WORTH.

I very recently met a young woman at a social gathering.  She was beautiful and from what I could understand extremely intelligent. She had multiple undergrads and Masters degrees, and all of these in either financial management and or computer science.  She was a warm caring extrovert, clearly good with people.   She enjoyed being client facing and imagined herself in more of a Marketing/Accounts Manager position than a finance role.  I was thus not surprised to find out how unhappy she was, as a person, in her current business analytics role. 

We ended up chatting about careers and how we sometimes find ourselves in certain professions and following certain career paths even if we are insanely unhappy, unfulfilled and demotivated.

She stayed in her current role, irrespective of her unhappiness because she admitted that people don’t take you seriously if you’re not in an analytical/ managerial role. 

It’s almost like going down a rabbit hole, by the time you realise you don’t like the profession you’ve chosen it’s kind of too late to study anything else and reroute, so you just keep on moving, whether you like it or not

You just keep on digging.

It’s always been so sad to me, how one’s profession shapes you.  How it becomes so all consuming that it becomes the only measurement of worth and value.   We are so young when we embark on the career journey, and we allow people and the world to mold us to shape us according to our talents and gifts and not according to what makes us happy.  What makes us tick.

But then again, whom of us really know who we are at eighteen.  So yes, we follow in the footsteps of our Fathers and Mothers.  We shape our life according to personality and psychometric tests and we embark on journeys that later in our life suffocates us. 

Pulls the life out of us.

I’ve always struggled with the career path I’ve chosen.  Its not one of the fancy big professions out there and yes, the remuneration certainly testifies to that.  I’ve always felt inferior compared to most of our friends and I struggle to believe that anybody takes me seriously. 

Believe me nobody even looks twice at you if you arrive at a function and your answer to the “what do you do for a living?” question is not

“I am a CA/accountant”

“I am a doctor”

“I am a lawyer”

“I am an engineer”

“I am an actuary”

No corporate takes you seriously, they don’t consider you and they certainly don’t rate you very high. 

I’ve always struggled to make that shift.  To feel valuable and worthy irrespective of the career I’ve chosen. 

How is it that the world and individuals can sometimes make us feel so worthless and not enough.  How is it that a career can take so much space that it eventually blinds you and strangles the talented, worthy and spectacular individual you are. 

How is it that our careers become who we are, when inside of us we have so much more to give.

So much more substance.

But I’ve realised that no external factor will ever make you feel worthy.  No profession will ever make you feel enough.  It might give you a feeling of achievement and if you enjoy what you do, fulfillment.  But never worth.

We allow external factors to suffocate our worth.

We allow that.

Worth comes from you.  It grows and forms inside of you and its only you that can make yourself feel worthy.

Worth gets planted inside your heart, your soul.  And it grows and manifest only if given water and nutrients, BY YOU. 

BY YOU.