🧭 Your values compass

I just said no to a work opportunity and it felt fantastic.

I was recently accepted into a months-long training cohort, and the organizers were very clear that if you couldn’t commit to attending every session, your spot would be given to someone on the waiting list. And as it turned out, one of those sessions landed on my daughter’s birthday, while we would all be on vacation together.

Technically, I could have made the session. Instead, I gave up my spot. There will be other professional development opportunities, but this birthday’s only going to happen once.

As I’ve been talking to people about their careers, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on how we develop and pursue our values. We use our values compass all the time when making decisions about where to put our time, what opportunities to pursue, and how we show up, for ourselves and others.

Chat update:

As of this week, I’ve talked with 75 professionals about their Career River questions! Thank you to everyone who shared my invitation to connect. I’m on track to reach my goal of 100 chats by the end of the month, and there are still a few slots left on my calendar — if you’d like to enter or share the chat giveaway, you can do so here!

One question that keeps coming up is whether our values can change over time. Do we still follow the same compass as when we were starting out?

This week, I was giving a talk to a group of college students and one of them asked me whether I was still doing the work I had wanted to do when I started out. I said yes, even though my job now looks nothing like the reporter job I landed after college. I said yes because the work I’m doing goes much deeper than just reporting or even journalism.

“At its core,” I told her, “my work is about connecting people to information.”

I could do that work in any number of ways, in any number of jobs. At this moment, it looks like supporting newsrooms in engagement and this Career River project. In 10 years, it will probably look completely different. But I’d be willing to bet the heart of it will remain the same.

A big theme that has been coming up over my conversations about navigating uncertainty or the unexpected in our careers is the influence of our responsibilities outside of work on our career choices. When I was starting out, my choices only affected me. Now they impact my family of five. I talked to one person this week who just got a mortgage; another who took care of an ailing relative. These experiences shaped their career choices.

What might be the right career move can feel like the wrong life choice (and vice versa). How do we balance the two? We combine them to find the direction that will get us closest to where we want to go.

Finding True North