Hi, and welcome back to the Awfully Quiet Podcast. This is episode 99, and I know. Really well that nobody cares about it being episode 99 more than I do. But there is something about approaching a hundred episodes that makes me feel proud of having stuck to it, of having done this consistently for the past two years and in, you know, the past couple of weeks and months there have been so many new listeners to this show that.

I also feel really proud of the community we're building, of the people who are tuning in every week of, you know, some of the feedback that I get, some of the messages I get, and I wanna say, genuinely think so. And I wanna say genuinely thank you for being here with me and for, well, I don't wanna say letting me do this because.

I don't financially benefit from running this show. I mean, we can all be honest about that, but there is something about this topic of, you know, being awfully quiet in the workplace that. I feel like I could go on and on about, and the fact that in two years I have never had to repurpose an old episode or rerun an old episode or ever be in trouble for not knowing what to talk about is testament to the fact that we are really onto something here.

And I am not in the far from millions of downloads. It's, it's not a massive show. And I've not seen exponential growth of this on, on this show. But I have seen steady growth. I have seen slow growth. I almost wanna say quiet growth. But, yeah. So this is not to say that, I wanna just say thank you. For being here with me and for tuning into this exact episode, episode 99, I, I thought I wanna spend on talking about career fulfillment because I do tend to speak about fulfillment a lot on this show because it is a part of the reason why I feel so passionate about.

Talking about careers, I always come from a position of we're all quiet, introspective introverts who don't wanna go about our careers in a loud, conventional way, but at the end of the day, what we want. It's to feel fulfilled. We want our work to matter to us. We don't just wanna sit there at a nine to five.

We don't just wanna, you know, work for the sake of earning money. I don't think that you would be here for that and you would be listening to a career podcast. And so I wanna unpack a little bit what career fulfillment really is and how it changed over time. What's really behind it. I do have a little bit of an aha moment at the end for you where I feel like I kind of cracked the code on career fulfillment.

This is not clickbait, this is not keeping you on for the sake of listening through a whole episode, but I do just wanna say I'm going somewhere with this, so bear with me. Now when I think about career fulfillment, early in into my career, what career success looked like for me was a corporate career in brand management and was a corporate track record to become, you know, a brand leader one day to, you know, yeah, essentially be a senior leader at a big CPG company working on iconic global brands.

That is what I always strive for. Fresh out of university. And so that is what I pursued. But then towards the end of my twenties, well onto that track, I realized there was a sudden shift in what career success can feel like, or you know, the potential out there in the search of social media and then online influencers.

And then I perceived so many influencers online. Who would suddenly work with these brands? I aspire to being a brand manager of in a capacity. That I had never thought possible, and you will have seen this too, right? when influencers first started to work with big, big brands, it feels like, you know, almost like they broke through this whole sentiment of, you know, you need to apply for a big company.

You need to work your way up. Then when you become a brand manager or a brand consultant or you in any capacity, you work on a big brand, then you finally have something to say. But suddenly there were these people way younger than me at the time, who had garnered a huge following online, who had built massive reach, and suddenly they worked with these brands.

In a way that I never thought possible, they would collaborate with these brands. They would affect change at these brands. They would have creative. Power over what something was going to look like, what a certain product was going to look like. They earned a lot more money than I did, working for these brands as a brand manager.

And so, and so, I thought to myself, what is happening here? I always thought that, you know, the holy grail of cracking, you know, of a, of career success would look like this certain way. And now there are all these people who just didn't go the traditional route. Now it feels like they won. And it wasn't that I wanted to become a content creator or an influencer, but something about this felt off to me.

And something about this felt to me like I was no longer succeeding. I no longer felt fulfilled because there were all these other people who would felt to me like they were smarter than me. They went against the grain and they benefited from that. A couple years thereafter, I felt like. I was really pulled into the whole online business owner, world entrepreneurs and perceiving a lot of people, again, my age or younger, who had built their own businesses, who based on their social media following their reach and their ability to, to collaborate with big brands, then went on to create their own brands, their own, you know, personal brands or, or businesses, frankly.

And then. I had these massive businesses to run and, and teams to work for them. And, honestly, again, massive success. And I was extremely jealous of that. Like extremely pulled into this world of wow, you know, look at them. They didn't think in their twenties that they had to work for a big global brand in order to be something they didn't.

They worked through and passed all the obviously negative sentiment at the beginning of when we saw influences rise. There was a lot of negative sentiment around that too, but they worked through that. And I am not under any illusion to think that, you know, being an influencer, creating content, working with brands is easy.

I do believe it is hard work. I do believe that they put a lot of effort in and the ones who did become so big that they ended up building their own brands, kudos to them because I don't, I don't put that off as the easy path. I think that that's also, that there is a lot of effort behind that. So I'm not, it's not to say that that was an easy path, but again, I was quite, I was jealous of the fact that they went for that, that they gave themselves permission, that they didn't wait for any corporation to give them permission or, you know, give them recognition or.

Allow them to do that in any way. Whereas me, again, still as a brand manager in the corporate world, yes you do get more responsibility with every move that you make, but never do the same effect. And again, those people were, more often than not, they were younger than me and it was crazy to me the level of success they had.

Now, again, pulling this back to. What I perceive to be career fulfillment and successful career. So it went on from building a corporate career to then, you know, be becoming somebody who could, you know, reach many people online and collaborate and work partner with great brands to building their own brands online and their own businesses.

And so this is when I realized. The goalposts always kept moving. There was always something else that I sort of aspire or strive for or was jealous of. And I know that whenever I feel jealous or triggered by something, it means that there's something there that I want for myself, and it feels like there's something there that I feel like success could look like for me, and it's something that I, even if subconsciously I strive for.

But then recently what I noticed is. Conversations on, well on the internet and the sentiment, sort of shifting people going back to their corporate careers influences, going back to their corporate careers, privacy becoming more important. People craving not being on all the time, not reporting to brands, not, you know, creating content three, five times until the brand approves of it and you're ready to post it.

entrepreneurs going back to employment because their businesses failed, or, you know, something didn't work out for them. And so that's when I thought to myself, wait, this feels like we're going back and forth. Like, I don't know anymore what to strive for because frankly, all throughout this transition and these various different things coming up.

There was always a, part of me that also felt fulfilled in my corporate career. There is a part of me that feels like this is just right for me. I do a great job. I get recognition for it. I grow, I develop, I work alongside great people, great minds. I work on brilliant campaigns. I have massive opportunities.

I don't wanna spoil that. So I, to a certain extent, I have always. Loved and thrived in my career. There has just always also been a part of me that felt like I wanted something else more. More freedom of creativity, more power and more say more of something that's me, which is why I started building the subtle series and this podcast, and.

So it scratches some of that edge. But, this back and forth just had me, you know, thought, think of it as like career fulfillment is not just one thing, and career fulfillment is also not something that you achieve at one point in your career, and then it's done. Career fulfillment is not a constant. It is something that we have to work on consistently, is something that changes like the same career dream you have in your early twenties is not the career dream or the version of career success you have at the end of your twenties into your thirties, probably not into your forties.

I cannot really judge that yet, but it's what I imagine. Will happen. There are, we go through different seasons and the world goes through different seasons. Right? what I've just described is almost like, you know, two decades and then things happening externally that also affect some of these, versions of success like COVID happened in 2020, and that is also when a lot of online businesses came about, when a lot of coaches opened.

Online services when you know, influencers had a huge search. So it's these things that happen externally and internally within the seasons of our lives that dictate what career fulfillment and what success looks like. It is not always the same, and it is very unlikely that the same job, the same trajectory, the same career.

Is going to feel fulfilling forever. And that had me think about the one skill that we all need to drive career fulfillment in the long term. And the one thing that we always need is this ability to accept change, to sit in discomfort, to make tough decisions, to pivot. Being flexible enough not to be just slotted into a career or a job because our lifestyle depends on it.

That is a lot of what I'm perceiving at the moment too, is like, you know, a lot of people around me, 10, 15 years into their careers and into their current jobs. Obviously you have adjusted to a certain kind of lifestyle that comes with this job, that comes with this career. And as great as that can feel, it can also feel limiting, right?

Like people often talk about the golden handcuffs. If you've worked your way up in a certain career, in a certain role, you have built , that lifestyle around you, that, that is dependent on you keeping that role, keeping that job, or keeping that level of, of a salary, right? And that can feel really, really limiting.

And this is why a lot of us feel stuck. And so I believe that career fulfillment really is the ability to accept that things have to change and being open to it and, and not making ourselves dependent on a certain role, on a certain salary, on a certain, type of work. And being open to accepting and tuning into ourselves long enough to understand whether something is still for us.

Or not, and that can be a very uncomfortable thing to do, like accepting that you wanna make a change, that you wanna make a pivot. But at the end of the day, I think that this is what takes us from feeling stuck, from feeling like we're chasing something that, you know, may or may not be for us to really being in control to really being able to.

To be flexible enough to adjust the sales to, to a new direction. Career fulfillment is a set of skills, you know, you can rely on and transfer. To whatever comes next. It's almost like that self-trust, that trust in yourself. You know, you've made it this far. You have built experience, you have built skills.

Those skills are not gonna go away. You can rely on what you've built here. You can rely on yourself, on your approach, on your personality, on your traits. Whatever makes up your human, like your personal brand, you've built that up until now. You can take that into any other direction you wanna go and apply that.

And it's that trust in yourself that is always going to make you feel at ease. That is going to make you feel in control even though the context around you changes. And I feel like that is the skill that we all need. That is something that's going to take us into the next, in, almost like into the future of work.

'cause frankly, I don't believe that we're always just going to be doing one thing, I think alongside my corporate career in the future. I would love to keep an element of it, but I would love to do other things as well. I would love to run this podcast, make this podcast. A bigger show in the future. there are so many different things that I would like to do alongside my corporate career that I feel like I need to give myself permission to.

And collectively, we might need to accept that we're not just in one position, at the, at the same time, but that there are, you know, multihyphenate careers that we can pursue. It's not just always one thing. Allowing ourself that flexibility and that space and not slotting into a certain expectation that an earlier version of us had that, you know, our, you know, early twenties version had about our careers.

It's absolutely okay for career ambitions to change. And it's also okay to sometimes feel a little jealous and sometimes feel a little pull. Even though there are things out there that are trendy and that they are going, you know, that are in sometimes on trend and then going out of trend again, I think it's being able to be close enough with yourself to decide whether something is for you or not.

Like I mentioned this whole thing about. Influencers, would I have thrived as a full-time influencer? Likely no.would I have thrived if I had quit my job and then pursued an online business? Maybe also not. So I have always stayed really close to my inner knowing and deciding the next step, and so I ended up with this weird construct of doing both, which, you know, it may or may not be right for me in the long term.

I, time will only be able to tell, but. That's the skill, that's the underlying skill that sets us up for life. The ability to tune into ourselves, to know what we want. To be brave enough to sit in the discomfort when we realize what we're currently doing is likely not the right thing for us, and then to open up our minds to be able to accept that career fulfillment means change.

It's going to be different today than it's going to look like in five years. And that is how it is. That's how it, it's always been. And it continues to stay that way. And knowing and trusting yourself, being, you know, having that courage and confidence in yourself, the skills that you have, whatever brought you here, is also going to bring you wherever you're going next.

That is something that I want to leave you with an episode 99 of the Awfully Quiet Podcast. There is so many more places I wanna go with this podcast and so many new things that I have in the making for you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you take something away from it that. Made sense for you that it clicked for you.

It certainly felt like it did for me, so I'm hoping that I could transport that and convey that for you today. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. I love that you're listening to this, and if you ever wanna say hi, DM me at Awfully Quiet podcast. I would love to hear from you. Thank you very much and see you next week.