It can be difficult to hold everything you have learned about yourself in your head, especially when work keeps pulling your attention toward what everyone else needs. We continue to reach for goals that were never ours in a work environment designed to make us forget who we are.
You may have spent time discovering your values, understanding why certain situations drain you, and recognizing patterns across your career. Then a department reorg happens, or your responsibilities change suddenly, or your manager adds another priority. Before long, you are right back to just trying to survive the week.
One of my frustrations with corporate life is how easily the person can disappear from the equation. When decisions come down to budgets, headcount, and business outcomes, you can find yourself treated as a variable in a calculation or a line in a spreadsheet.
That’s the very foundation that everything is based on, that you are not a real person with a real life happening.
Consider a department reorg, which many of us have been through (maybe more than once). There may be extensive discussion about the new structure and what it needs to deliver, the goals the teams need to hit, and who’s going to lead which teams. But where is the discussion about what those changes will mean emotionally, mentally, and psychologically for the people expected to live through them? Asking those questions (and knowing what to do with the answers) requires attention and skills that cannot simply be assumed because someone has a leadership title.
Leaders are inadequately trained on how to deal with the mental impact of workplace decisions.
When the system around you keeps focusing on what you produce, it becomes especially important to have a way to remind yourself of who you are.
What is a Career Constitution?
Inside my Identity course, I call this document a Career Constitution. The course is career-focused, but what you are creating is also a personal constitution: an ongoing promise and reminder to yourself about what matters to you and the conditions that help you operate at your best.
It is a snapshot of the work you have already done to understand yourself. That might come from the course, your own reflection, coaching, or exercises you have explored through these articles.
The goal is to gather the important pieces onto one or two pages so that you can return to them without searching through every worksheet, journal entry, or note.
It’s something you can print out, put on your desk, and serve as a reminder of what’s important to you.
When work starts making you feel lost, you have something concrete to come back to.
What should I include in mine?
Your Career Constitution brings together several parts of your self-understanding:
- Your values. Include your core values, your proximity values, and your perimeter values. In my approach, these represent the values closest to your center, alongside others you may draw on depending on the situation. You can read more about that in the values card sort article.
- Your must-have conditions. Write down what you need in a job to work in a way that is sustainable and aligned with who you are. Be specific about what those conditions look like.
- Your never-agains and red flags. Capture the experiences you want to avoid repeating and the warning signs you want to remember. The article on avoiding the same bad work experience again can help you identify these.
- Your activators or energizers. These are the situations and conditions that motivate you, help you lean in, and bring out your best.
- Your depleters. These are the conditions that drain you, exhaust you, and can gradually make you dread your work. If you need help naming both sides, start with what brings out your best or worst at work.
- A reminder to your future self. What do you want to remember when you are overwhelmed, questioning yourself, or tempted to dismiss what you already know about your needs?
Write this for yourself, in words that mean something to you. It does not need to impress anybody else. It is purely for you.
If you would like guidance through the reflection that feeds into this document, the Identity course inside Innervates walks you through that work and brings it together in your Career Constitution.
How do I use it when work gets difficult?
Your constitution gives you a point of comparison.
Look at what you have written, then look at your current working life. How close are the two? Which parts of your job support the conditions you described? Where have you drifted away from them?
My suspicion is that, for many people, the further that gap grows, the more difficult and miserable work begins to feel. And sure, that does not explain every problem at work, but it gives you something specific to examine.
You might notice that a condition you described as essential has gradually disappeared. Or that your week is full of depleters, with very little room for the things that energize you.
From there, ask: What is one small step I could take this week to move closer to what I have written?
This connects to the practice in making your workweek a little better. You are comparing where you are with the conditions that help you do well, choosing one manageable change, and returning to see what happened.
The gap may include things you cannot change right now. Acknowledging that is part of understanding your situation. The document can help you identify what you want to protect, what you are currently compromising, and what you want to move toward.
Can my Career Constitution change?
Yes. That is part of the point.
I use the word “constitution” because it describes guiding principles you can return to when deciding how to proceed. And, like the U.S. Constitution, it can be amended.
Humans are complex and we really don’t like fitting into boxes. We grow, learn, and change our minds. Something that mattered deeply at one point in your life may not matter at all one day. A condition you once sought out may no longer suit the life you want.
Your Career Constitution is a point-in-time reflection of who you understand yourself to be and where you want to go. It should leave room for you to evolve.
One day, you may read a sentence in it and realize that it is no longer true. You get to change that sentence.
The purpose is to help you find your way back to yourself when you feel lost, while leaving you free to become someone you have not yet discovered.
