Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever listener mail. I'm your host, Erin Keating. And in these new short weekly episodes, I give you my opinionated and not at all officially qualified feedback about the questions, problems, quandaries, and dilemmas that you have posed to me about love, sex, relationships, career, aging, ambition, divorce, and anything else that's on your mind.
I have a question from Looking For A New Life in New England. She writes:
"I have an advice question for Erin. I know that my job and career are at a dead end, but I don't know what's next. I already followed my dreams, but I have another couple decades of working life ahead of me. Do you have any suggestions for how to dream up what's next?"
Oh, Looking For A New Life in New England, aren't we all in the same boat where career has shifted in our generation to require constant evolution and constant agility and reading the tea leaves of the ways in which work and working lives are changing constantly under our feet. You know, our parents went to college and they studied a thing and then they became that thing and they were that thing and they retired as that thing and that was it.
That was their career. That's what you would call a career. You were a lawyer or a doctor or a real estate developer or an accountant or a plumber or an electrician or you were a teacher. If you were a woman, you were one of like, what, three or four things: you were a teacher, you were a flight attendant--that was the glamorous option, but you had to probably be a size six or less than they were allowed to measure you.
My mother was a bank teller. They let her do that. Really, the options were so limited. And today, sky's the limit, right? And jobs that exist. Today did not exist 15 years ago, 10 years ago, and jobs that will exist 10 years from now don't exist today. So I think you've got to go to the core and the root, which is you, right? You and yourself and your natural talents and abilities and your inclinations and your values. So what comes naturally to you Looking For A New Life in New England? What comes naturally to you? What do you do when no one is paying you to do it? What do you do that is industrious and productive and possibly creative? That you would do for no pay and maybe you already do for no pay?
There's probably a career path, a 20 year path there for you drill down into your values. What we keep hearing over and over again on this podcast is that women who are beginning the back half of their lives start to be driven more consciously by their values. And so if you get to the root of what it is that you care about, you will probably also find a path to meaningful work. So if you care about like I care about personal self expression, so it would probably make sense for me to produce other people's work and help them be self expressed or to teach workshops on helping people write their memoirs or something like that.
Is that a career? I don't know, but maybe there's a teaching component. If you care about social justice, there is certainly work in the non profit world if you care about animals, about environmentalism, about the family, about children. If you care about financial education, I mean, there are so many things that you could potentially care about.
And I think letting your heart and your personal interests guide you, you can't go wrong. You cannot go wrong. I think you can find at least a first foot on the path towards another role. I also think you should ask yourself how much intellectual stimulation do you need at work? What do you need to get out of work? Is it about making a lot of money? Is it about making a subsistence living because you don't need as much materially and you're willing to move somewhere cheaper? Ask yourself, what are the primary things I need out of work?
I need to work with people who I think are talented. I need to be intellectually engaged. I need it not to feel routine. I need projects with a beginning, middle, and end. I think you can find some bits of the contour of the next path by looking at the frame of the job itself. Is it important to you to have flexibility in terms of your time? Or are you willing to go to a place for X number of hours a day, every day? You know, I think one thing that it would be dishonest not to talk about is money, I mean, how much money do you really need? Have you sat down and looked at your budget and how much money you spend? Do you want to live a certain kind of lifestyle? Are you expecting to keep up with the Joneses? Do you have investments? Do you have money in the bank? When does your social security kick in? Can we trust that social security will kick in?
I do not know. But have you done the actual math? Because some people can live on less money more easily than others can, and some people can earn a lot of money more easily than others can. It is not a level playing field. We are not all coming at this idea of career and career reinvention from the same place, right? Some people have worked in retail their whole lives. There is a very defined path in the retail world. Some people have worked in technology or these more agile professions.
You know, if you have a law degree, you can do certain things with it that you can't do those are not roles that you would be eligible for without that. Or people are more incentivized to hire you with a certain kind of educational background and training. So I don't want to make assumptions about where you sit on this educational and socioeconomic spectrum, because those calculations are different for everyone.
When my mom did her nth career reinvention at around 50, she did it in the most practical way I could possibly imagine. And this is simple and straightforward. Go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and find out what are the fastest growing jobs. That is a very straightforward thing anyone can do. When my mother did that 30 years ago to look for her last career, which she had for as long as she wanted it, and as long as she needed it, Occupational Therapist was on that list, very high up. And honestly, Occupational Therapy Assistants is still a role that is very much in demand.
Here are a couple of jobs that I see in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, okay? Wind Turbine Service Technicians, Nurse Practitioners, Data Scientists, Statisticians, Information Security Analysts, Medical and Health Services Managers, Epidemiologists, wonder why we need that, physician assistants, PT assistants, OT assistants, software developers.
This is a list of very practical jobs that the world needs. We need here in America and there is a very wide range of pay for these roles, but depending where you live, they are all potentially decent jobs. Are you willing to get new training or certification? Are you willing to go back to school like my mom did? She needed another degree in order to be an OT.
Do you want to work for yourself or do you want to work for others? Is there a business you've always wanted to start and do you have some runway to grow and build that business? Another thing to look at is, is there a path that others who have had your career path to date have pivoted to? Can you reach out to people that you knew in one chapter of your life and you've seen the pivot that they've made? Can you call them and talk to them about how they did it?
I think you're gonna have a have to do a lot of soul searching. You're going to have to do a lot of journaling. You're going to have to just get every thought that you've ever had about anything you might do to make money and lay it out on the table Looking For A New Life in New England. You say that you already followed your dreams. How did that go? I'm assuming you did it and now it's done and you have to do another thing. Is there something that jumps off from already following your dreams into yet another manifestation of career?
When you look back, the dots will look so connected. I remember being in a career transition and a television producer who I really admired said to me, the next thing will show up, and it will make organic sense in the story of your career, but it's not something that you could ever calculate today. You're going to seem like a genius because you connected these dots, and you found your way from this medium to this medium, or this kind of role to that kind of role. It's going to feel like it was an inevitable continuation of the previous chapter. You just don't know what that's going to look like today.
Your job is to dig deep, to study yourself, your passions, your interests, your talents, the things you do better than other people, the things that come naturally to you, and to take that and push it up against a Venn diagram of what is needed in the marketplace. What you are willing to retrain yourself for, what is needed in your local area, where you want to be, and how you want to live for the next 20 years? How much do you actually need to make? How much do you want to make, how much energy and sweat do you want to put into this next chapter?
It's not going to be easy. None of this stuff is easy. But the only true resource you have in making this calculation is you, my friend. You are the only true resource at the center of this. And you and your innate and essential self is going to be the source of this answer. I wish you so much luck. I challenge you to dig in. You don't have to know the whole story, you just have to get your foot on a new path and the journey will evolve from there. I believe in you. I know you're going to do an amazing job. We all have to figure this out. Let's take a workshop together. We'll do some serious fucking journaling.
Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever Listener Mail. How can you ask a question? I am so glad you asked DM us @hotterthaneverpod on Instagram or leave me a voicemail or text the Hotter Than Ever Hottie Hotline at 323 844 2303. I would love to answer your question in a future episode.
Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Gerard and PodKit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating, with vocals by Issa Fernandez. This has been Listener Mail.
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