What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Reflecting on careers as a lifelong journey

As a child, I remember thinking that adults were all a bit obsessed with asking the question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Apparently, for a long time my answer was ‘I want to be a ballerina because I like ballerina-ing’. My brother's answer was that he wanted to be a lion. I can’t stress enough how bad I was at ballet. Honestly, my brother probably had a better chance of achieving his dreams. I really don’t remember enjoying it either, so it wasn’t a case of following my passion and hoping for improvement. Perhaps I just liked the shoes and wanted an easy response to a regularly asked question that I had no real idea of how to answer. 

I’d say that set the tone for how I felt about the idea of choosing a career for the next decade or so.  A slightly panicked shrug and an “I don’t know, please don’t ask me that” expression.  The question would sometimes come up at school and I remember there being different psychometrics that we would complete in order to give us a glimpse into our future.  One of my friends knew she definitely wanted to be a writer when she was older and I distinctly remember her dismay when the top prediction from one survey was that she would become an embalmer, which seemed oddly specific.  I didn’t hold those surveys in particularly high regard after that, but still hung on to their outputs in the hope that they would give me some idea as to what I wanted to do. Perhaps I wanted to be an embalmer too? An estate agent? An engineer?

I couldn’t understand how some of my friends had such conviction when they talked about their future. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in anything, but the possibilities just seemed endless.  How was a girl to choose? 

The first big pressure point I felt about picking a career definitely came when it was time to leave school and decide what to do.  I ordered every prospectus from every university, which you may be surprised to know didn’t help me very much in narrowing down my search.  My mum caught me looking at a jewelry making course in London and a winemakers course in Sussex and clearly felt like she needed to stage an intervention.  ‘What do you actually enjoy doing?’ she asked, which is a difficult question for an 18 year old with no real work experience to answer. I finally concluded that the thing I enjoyed learning about the most was psychology.  So I decided to study that and take the big idea of a future career one (enjoyable) step at a time.  Alarmingly simple in the end, although I was somewhat disappointed that my sophisticated appreciation of whatever red wine the corner shop had on offer that week would not be part of my formal education.

Once I left university the question of careers inevitably came up again. Swiftly side stepping the need for an immediate decision I decided to go traveling. However, in order to do that I needed to save money and so I got a job in a call center selling home insurance to the over 50s. This job taught me an important career lesson:

Learning what you don’t like doing is just as important as understanding what you love.

I lost count of the number of times I was hauled into the manager’s office to listen back to one of my calls, where I could hear myself having a lovely chat with Doris about what type of lock she had on her door. However, when it came to converting that conversation into a sale, I instead told her that of course it was fine for her to call me back once she had checked the price at a few other places and that absolutely she would still get her free pen for the quote. I was, objectively, a terrible employee with terrible conversion rates but it made me realize how much of a skill being a good salesperson is and how much that skill was not mine to hone.  You can’t be good at everything.  

Eventually, after I’d spent as much time living out of a backpack as was feasibly possible (given the distinct lack of bonuses earned from my sales job) I got a role that was related to education.  With two teachers as parents, the apple wasn’t exactly hurling itself far from the tree, but it was a start.  From there, I realized that I was actually enjoying the business side of things more than I had expected to and I was passionate about employee development.  This realization led me, through some slightly more specific research than before, to pursue a Master’s in Occupational Psychology.  I can now confidently say that this was where I realized that I had finally found what I wanted to do. 

I felt like I’d kept following my interests for long enough that I had eventually got specific enough to specialize in a particular area.  What a rush!         

But of course, building a career isn’t static.  Even after an ‘aha’ moment, change is pretty much a constant.  At first I thought that joining a consultancy was the only way to work as a business psychologist, so I did that for a while, but I then experienced working in-house for companies, which I loved.  Now, I appear to have started my own business.  If you’d have told the girl at school, frantically searching through ‘job titles beginning with E’ that she would one day start her own business she would have barely glanced up from her research, such would have been her disbelief. 

I think what I’ve learnt, from reflecting on my career so far, is that if you have a plan - that’s great.  Many of my friends knew what they wanted to do when they were 14 - and they’re doing that now.  However, if you don’t have a plan, that’s also ok.  Not knowing can feel scary, because your career is so linked to your identity and also your ability to earn money - and feeling like you’re in the wrong field can make you feel trapped. 

However, I made more positive strides in my career path when I made decisions from a point of curiosity and interest, than from fear. 

It’s a big mind-set shift, but I now see a career as something that’s ever adapting, which is something I wish I could have told my younger self as she put so much pressure on making the right decision at such an early age. “You’ll figure it out”, I’d reassure her. “But…you might want to put that tutu down and instead help your brother think about what he might like to do if the whole lion thing doesn’t work out”.

If you're someone who is considering a career change or if you're wanting to build confidence in the next steps in your career, check out how Together We work with individuals like you.

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