Navigator Q&A: ‘It was like a personal reset’

This week we’re kicking off an occasional series of interviews with fellow members of the career river community. Reply if you or someone you know would like to talk to me about your professional journey.

In 2018, Alisha Wang Qing Saville pivoted from working at nonprofits and advocacy organizations to start working in journalism. She has brought her talents in multimedia storytelling and community stewardship to her current role managing the News Voices project at Free Press, and her past work includes co-creating a DEI coalition for journalism, national documentary engagement at California Newsreel, and Asian American organizing and youth media education. She also enjoys climbing and biking. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

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Where were you in your career when you first learned about the career river concept?

It was the summer of 2022. I was more than 10 years into my working life and about four years into wading into the journalism waters. I had just graduated with my master’s in multimedia journalism from the University of Oregon in the previous year. So I was a year out from having graduated and about a year into a job at Free Press with their News Voices program, which builds people power to win the local media transformations that communities need to thrive. 

How did the career river framework inform or shift the decisions you were making?

When I first did that exercise with my friend, I had gotten to this point where I was like, “Now I have a job and I’ve got the degree, but what next? Where am I going from this? I don’t know.”

It was like a personal reset. It was less to inform or shift a specific decision and more to locate where I now was, professionally, in preparation to think about where I might want to go next.

Looking at my career so far, I’ve been motivated by my values, the questions I’m holding, my interests and my gifts rather than a particular field. Last year I wasn’t quite sure how my different professional experiences in education, organizing, documentary engagement, and now journalism fit together. The career river exercise did convince me that I hadn’t made all the wrong choices. 

It illuminated that even if the field I was in felt new, these themes of organizing media, changing systems, community engagement, storytelling as an organizing tool - all of those threads from my past are actually still very present. They’ve just come together in a different form.

Did you have any emotional response when you started thinking this way?

Yes. I felt such relief and a sense of openness and possibility, and also just less pressure. 

How has your understanding of the concept evolved over time?

I’m in the early stages of complimentary somatic and contemplative journeys. Combining the career river with these practices, I’m realizing that I was quite driven by fear and I relied on anxiety and control to goad myself into “staying on” a career path.

That approach doesn’t work for me, nor does it match the modern reality of constantly shifting and evolving professional lives. Thinking of my career as a river helps me think about navigating my professional life in response to changing internal and external conditions.

What do you think about now regarding your professional life that is different than before?

The career river framework broke me out of my anxieties and created more space in my thinking. To bring in a different analogy, I now see my professional life as a bunch of Lego pieces (skills, experiences, values, interests, opportunities) that can be recombined in different ways throughout my life. What questions do I want to pursue and why? What projects do I want to work on? Who do I want to collaborate with? How can I have fun and make meaningful connections in the process? 

Do you have any advice for others considering a career river approach?

Try it as a mental exercise! There’s nothing to lose. Observe how you feel in your body and your mind. Notice what space it opens up in your thinking and imagination about what is possible in your career. If you contemplate your responses and the questions above, you’ll get a wealth of valuable information to help you choose your next move.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

I am learning to trust that as long as I define what my “ocean” is and my values, and how I want to move, and I reflect regularly, I will definitely be surprised about where I end up, and it will probably be pretty sweet.

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Happy navigating,
Bridget

💬 Can’t-miss comments

Thanks Andrew Losowsky for sharing this in response to last week’s ‘Dumpsterfire jugglebus’ job posting: “I came across this recently, which listed and described the team members the person in the role would be working with: https://www.ynab.com/humbly-confident-director-of-product/. I'd never seen that before!”

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