Our careers help to create our personal identity, showcase our skills and talents, and help us to make positive contributions to our communities. Find out why it’s not worth it to allow your career to destroy you, and how you can have a successful career and still keep your sanity and health intact.
Our carers can make us or break us. The time, hours, emotional energy, and hope we put into each project we work on can uplift us or tear us down. More than that, our quest for greatness at the job can push us to obsessiveness, make us tolerate abuse, or hold us back from our personal lives, wrecking our relationships. Join SpiritualBlossom to find out why you are more important than your career. Find out what careers are, why we have them, and whether our careers alone define us. Discover what kind of problems we can run into at the hands of our careers, and most importantly, ways to balance our career with maintaining good mental, physical, and emotional health. Our career is a big part of our life, but it’s not our whole life. Read on to find out how to manage yours so it doesn’t destroy you.
What Are Careers?
“ If you want to be successful in this world, you have to follow your passion, not a paycheck.”- Jen Welter
Our career is our chosen profession that we undertake for a long period of time. It's more than just a job. Your career is a combination of a lot of different jobs that you do that contribute to your professional development. Some people call their career their professional calling and other people say it's just what they do. Your skills, reputation, and expertise are built up over time in your career. It doesn't just contribute to your personal development. It contributes to your financial stability and how you build wealth over time.
It also contributes to your sense of personal identity. One of the ways that we define ourselves is by what we do, and that includes what our career entails. When asked, “Who are you?”, a lot of people don't necessarily share what their hobbies or beliefs are. They share what they do in their career. However, it's important to remember that we are not our jobs or careers. We are multifaceted individuals who have a lot of different things in our lives besides just what we do professionally. An identity crisis can occur when you have to change careers or retire. If your career becomes your entire identity and you are stuck at a toxic job, it can be devastating. Find out what to do about a toxic job here: What to Do About a Toxic Job Environment
Why Do We Have Careers?
“ Choose a career you love and you will never have to go to work.”- Denis Waitley
We have careers for different reasons, depending on who we are. Some people have a career to give them a sense of purpose. Having something to look forward to every day and a way to feel like you are giving back to your community can be very important. Some people have their career as a matter of personal pride as they sharpen their skills and improve regularly. They feel very fulfilled by their careers. Other people just have a career for financial stability.
Take a moment to think about careers in another way though. Think about the intricacies of your community and society as a whole. Your career gives you an opportunity to make a positive contribution. It is a way for you to showcase your talent and abilities. It allows you to use these to make a unique contribution. There is no one else who is just like you or can do things exactly the same way that you do them. Your career helps you find your place in your community and helps you to make your community better. One Zodiac sign that is well known for their love of career is Capricorn and you can read about them here: Capricorn Zodiac Traits and Love Compatibility
Does My Career Completely Define Me?
“ Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”- Dolly Parton
Some people completely define themselves by their career and have nothing besides that in their lives. Are you someone who does that? Ask yourself these questions and if you answer yes to them you probably base your whole identity on your career:
1) When you introduce yourself, do you just talk about your career as opposed to talking about personality traits, beliefs, or hobbies?
2) Do you spend almost all of your time focusing on your career either doing the work, preparing to do it, furthering your training, or planning your career?
3) Are the only clothes you own the ones that you wear for your career?
4) Is most if not all of your socialization related to your career?
5) Do you find it difficult if not impossible to step away from your career for very long, even on vacation?
6) Does the thought of losing your career make you feel like you would have nothing left if that happened?
7) Do all of your goals and life center around your career instead of including family, friends, or hobbies?
8) Do you refuse to take vacation time, hate days off, and would rather lose sleep than miss time on your career, and do nothing but focus on your career?
9) Do you spend more time at your career than most of your peers or coworkers?
10) Do you neglect your personal care so that you can spend more time on your career?
If you answered yes to at least half of these questions, your career pretty much defines your whole life. There will be times in your career when you have to spend more hours doing professional things that you would prefer to. However, if you have the capacity to spend less hours, but refuse to, you're making a choice to pretty much make your career your whole life. Some people love their careers so much they don't realize that they've made their career the whole focus. When your career brings you more joy than anything else, you may unconsciously focus on just your career. Especially if you don't have a lot of close personal relationships, focusing on career only can feel quite fulfilling. Heavy focus on career can also be quite an ego boost but it's important to stay humble. Read more about that here: Humbleness - The Art of Defeating Your Ego
What Problems Can Our Careers Cause?
“ Careers are dangerous because people invest so much of themselves into their careers that they establish an identity and social status based upon where they work and what they do for a living.”- Joshua Fields Millburn
How could something as fulfilling as a great career cause problems? If it eats up too much of your time and you don't balance it with spending time doing other things, it will start to chip away at your life. Physically your health could suffer for various reasons. Your relationships will suffer if you're not spending enough time with the people that you love. Psychologically, you will become overwhelmed, under rested, and you will start performing poorly.
Physical Problems
When you focus too heavily on your career, your health can suffer. One of the number one problems that you will find yourself dealing with is over-focus on your career and not enough focus on eating right. You may find yourself eating out of boxes, cans, bags, vending machines, and fast food drive throughs. You aren't thinking about getting the right amount of nutrition or eating foods that support heart health, let alone drinking enough water. If your career does not have to have a focus on physical activity, you can become seriously out of shape if you don't exercise. If you work long hours and neglect sleep, sleep deprivation can cause memory problems, cardiac issues, and it can even make your appearance decline.
Relationship Problems
Your relationships will suffer if you focus too heavily on your career. Make sure to take the time out to spend with the people who you love. You might not have any relationships at all outside of your career if you are over focused. You will miss birthdays, vacations, anniversaries, festivals and other events where memories are made, including basic day-to-day bonding with people. If you go too long without spending time with the people who you love, your relationships can fade away to nothing. Relationships are very important to Geminis and you can read about that Zodiac sign here: Gemini Zodiac Traits and Love Compatibility
Psychological Problems
Over-focus on your career or any one thing is not good for your brain, believe it or not. Some people believe that the more they think about one thing the more they will excel at it, but your mind needs variety. You can also become so used to doing things one way in your career if you're over-focusing, that you won't allow yourself the ability to grow, change, and move forward with new times. Mentally you can become stagnant, or even bored if you over-focus on your career. You can become overwhelmed if you overwork yourself, and your performance capabilities will drop.
Balancing Career with a Healthy Life
“ Don’t confuse having a career with having a life.”- Hillary Clinton
How do you balance your career with the rest of your life in such a way that you are devoting plenty of time to your career, but not too much? There are ten things that you can do to ensure that you balance your career with the rest of your life. Read on to find out how to use them to balance your career with the rest of your life.
Take Time Off
When you're passionate about your career, the idea of stepping away even for a few hours might seem horrible. Even just taking one day off a week from your career and focusing on other things instead will help your mind to become fresh so you can refocus when you return. Time off allows you to go to other places, do other things, and enjoy all of the things that life has to offer.
Learn Something Else
The human mind was not designed to focus on one thing forever. That's why it's important to expand your mind and learn new things often. Allow yourself to take a class, go on a trip somewhere you never went before, or even learn a new language. Libras love to learn, and you can read about that Zodiac sign here: Libra Traits and Love Compatibility
Schedule Time for Fun
If you're like some of us, you love your career and you have a lot of fun doing it. That's not the only fun thing in life there is though. Before you had this career, what kind of things did you love doing best? Go do those things.
Include Loved Ones
While you're at it, take the people you love along and make some great memories having fun together. There may come a time in your life when you don't have your career anymore, or you need help with something. It's the people who love you that will come through for you and who share life with you. Don't forget to include them in your life. Read about the love of friends here: All About the Love of Friends
You Are Replacable
Never assume that you are so important that you can't be replaced, because you can. If you work yourself to death trying to climb higher and higher to career success, the day that you die they will be looking for your replacement. The people who cannot replace you are your friends and family, so remember that.
Allow New Opportunities
One of the biggest mistakes that we make in our careers is we do the same things over and over again. Allow new opportunities. Take new classes, learn a new skill within your own career. Try a new way of doing things. A new opportunity can further you in your career in ways that repeating the same things over and over again never will.
Look at The Big Picture
The big picture in life is your whole life, not just one aspect of it. Your career may provide a lot of fulfillment for you, but it's only a part of your life. Your hobbies, relationships, self growth, and connection with the earth, your pets, and your future are all a part of your life. Don't forget those things while you're focusing on your career.
Mind Your Health
While you're on the quest for greatness in your career, do not, under any circumstances, neglect your health. Get enough sleep. Take care of your hygiene. Drink plenty of water. Eat healthy. Exercise. Also don't forget to step out from your career and to nature, rejuvenating your heart, mind, and soul surrounded by the earth.
Feed Your Soul
While you are nurturing your body, don't forget to nurture your spirituality. Meditate, attend worship services, read scriptures, think about what you believe the meaning of life is, and find ways to give back. Our physical bodies are only part of who we are. Our spiritual bodies are just as important.
Pass the Torch
The people who accomplish the most in their careers know a secret. Mentoring, delegating, and preparing tomorrow's leaders and their career field is in some ways more important than excelling in their own personal career. Make sure that you take the time to prepare the next generation of people in your career so that they, too, can excel.
Your career helps you find your place in your community, helps establish your personal sense of identity, and helps you with your personal wealth. Your whole life that you live with the people that you love is just as important as your career. Remember, you are replaceable in your career, but there is no replacement for you in the lives of the people who love you.
Would you like some tips for work life balance? Reach out to a psychic for some great advice about that today.
About the Author: Lady Saoirse has studied magic and lore for most of her life but started walking her own Magical Path after being spiritually reborn in the desert. Today she is a High Priestess for The Temple of the Goddess, she is a psychic advisor and spiritual counselor, she shares her gifts as a Psychic and Content Writer for Mysticsense and SpiritualBlossom, and she writes for PaganPages.Org emag.
