that interesting but I think we need more of them.
The stress of wondering if another project is newer for me and is always there, but I have learned to have more confidence in the uniqueness of my experience and knowledge and be more forthcoming with selling that and that some of the personal things I have been brewing will come to fruition one day. These days, I really enjoy my interactions with corporate businesses. I do want to rely less on these jobs in the future but I’ve learned to take my time and enjoy the journey getting there.
I was right about something though. I had been thinking about leaving my prior role for sometime, for a reason that had been hard to articulate and work through. I felt like I was becoming institutionalised by my corporate experience in a way that had started to hard wire my mind and even my personality. I was so intertwined with my work identity I had started to distance my authentic self. My work identity had been leading front and centre for so long I was getting fed up with it leading my thoughts and decision making. There are parts of the job and just being in the broader corporate space, where you have to be tough, strong, resilient and adjust yourself. I had no problem doing this for a period of time, but always hunch from the early years, that I would need to depart before it changed me forever.
I am not sure if everyone has this issue, some people are likely better at compartmentalising than myself who tends to feel and experience everything very wholly and deeply. But it did get me thinking about how our jobs change and shape us for better and for worse. When a person has done decades in any industry and dedicated time and energy to it, I think some kind of institutionalisation is likely inevitable? I recognise this in lots of people in my life. I know people right now who are deeply ambitious and building things in a corporate way. Sometimes they’ll say something or behave in a way that holds a mirror up to who I used to be and it makes me feel very icky, less so about them, but more a glimpse into the path I was hurtling along. I also have friends who have had long careers in organisations like the NHS or government and who as a consequence seem to view life with a very specific pair of goggles on and can’t see in other directions. Sometimes we laugh about this, other times it’s more challenging.
When we think about careers and our choice of job, we tend to consider our skills and interests (if we are so lucky to have these kinds of options). But rarely do we think about how an industry or organisation might intercept our personality and authentic self, how it might institutionalise us and what this could look like in the future. Perhaps it’s unlikely to ever know this until we get there and find out. I feel deep in my bones that something has shifted very deep in me with my pivot from all immersion in the corporate world to something more transactional. I feel kinder, softer, more open and less anxious. I am still ambitious, but in a way that’s very different to how I used to be. I often see posts linked in about all the talks, promotions and all the successes people are having, and wonder if I threw away too much, too soon. My work these days is very behind the scenes - there will be no awards, no big hires, no public conference speeches, it’s just me working from home doing great focussed work for a small set of clients and honestly, I couldn’t be happier about that. I am so much more patient, open and creative and have a freedom that is invaluable.
I have removed of some parts of what I do that felt at odds with my values and core identity and as a consequence have been pulled in directions I never would have imagined. I am a big advocate for a career pivot. For those of us who crave change and growth I think it’s essential to pivot to unlock parts of the self and stay authentic to who we are, but I do wonder if as part of that process, rather than only putting attention on the roles we would like to move into, we consider a wider look at industries and how they affect us at personal, even spiritual level and how interact with them. As it turned out, it wasn’t that I actually wanted to wave goodbye to the corporate sector forever, but I instead needed to widen my portfolio of services and upskill to work in new ways. Rather rather than losing myself into the system, I now bring my entire self fully into my work and whilst my life is quieter and any achievements go unchecked on linked in, I’ve never been more content or had more fun in my career and the only thing I’m institutionalised by is my family, lifestyle and my playtime and what more can I ask for than that?