Where did your idea of a successful career come from?
Sometimes, our career goals are handed to us long before we’ve had a lot of opportunity to actually ponder and choose them with intention.
We’ve heard the story, many times, of parents who push their children to become lawyers, doctors, or engineers. Or maybe our community, culture, friends, or religion may have a particular picture of success for us. We may hear that we’re good at something or that there’s really good money in it.
I hear versions of this from coaching clients all the time. When we talk about where their career began, we find someone else’s hopes and dreams sitting near the beginning of the story.
Sometimes those dreams line up beautifully with who the person is. But sometimes the goal they were given doesn’t align with what matters to them or the values at the center of what gives them purpose and drive in life.
Then the question becomes bigger than how to achieve the goal. It becomes whether they want the life that comes with achieving it.
What if following the goal means disappointing yourself?
Let’s take the ambitious “parent wants you to become a lawyer” dream.
You go to law school but the subject doesn’t interest you. The learning feels like a slog, and the future you’re working toward doesn’t feel like one you want to live. Every day it’s harder to find motivation and maybe you start questioning yourself, looking around at how energized everyone else is about these classes.
Over time, you might begin to resent the profession. You might also feel resentment toward the people who pushed you toward it, especially once you recognize where the goal came from.
But choosing another direction can feel painful too. You may worry about disappointing your parents or walking away from something other people were proud to imagine for you. Especially with how powerful external validation can be for us.
That can feel like a lose-lose situation: continue toward a life that doesn’t fit or carry the guilt of disappointing someone important to you.
I’m generalizing here to illustrate a tension I see. Families respond differently, and some are very open to a change in direction. But when there is little room to question the expected path, choosing a career goal can feel like choosing whose disappointment you’re willing to live with. Yours? or theirs?
I recognize part of that tension from my own experience.
How I realized IT was someone else’s picture of my future
When I was in high school, IT and cybersecurity were becoming an increasingly visible career path. A lot of my family encouraged me to go in that direction.
I was smart. I was good with computers. I enjoyed tinkering, building computers, and fixing things. They could see the potential for good money and a good career, and they regularly talked about how great it would be for me. Especially since I “was so good at it.”
Economically, I could understand the appeal, especially since my family did not come from money… quite the opposite. And I did enjoy parts of it, sure. But it never drew me in as something that felt connected to who I was or what I wanted my life to be about.
Still, I followed that direction. I earned my associate’s degree in IT at a community college, then applied to a bachelor’s program in IT when I transferred.
I’ll never forget the first day of class.
I don’t remember which class it was, only that it was part of the degree. I arrived five or ten minutes early and found a room that was already packed. I paused in the doorway, surprised that so many people had arrived before me.
The room was buzzing.
People were talking about projects they’d worked on over the weekend, computers they’d helped family members fix, coding they were learning, and the classes they were taking this semester. I could hear the excitement in their conversations, the energy was palpable and real.
I found what looked like the only empty seat, near the back, but I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down, I was in awe at what I was realizing. I stood behind it, looking around and listening.
And I realized: I am nowhere near this excited about this subject.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work. I had already completed a degree in it. But listening to those conversations made something clear that I hadn’t fully acknowledged to myself.
I turned around, left the classroom, and went to the school’s career counselor’s office. I withdrew from the program and said I was going to take a semester off to figure out what I really wanted to do.
After some time away, I realized that the subject that interested and excited me was psychology.
I didn’t know that I wanted to become a psychologist or a therapist. I didn’t even know exactly what I would do with the degree. I just knew that psychology interested me in the way IT seemed to interest the people in that classroom. I was fortunate enough to take an AP Psychology class in high school and it was the only class that fascinated me. The human mind. Neuroscience. Autism. Diagnostics. Research Trials. All of it… I couldn’t get enough. It was the only class, in all of my education, that I read all of the material cover to cover.
The following semester, I changed my degree. I had to redo some coursework because of how my associate’s classes transferred, but I went on to complete my undergraduate degree in psychology.
It was the most incredible learning experience I’d had in all my schooling up to that point. The only thing that has surpassed it was the master’s in social work I completed much later in life.
That moment in the classroom helped me recognize the difference between a future that made sense to other people and a direction that felt meaningful to me.
Can an inherited career goal still be yours?
Absolutely.
If your family encouraged you to become an engineer and you love engineering, there is no reason to reject that goal simply because someone else introduced it.
An inherited goal can become a goal you consciously choose. The important reflection is whether it aligns with who you are now and who you want to become.
You may also discover that something which once fit you no longer does. Your values can develop. Your understanding of yourself can deepen. You are allowed to revisit a direction you chose earlier in life, even if you chose it enthusiastically at the time. Humans are awful at fitting into defined boxes, we’re meant to change and evolve as life progresses.
Knowing your values gives you something to compare that direction against. If you haven’t explored them yet, my article on what a values card sort is and why it matters walks through one way to begin.
When you’re more grounded in what matters to you, you can look at a career goal and ask what it would actually allow you to live out. You can also notice what pursuing it might ask you to leave behind.
When you imagine your future, whose story do you hear?
Think about where you imagine yourself in ten or fifteen years.
Where did that picture come from? Whose voice do you hear when you describe what you should be doing? Does the goal align with who you are and who you want to be?
You don’t have to make a dramatic decision today. My story involved leaving a program, but this reflection doesn’t require that kind of immediate action. You may discover that you want to keep your goal, understand it differently, or give yourself room to explore another possibility.
Sometimes, simply recognizing that you’ve been pursuing somebody else’s dream opens up options you hadn’t allowed yourself to consider.
Choosing your career goals can begin there: getting clear enough about yourself to decide whether the future you’ve been working toward is one you still want to call your own.
