EP.01 - What is an intentional career anyway? with Karen Styles

Welcome to the first episode of the Intentional Career Podcast! I’m Karen Styles, host, Career + Life Coach and owner of Flow + Fire Coaching. So, what the heck is an intentional career anyway? I’ll share my thoughts on that question, what to expect from this podcast, and a few of my career theories. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on my website.

Transcription created with DeScript.

Transcription:

(Transcription has been edited for clarity.)

Karen: I'm Karen Styles and this is the Intentional Career Podcast. I talk to all kinds of people who take all kinds of paths to work they love. I'm a career and life coach and owner of Flow and Fire coaching. If you're ready to create your intentional career with the support of a coach, schedule a call with me.

There's a link in the show notes, or you can go to intentionalcareer.co and click the blue "Schedule a Call” button.

[00:39] Karen: Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of The Intentional Career podcast. I'm so happy you're here. And we are here to talk about, well, I guess I'm here to talk about what is an intentional career anyway? But first, let's talk about why I'm the one talking about it and what you can expect from this podcast as a whole. I want to give you a little bit of an idea of what's going to be coming up. 

I've spent the last several years working in career development. And before that, I was a recruiter for a few years. I also went through my own angst and frustration in my career before creating my own intentional career as a career and life coach. I just used the word career a lot of times in those sentences, I realize. 

All that to say, I've learned some things, both personally, and from my clients, about finding your way to work, you love. And I also know that I don't know everything about it. 

[1:51] That's why the bulk of these episodes are going to be interviews with folks who created their intentional careers.  And just to ask them how they did that. Because I know that all kinds of people do it in lots of different ways and I want this podcast to be a really inclusive venue, to look at lots of different people and the lots of different paths they took, in particular paths that are not necessarily linear.

I know for myself and maybe for a lot of other people, we might think, oh, I wish I had known back in university. I wish I had, you know, maybe made different choices than I did and then it would have been easier. But, okay, there's a lot of beauty in the things that we learn along the way.

And I think, this is my hunch that, there's a lot of people that have found their way to meaningful work and they may not be all that different from you. My hope is that you will be sparked with ideas and inspiration hearing from stories of real people who have done it in lots of different ways.

I'm really looking forward to learning from these guests as well. I'm always gathering information and looking for patterns in the world around me. I'm going to be paying attention and seeing, you know, are there common themes that come up for these stories? And I might also test out some of my theories on them.

 So let me tell you about some of my theories. 

First of all, let's go into that question I started with, what is an intentional career anyway? For me, an intentional career is a career that you choose. That's the simplest way to put it. And maybe that's really simple or obvious, but I've talked to quite a few people and there are people, whether they're 10 years into their career or whether they're 20 plus years into their career, sometimes they say this just happened to me, I didn't make any of these choices or I didn't know what to do. So, here's where I ended up. 

I want you to know that, you know, if you've ever woken up and had that thought that, here I am, and feel like I didn't choose this, you can choose at any time. You can create your intentional career at any point. You can make the start. 

And that leads to my next theory. It is that you don't have to make a leap to have an intentional career, you can make small steps. And those can really make a difference too. 

[4:49]I bring this up because again, because I know I felt this pressure to do something big and bold and dramatic and, follow your passion or something like that.  First of all, I wasn't sure what my passion was, so I didn't exactly know how to follow it. Being bold and taking a leap, which at some points I knew might be quitting a job. [00:04:34] I didn't know what I was going to, so it felt impossible, that’s what it felt like for me. 

I've heard this echoed back from clients at times where it feels like you are stuck with two crappy choices, one being take the leap, make the big bold decision. Or the other choice is to stay in the crappy thing.  That's not quite working out for you. And those both feel like really lousy choices. 

I'm here to tell you those are not your only two choices. 

There might be other options in between there. And some of those other options might feel like really tiny, little steps and the tiny little steps can actually make a big difference for you. Small steps for a big change. 

Martha Beck in her latest book, The Way of Integrity, calls it, “one degree turns.” So maybe we can't all make a leap, but we can make a one degree turn. She talks about a plane changing its course. You know, if a plane changes, its course just one degree at a time, after a while you're going in a vastly different direction.

I want to bring that up to give you a little bit of hope. And to know that if you don't feel like you can make a leap, and if it feels like the choice of staying where you are, doesn't feel great either, you might have options and they might be little, tiny choices, and those can make a difference too.

So that's a big theory of mine, that you don't have to make the leap.  

Now, I am also willing to be proven wrong. I'll be interested to see what stories I hear from my guests. 

Another thing is, maybe something that looks like a giant leap, that looks like a leap in hindsight, and there might've been a lot of little decisions that happened along the way to make that so-called leap possible. 

So, when we're telling the story, in hindsight, we can edit a little bit more and we can focus on the brave pieces, but I'm interested to test out this theory. This is my theory. It's what worked for me. Little things slowly. 

And let me tell you even that was kind of frustrating at times because I felt like, in my case, particularly in 2019, once I had been working with a business coach and I launched my business and I was still working a day job at the time, I felt this pressure to quit. I ultimately did want to work for myself full-time and there was the pressure of going, if I was a real entrepreneur, if I was going to be really successful, I would do this full time, there was this compare and despair.

I see other people who are working for themselves full time or they quit their day job before I did, and those types of things. I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here that wasn't in my notes, but I guess what it comes back to is, it's okay. If I'm wrong, I know that this is an option, and I don't hear a lot of people talk about it. 

So, I want to share that the small steps are possible. And also, if there are people who make the leaps, I want to learn about that too, how they go about making that decision. So, that's my theory, and I'm also willing to prove it wrong because that's what you can do with the theory.

It's not exactly the scientific method, but it's kind of what it is. Right? You start with a hypothesis and then do some research, and see what you find. And I feel like, that's what I'm doing here. It's a little bit selfish on my end because I realized that I'm really motivated when I get to learn something, that's what really excites me about this podcast as well. I know I'm going to learn a ton along the way.

Most of the episodes are going to be interviews. Every once in a while, I'm going to intersperse solo episodes like this one, where it's me sharing some of my thoughts, ideas, stories, philosophies, maybe even things that you can try out for yourself, they're likely to be a little bit shorter, just like this one and I hope you enjoy them too. 

My other theory, this is not even really a theory, well, maybe it is, but I want to say that work and life are not separate. And if you think that they are, and if that works for you great. But for me, work is a part of life. And my goal around creating an intentional career is really to create a life that's meaningful for me, a life that I enjoy. Days that feel great, that doesn’t drain me, that include things that are meaningful, that let me connect with people. That I get to spend time doing what I enjoy, getting challenged, doesn't mean that every minute is perfect.

But I'm really about creating a life that works for me. And it turns out that work really plays a big role. And so, I want to make sure that that matters and not just suffer through my eight hours or more, maybe because I'm an entrepreneur. Sometimes I'm spending more hours or less because I have the freedom to do that too. Making a life that works for me, that's why having an intentional career is important. 

And I also want to clear something up about myself as a career coach, because I want to let you know that I don't focus mainly on job search and neither does this podcast. Now there's a lot of different ways to be a career coach, just like there are a lot of different ways to do lots of roles. 

The questions that I'm looking at here, when I'm thinking about an intentional career, it's the bigger questions, the broader questions. Those questions of how do you discover and do work that lights you up? How do you create a meaningful life and work? And how do you make that all work together? 

So, it's not that I'll never talk about job search, and being a former recruiter and whatnot, I know stuff about resumes. I know stuff about interviews.  It's not that I'll never talk about those things, but I do differentiate the work of a job search coach from a career coach. And I want to let you know, ‘cause if you're coming to this podcast for job search tips, you're not gonna find a whole bunch of that. It's more about learning from the stories of people who have gotten to work they love and how they did that.

So, that's it and I suppose to summarize an intentional career is a career that you choose.  My theory: You don't have to make a leap. You can make small little shifts and those will eventually make a big difference in your life. And work and life are not separate. And this podcast is looking at a career as a whole and not just a job search.

And I don't know how to wrap this up. It's my first episode. I wrote a bunch of notes and I guess I didn't write a conclusion and that's how it works, but I want to thank you for being here. I'm so grateful that you chose to listen. And there are three other episodes, three interviews that are dropping today, the same day this one is released, and I do hope that you'll check them out. 

I talked to Kristine Miguel about why she left and how she traded her accounting career for love - not in the way you think. I talked to Michelle Ward about how she went from being an actress dreaming of Broadway and found her way to becoming a business coach. I talked to D’Ana Joi about multi-passionate creatives and what her experience is like creating that multi-passionate career as an entrepreneur. So, I do hope you will check out the other episodes.

Those all dropped today and then going forward, I'm going to be releasing episodes every two weeks on Wednesdays. So please subscribe so that you get the new episodes every time they show up. And I would really appreciate it if you would go to Apple Podcasts and give a five-star review if you've enjoyed this because it helps more people find the podcast.

[14:41] And, you know what, there's just too many people out there who hate their work and you spend a lot of time at work. And I really, really want to help people find better work because creating an intentional career means creating a better life too. So, thank you so much for being with me.

Stick around. I'll see you soon. 

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