Your career can have seasons

I had a different plan for today's article. But inspiration comes from the conversations I have, and lately, I have been thinking about something I hear more and more from accomplished, successful women: the decision to slow down and put their personal life ahead of their professional life, often for the first time after decades of career.

It often does not come naturally, and it can still feel strange - even when it is the right decision. I have written before about how life has seasons - different periods with different responsibilities, priorities, and what matters most. But we rarely, if ever, talk about seasons in our careers.

So why don't we? How come that our careers, such a large part of our lives, are expected to stay the same throughout different life seasons? Unaffected, unchanged, and steady?

The all-or-nothing culture

Linear careers - climbing the corporate ladder within one company or industry - became the prevailing expectation in the mid-20th century. And while the world of work has drastically changed over the past 15 years, in many industries this expectation is still alive and strong.

In these industries, it is expected that our jobs stay the same - regardless of what's happening in our lives. Single and in your 20s? 80-hour weeks. Juggling young children in your 30s? Same. Caring for aging parents in your 40s? Same intensity expected. Covid? Just a break with a whole new set of challenges. Health issues, fertility struggles, life crises? The job does not change.

How does that fit with the modern world, with an ever-changing and evolving workplace? The answer is: it mostly does not, but many companies have not yet caught up with it.

And if you are a woman working in a demanding industry? You might be lucky - your company might even offer to freeze your eggs as a benefit! Generous indeed, but it does have a rather selfish side to it: extend the "lifetime" of an employee whose main focus is work. It is how industries with 12+ hour days function. The culture becomes all-or-nothing: you are either in, or you are out. And when life changes and enters another season, especially at the start of the season when everything is still new and lots of adaptation is needed, the all-or-nothing culture on the other side does not exactly help.

This brings me to an important point: what are we optimizing for? Or for whom? Are our lives supposed to be optimized to fit our jobs and the expected way of working? Or should it, ideally, not be the other way around?

Because, as it happens, we do have only one life. There are many jobs, many careers, and many ways to work. Yet most of us do not stop to question whether things might be inverted - skewed toward optimizing life for work, rather than work for life.

I hear this constantly from clients: successful, high-achieving women struggling to do everything, be everything, have everything. Ultimately, it does not work - as it happens, we all have 24 hours in a day. Something has got to give. I always say: as long as it is a conscious, thought-through decision, all is well. The issue is when it is not. In those cases, we tend to keep pushing along until a breaking point happens - in whatever shape or form.

And no, seasons are not just about motherhood (or fatherhood, for that matter). They are also about health, energy levels at different life stages, aging parents, and simply wanting different things, or whatever used to fit before not fitting anymore, for whatever reason.

This might sound dramatic. It is not, though. Because it might be useful to remember: nothing is forever, because life changes, seasons pass, and change.

This is primarily about giving ourselves permission to change and redesign our work in line with our life and its current stage.

The guilt of slowing down

In my experience, high achievers - especially those in more linear careers - feel guilty about slowing down. It feels like defeat, maybe even failure. Even when they are exhausted, even when life demands change, and even when continuing at this pace is clearly unsustainable.

But it is not just guilt. There is also fear - fear of slowing down when you have always kept it at a specific intensity - and when that intensity has become your default, your autopilot. When you have had such an intense career, especially one focused on the climb, there has rarely been time, if any, to stop. To reflect, to ask yourself questions, to examine whether this is right.

And stopping to ask creates ambiguity. Opening one question can open a Pandora's box. Questions you might not want to touch and answers you might not want to hear.

I have even heard the fear expressed this way: "If I question things, will that mean I have gone down the wrong path altogether? Made wrong choices, sacrificed too much? Done it the wrong way? Better not touch the subject - because it might wake up all the demons, and the questions might not stop."

And sometimes it is a journey without return. Because once we start asking these questions – actually stop and question what we are doing and why - it might turn out we are indeed a lot less happy with it all than we have thought, or convinced ourselves and others around us that we are.

And will we cross a point of no return? When will the change eventually have to happen? It can feel like throwing everything away. The climbing, the promotions, all the effort - almost for nothing. The framing becomes zero-sum: stay and keep climbing, or leave entirely. And if you leave... then what? What are the options?

The more linear the career has been, the less obvious the options seem. Strangely enough, sometimes it can even feel like there are no options at all. Especially when there have not been big changes along the way - when it has always been this expectation of upwards ever, backwards never. It can be really scary. "What else can I do?"

The unrealistic expectation of constant climb

We are told we should climb. Get higher. Get promoted. Move analyst to manager to director, or whatever applies. In some industries, this is so emphasized that if we are not following the prescribed path, something must be wrong. We are not performing as expected.

I would like to challenge this by asking: Is it realistic to be constantly climbing, constantly growing, constantly rising?

Let´s look at nature for a comparison. Plants do not grow year-round - they have seasons for growth and seasons for dormancy. Animals do not stay active constantly - they have periods of intense activity and periods of rest, and even hibernation. Trees do not produce fruit every month. Even the sun has cycles. Nothing in nature sustains constant growth. So why do we expect our careers to?

It does not have to always be up, up, and up - actually, it is not really sustainable. So why do we have such a problem with periods of slowing down, even temporarily?

Another, somewhat unexpected parallel comes to mind: financial markets.

This expectation that companies need to exceed earnings every quarter, year after year. Constant growth, constant climbing. And while technology and innovation do enable a lot, there is no silver bullet. Our Earth´s natural resources are limited - yet, there is this pressure on the management of any public company to grow constantly and infinitely. How this has served us, our world, and climate, I will not go into this time, as we are all becoming painfully aware of the answer.

This is unrealistic. Companies cannot grow infinitely. Neither can we work with the same intensity for decades. Yet, we expect that from ourselves - upward trajectory, quarter after quarter, year after year, for 40+ years.

The truth is: there is time to speed up, to give it all. Then there is time to slow down, even if only to an extent, and to optimize for other things. And that does not mean failure or giving up. It is optimizing for our life and building our career around our life - not the other way around.

Giving yourself permission

This article is about examining the whole upward culture - and the fact that it is simply not aligned with the seasons of our life, with how priorities change and how life demands different things at different times.

To adjust and change this - especially in up-or-out industries, and when something feels off - we need to take a macro view of our lives. It means being honest with ourselves about what we want, what we are striving for, and what our priorities are.

If this resonates, take a pen and paper (yes, old-school first - discuss with your AI friend later) and answer these questions:

• Which season of life am I in right now?

• What matters most in this season?

• What would my career need to look like to fit this season?

• What's one thing I could change in the next 3 months?

• What do I actually want? (Not what I should want - what do I want?)

• Ideal scenario: what does life look like now, in 5 years, in 10 years?