Career Refresh Digest #34
Welcome to the latest edition of the Career Refresh Digest.
Something I see regularly with clients is that the criteria they're using to evaluate their next career move were formed at a different stage of their life – sometimes years earlier.
They feel current because they're familiar. But familiar and current aren't the same thing.
This edition looks at what happens when the brief you're working from no longer reflects who you are now.
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WORTH THINKING ABOUT
The criteria you didn't know you were using
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
This idea is widely attributed to Carl Jung – and whether or not the exact wording is his, it captures something that sits at the heart of this kind of work.
Career criteria form in context. They're built from specific experiences – a role that went wrong, a period that demanded something particular, a version of success that made sense at the time. The problem isn't that they were wrong. It's that they were right once, and haven't been examined since.
The tricky part is that outdated criteria don't feel outdated. They feel like sound judgement – because they were. They don't announce themselves as obsolete. They just keep doing their job, long after the circumstances that shaped them have changed.
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WORTH REFLECTING ON
Whose brief are you working from?
It helps to ask: who were you when you last updated your criteria?
Not just what you were looking for, but what your life actually required at that point. What you'd learned from the roles you'd had. What felt non-negotiable – and why.
Those reference points made sense then. But you've accumulated more experience since. Your circumstances have shifted. Your sense of what constitutes a good fit has likely evolved, even if your stated criteria haven't.
One of the things clients often tell me, months after we've worked together, is that they ended up in a role they never would have considered before – and that it turned out to be exactly right. The opportunity had been available. The criteria hadn't caught up yet.
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WORTH DOING
Check when your criteria were last updated
Write down the three conditions you currently use to evaluate whether a role is worth pursuing. Then note, roughly, when each one was formed and what was happening in your life at the time.
The question to ask is whether they reflect who you are now, or who you needed to be at an earlier stage.
If most of them trace back to a previous chapter, that's worth knowing before you apply for anything else.
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f you suspect your career criteria haven't kept pace with where you actually are now, a 15-minute conversation is a good place to start. Book a time here.
– Lucy
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ABOUT THE CAREER REFRESH DIGEST
The Career Refresh Digest is a fortnightly newsletter for mid-career professionals who feel stuck or out of step with their work. Each issue shares practical insights and tools to help you reset direction, make clearer decisions, and reshape your work to better fit your life – drawing on recommendations, research, and insights from client work.