Career Refresh Digest #47
Welcome to the latest edition of the Career Refresh Digest.
In this issue, I look at why so many people land in the "functioning but not thriving" middle ground, and how your job title might be playing a bigger role in that than you'd expect.
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WORTH THINKING ABOUT
Functioning isn't the same as thriving
When you think about your current work situation, would you say you're not miserable, but you're not thriving either – that it just doesn't feel as good as it could?
The majority of people who have taken my Career Wellbeing Quiz are feeling the same.
Of the 1000+ people who have completed it, most land in the middle, not at either extreme.
They are functioning but not thriving.
The trouble is, the middle part is most likely to be ignored. Nothing feels obviously wrong, and nothing's urgent enough to force a change.
When nothing's acutely broken enough to force a reckoning, the natural default is to keep going exactly as is, indefinitely, without ever consciously deciding whether this is how you want to feel about your work life.
If you are in the functioning but not thriving middle, it's actually not a safe place to stay.
Just because there is low urgency, doesn't mean there is low cost.
Settling, rather than thriving, means you risk spending years of your life in a situation you might not have if you'd been clear on what you needed to thrive.
So it's worth asking yourself: is staying actually a decision you're making, or just what keeps happening because nothing's forced you to really look at it?
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WORTH REFLECTING ON
When your job becomes who you are
To really thrive, you need to know what you want and need from your work. Thriving happens when a role genuinely fits your values, preferences, strengths and interests.
But for many people, their identity has fused with their job title, and they're performing the role on autopilot without ever really asking whether it's still a good fit.
You can perform the role well, which reads as functioning, without ever actively shaping it around what would make you thrive.
Part of the reason that question doesn't get asked is that answering it requires a sense of yourself that exists separately from the job, something to measure the fit against. When identity and job title have merged, that separate reference point disappears so there's nothing to check the role against.
It is possible to be doing the work, without ever asking: is the job working for you?
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WORTH DOING
Three things that would still be true
If any of this struck a chord, here's a simple way to check.
Write down three things that would still be true about how you work, and what matters to you, even if your job title changed tomorrow. Not skills tied to the role itself, but rather things like how you approach problems, what kind of environment brings out your best work, or what you actually care about achieving.
If that's hard to answer quickly, that's worth noticing too.
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If that exercise was harder than you expected, or it surfaced more questions than answers, a Values Clarity Session is a good next step. It's a single session built around exactly this, getting a clearer picture of what you actually need from your work before deciding what to do about it. Book a Values Clarity Session.
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That's it from me for this fortnight.
– 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.