Where does a career that fits begin?
This is the first article in a series about turning your career into a craft. As the series grows, you can find the other articles by choosing Craft on the Resources page. This series builds on the identity work we’ve explored in earlier articles and begins asking how that understanding can shape the work you do.
I come to this as someone who built a successful career, managed people, mentored others for years, and now works as a coach. My clinical training and master’s in social work also inform how I think about the relationship between people and their careers.
One of my strongest beliefs is that a significant part of our misery at work can come from the distance between who we are and what our work allows us to express.
Toxic environments and abusive bosses are real sources of distress, absolutely for sure. Our ability to tolerate those types of environments becomes so much lower when we’re also feeling lost ourselves. When your work continually pulls you away from what matters to you, you can begin to feel as though there is less and less room for you in your own career.
What I’ve seen in coaching is that bringing the work closer to who someone is can change their relationship with it. They may find more motivation, more interest, and a little more room to navigate the difficult parts.
The environment still matters and responsibility for abusive behavior stays with the person doing it… we never excuse bad behavior of others. Knowing yourself can give you firmer ground to stand on within that very environment. Criticism of a project becomes easier to examine as feedback about the work, without turning it into a judgment of your entire worth.
That foundation is central to what I teach in my Identity course. Career as Craft builds from it.
Why can it be hard to work on your career?
You can keep doing a good job even when you feel very little connection to the work. Actually, I’d say that’s more common than not.
You show up. You deliver. You may receive good reviews, bonuses, a raise or two, and some recognition. From the outside, your career looks like it is moving along.
But how interested are you in developing it?
There is a difference between working in your career and working on your career. You can spend years doing the first while having very little desire to do the second.
When the work feels far removed from who you are, where is the motivation to explore it more deeply? What makes you want to learn another approach, think through a difficult problem, or develop your own perspective? (And that last part is the most critical point of everything…)
For many people I’ve worked with, that interest has faded. There is no fire around the work anymore. It is something they can perform, for sure, but it has become difficult to find meaning in it. And it can also create this feeling of being aimless or listless… just feeling like you’re going along with the current instead of steering your own ship.
Alignment can create a different starting point. When some part of the work connects with something that matters to you, there is a reason to lean in. You become curious. You want to understand more. You start noticing other possibilities.
That is the kind of relationship with work I want to help people develop through their craft.
How can identity and work connect without becoming tangled?
For many of us, our identity has already become fused with our career. If work goes well, we feel valuable. If work goes badly, we start questioning our worth.
A promotion becomes evidence that we matter. A rejected idea, difficult review, or missed bonus becomes evidence that we do not.
But your value as a person exists independently of your job title, promotion, bonus, salary, project, or employer. You are a full, complete, and unique human being before any of those things enter the picture.
So how do you bring yourself into your work while preserving that separation?
I explain it using three beakers, like the ones you might remember from chemistry class. (I’m also open to a different analogy or metaphor or… whatever it’s called, but here we are…)
The first beaker holds your identity.
This is who you are: your values, interests, experiences, family, culture, spirituality, hobbies, health, and the things that excite or motivate you. It exists independently of your employment.
The second beaker holds your profession.
A profession contains far more possibilities than the job you happen to have today. There are different industries, company sizes, activities, levels of responsibility, working environments, and degrees of complexity. The pace can vary. The problems can vary. The way the work gets done can vary. The types of people you work with vary.
I call these the dimensions of your profession, and we’ll explore them in later articles.
The third beaker holds your craft.
We keep the first two beakers separate. We don’t empty your profession into your identity because then your entire sense of self depends on work. We don’t pour your whole identity into your profession and expect it to contain everything you are.
Instead, we pour a little from each into the third beaker.
We take parts of who you are and combine them with parts of the profession that align with those qualities. That combination becomes your craft.
What makes your craft yours?
Your craft is a particular part of the profession, approached through your particular perspective, in a way only you can express through it.
Someone else might work on similar projects, use similar methods, or hold the same title. But they bring their own history, interests, values, and experiences to that work. You bring yours.
That combination can shape the problems you notice, the questions you ask, and the decisions you make. It can influence what you find interesting enough to investigate and what you want to improve. It can absolutely shape the types of challenges you’re the best suited to solve for.
Your craft shows up in how you approach the work, how you think about it, how you learn from it, and how you modify your approach over time.
It is something you can practice. You can reflect on it, refine it, and explain it to someone else. Over time, you may teach others what you’ve learned or develop ideas that contribute to your profession.
This is why I think of a craft as something you own. An employer provides a place where you can practice it, but the perspective and learning can travel with you. They continue to develop as you do.
We explore this process in depth in the Career as Craft course inside Innervates. This article series gives you a way to begin exploring it for yourself.
How do you start finding your craft?
Start with an opening reflection… as always.
Think about what you already know about yourself and your profession. Write down a few moments when you felt especially interested, energized, or motivated by the work. Then consider moments when that interest was noticeably absent.
Ask yourself:
- What kinds of projects make me curious or excited to get started?
- What working environments help me feel engaged?
- When have I wanted to understand something more deeply, even after the immediate task was finished?
- What personal interests, values, or experiences might explain that pull?
- Where have I been capable of doing the work but had very little interest in developing it further?
Try to remember specific situations. A project, conversation, problem, or period in a past job may give you more to work with than a broad statement about liking your profession.
For now, you are looking for clues about the parts of the work you are drawn to and why. You don’t have to prove that nobody else enjoys those things. The connection between those parts and your own experience is what we are beginning to explore.
What if my identity still feels tied to my career?
As you reflect, consider one more question: How much of my sense of value depends on what happens at work?
If your title disappeared, or your current job ended, would you still be able to describe who you are and what matters to you?
If those things feel difficult to separate, discovering your craft may take some additional identity work. It can be harder to see what you want to bring into a profession when the profession already feels like it contains all of you.
The Identity articles explore that foundation: understanding your values, noticing what energizes or depletes you, and remembering who you are independently of work.
For now, give yourself room to notice what draws you in. Your first reflection can be (and will be) unfinished and uncertain. You are beginning to discover which parts of your profession give you room to express who you are, and which parts you want to make more deliberately your own.
