My Approach to Building a Career You Actually Like

I’m writing this to you at the end of a long day… of career and business ownership, first time motherhood to a 5-month-old, my newfound addiction to Mahjong, laundry, keeping a healthy plant-based diet while meeting the caloric needs of nursing a baby full-time, maintaining a healthy marriage, prepping to celebrate for my husband’s first-ever father’s day, and everything in between!

But what I love so much about the list I just rattled off is this one thing:

I chose every single bit of it.

• There’s no boss calling me at 9 p.m. asking me to review a deck before tomorrow’s board meeting.

• No 6 a.m. alarm so I can sit in traffic on the way to the office.

• No pumping schedule built around daycare drop-off.

Just a slower, simpler pace of working, living, and mothering on my own terms.

I was chatting about this over brunch with a friend who also left her soul-sucking job and rebuilt her career around the life she actually wanted.

We couldn’t stop talking about how different everything feels when your work fits your life, instead of the other way around.

That feeling isn’t luck. It’s design.

And it starts with one deceptively simple question that most people never actually sit down and answer: what do I want to do next?

The biggest lie we’ve been told as a society is that in order to be satisfied in your career, “you have to follow your passion”.

I haaaate when people suggest this because instead of helping you answer the burning question of what you want to do next, it actually creates MORE anxiety and MORE stuckness.

Because now you don’t just have to figure out what you want to do professionally… but you also have to discover your entire life’s passion?

Like no thanks, I think I’ll just stay at my job a bit longer…

So if I’m not going to tell you to find your passion, how do you figure out what you want to do next?

Here’s the good news: there’s no pressure to figure out your long-term passion and purpose, you just have to take the next right step.

And when I think about taking the next right step, this is what I picture inside of MY brain:

I’m walking down a super dark tunnel, and when I look behind me, the path is lit, but when I look ahead of me, it’s complete darkness.

That’s my life.

Everything I’ve walked so far? It’s lit up. I was there, and looking back, I can see it.

But the path ahead of me?

I’m building it right now. It’s still cloaked in darkness. There are unlimited possibilities of how it’s all going to go (that’s the best and worst part 🤪).

I’m not a fortune teller, and you aren’t either, but in our careers we try to be.

I think we get even more stressed and stuck when we try to see the ending before we’ve walked the current path.

So let this be your reminder today: you don’t need to know how this part of the tunnel looks from 50 yards ahead. You just have to take the next right step… and as you do that, the light above your head will switch on.

Careers are lifelong journeys, and all you have to do today to build a career you actually like is find the next right step.

So here’s the actual thing I do, and it’s almost stupidly simple: I get out a piece of paper and make a more/less list.

I start by listing out every single thing I’m doing in my current career (and the lifestyle components related to my work).

For me, today, it looks something like this:

• Filming content

• Posting content

• Writing emails

• Building courses

• 1:1 coaching

• Writing Substacks

• Maintaining my website

• Flexible lifestyle

• Remote capability

• Ability to travel

• Can make my own hours

• etc. etc. etc.

THENNN, I sort them through the frame of, “If I could build my dream job, what would I do more of? What would I do less of?”

And I just brain dump.

The parts of a job that light me up go on one side, and the parts that drain me go on the other.

MORE:

• Writing Substacks

• Writing emails

• Building courses

• 1:1 coaching

• Filming content

• Posting content

• Flexible lifestyle

• Remote capability

• Ability to travel

• Can make my own hours

LESS:

• Maintaining my website (because let’s be honest I’m soooo NOT in IT)

• etc etc etc

There’s no filtering, no trying to sound impressive about it, and no sorting through a million job descriptions to find the exact right title for me.

My entire career philosophy is just that every job you take should include MORE of what you love doing and LESS of what you hate doing.

Eventually as you progress through your career, your job becomes your dream job… because you’ve eliminated the majority of what you hate.

It’s pretty simple if you think about it. And the best part is that it’s SUPER actionable and realistic.

Because a good career move is rarely a dramatic plot twist.

It’s usually just finding the next job with more of my “more” and less of my “less.” That’s the whole strategy.

If you land in that job and outgrow it within a year, you just do this exercise again.

What do I love here? What am I hating?

Then you start to job search again.

It’s not permanent and it doesn’t involve discovering some hidden passion.

It’s literally just giving yourself enough clarity and direction to move forward with very low stakes… and the list guides the path.

But the key is that once you’ve built this list, you have to do two things with it:

1. Use it to identify roles that fit (either through having targeted networking conversations or doing an automated job search)

2. Communicate in your elevator pitch and job interviews why this is the next right step

If you’re looking for guidance on HOW to do those things, you can find it here.

ALSOO if this resonated, lemme know in the comments: ⤵️ and if it unlocked more questions than answers (career stuff tends to do that), drop those too! I read every single one, and your questions literally turn into my future emails. 🤓