The Five Stages of Professional Development (for both wannabe and actual office escapees!)
Tired of the 9-to-5 grind? Not sure what career path is for you? Looking or real meaning in your professional life? Check out the five stages below for insight and guidance! This guide serves as a nice alternative to the “traditional” career success track. If slaving away 40+ hours a week until you turn 62 doesn’t sound up your alley, you have come to the right place! There is a better way.
Which stage are you in?
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Stage 1 – Learning to Earn
We all start here. From childhood we learn to put our natural talents, strengths and gifts aside for the sake of fitting in, working on what we are NOT good at and forcing ourselves into a box in order to make a living. We strive of financial independence while we are young, trying to break free from our parents, and then eventually graduate from our educational setting of choice hoping that school and our parents have given us some direction. |
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Stage 2 – Working for Others
Once we have figured out what we want to do (roughly) it is time to take our professional lives seriously. We go to work every day of the week, working for someone else who has more professional power than we do. We trade our time for money and are not fully connected with our careers. We do it because we must, and because we need to earn a paycheck. This is the stage that most of us are in, from the coffee shop barista to the middle manager at a software company. Salary is irrelevant because the basic lifestyle is the same. |
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Stage 3 – Self Connection
Here we have decided to do something we love. We are tired of working for someone else and instead we have made the powerful and commanding choice to reconnect with our inner strengths that we lost touch with during Stage 1. While this stage is a process that can occur while still in a previous stage, it is generally a time of self-reflection and self-teaching. People here often need to sacrifice money and comfort for the sake of growth. |
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Stage 4 – Building Your World
At this point we know what we want to do with our lives. While this direction may shift course throughout our lives, once we are here we have no doubts about what we are doing. We know instinctively it is the right path. No longer working for someone else, we have chosen a path that is completely unique and are learning to make a living while doing it. Those in stage 4 have an unusual “profession.” You will not find it in any career guides. It is as unique as one’s fingerprints. |
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Stage 5 – Passionate Living
No longer just building our world, we have fully immersed ourselves in it. People in this stage have completely connected who they truly are and what they do. They are one in the same. Money, prestige, rank, power and career are no longer even relevant. Here, are content to live the lifestyle that fits and suits us. It is a place of ultimate professional fulfillment, and is what we should all strive to achieve if we want to maximize our output into the world. |
All of us are at different points in our professional lives. From the most prestigious CEOs to the most anonymous office employees we all have to earn a living somehow, right? For the longest time you’ve known that working your way up in your field generally comes with a higher salary, more responsibility and potentially more prestige.
You probably feel that the harder you work in your field of choice the closer you are to being able to afford a nice lifestyle, or at least you’ll be able to have people working underneath you instead of the other way around! If only you could get that promotion, or get that perfect job, your life would be much better.
But this line of thinking really has little to do with one’s happiness. Oh sure, the average millionaire is happier than the average poor person, but money and prestige are not what make our souls sing, so to speak. When I really thought about the people I admired when it came to their work I noticed a common thread: They were all passionately making a difference in the world, and they were not “traditionally employed.”
I started thinking about this in terms of success. What is success? Why do so many of us strive to achieve it? When we do achieve it are we fulfilled? I would argue that “success” in the professional world (the traditional definition) does not necessarily fulfill us. We are just socially conditioned to accept it, strive for it, and lose ourselves along the way.
Following these five stages is a much better bet if you truly want to find happiness in your career than the traditional model of “go to the office, work yourself to death, hope for a promotion.”
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