What can my career history tell me?
We spend a lot of time thinking about what we want from our next job. But we do not always intentionally examine what our previous jobs have already taught us. There are a lot of lessons to be learned there that are staring us right in the face!
Inside Innervates, I call this walking your career timeline. You start with the very first job you ever had and work your way forward, asking what you loved and what you hated about each one. I covered how to walk your career timeline in an earlier article.
Once you have those stories, the next step is to ask why.
Why did you love that project? What made working with those people enjoyable? Why did you join that company, and why did you eventually leave?
“I loved that project” is a memory. “I loved having the freedom to take a messy problem and turn it into something useful” gives you something you can recognize as a pattern showing up across multiple jobs.
That is what we are looking for: the reasons underneath the experiences. Your whys. Your patterns.
How do I identify my activators and depleters?
Take a piece of paper and make two columns: activators on the left and depleters on the right.
Your activators are the situations, environments, and ways of working that make you lean in. You feel interested, motivated, or energized. Sometimes you get so involved that it barely feels like work at all. Time passes by pretty quickly in these moments and you’re usually in some state of flow. It doesn’t mean the work wasn’t extremely challenging. There is a big difference between good challenging work and mentally exhausting/harmful challenging work.
Look through your career timeline and write down what created those experiences. Your values and what you already know about your current work can help you put words to them, too.
Imagine a job that contained everything in that activators column. It should start to resemble a dream job or a dream environment. Somewhere you’d really find yourself enjoying the work in.
Then build your depleters list. What repeatedly exhausts you, makes you dread the day, or asks you to compromise something important about yourself?
Some entries may connect to a value getting stepped on. Others may describe a process, an interaction, or an environment that consistently drains you. Or point to times you’ve had to compromise on who you are.
Imagine a job made entirely of those things… that is your nightmare working scenario.
What if my two lists are just opposites?
It is easy to write the same list twice.
You might put “my manager gives me autonomy” under activators and “my manager micromanages me” under depleters. Those are essentially the same observation reversed, and don’t really help us here.
For this exercise, I would keep whichever version is strongest for you and remove its opposite from the other column. Using myself as an example, having a micromanager boss is far far far worse than not having a boss that gives me full autonomy. So I’d keep the micromanager boss in the depleter column.
Maybe having freedom over how you work is one of the clearest sources of energy across your career. Keep that as an activator. Or maybe close monitoring is the experience that most consistently drains you. Keep that as a depleter.
Removing the duplicate makes room to name another more distinct pattern that you can move towards (or away from).
How do I use these lists in my current job?
First, look at your role as a whole. Which column does it sit closer to?
Then look at its individual parts. A project might contain several activators while a recurring interaction is a heavy depleter.
From there, I would look at two things:
- Where can I do more of what activates me? Could you spend more time on that type of work, contribute to another project in that way, or work more often with people who bring out that positive energy?
- Where can I put a fence around what depletes me? Could you reduce it, address the underlying problem, ask for help, or get part of it off your plate? Even limiting how much more it takes over your job can matter.
Sometimes you can also bring an activator into a depleting activity. If learning energizes you, for example, you might explore a new way to complete a repetitive task. The task still needs doing, but you have introduced something that gives you a little energy back.
You may not be able to change every part of your job. But you can move from “this job drains me” to a much clearer understanding of what drains you, what brings you to life, and where you have room to make a change.
And the best part of all, when it comes time to eventually find a new job, you have a much fuller picture of the type of environments you want to be drawn to.
