Who Chose Your Career Path For You?

When I was a kid the high school senior prom ended at midnight or one a.m., and after that a few hundred high schoolers were set loose to wreak havoc. Somebody came up with the great idea of organizing an all-night After Prom event where the kids can have fun with a bit of adult supervision and no alcohol, or at least none that is served on the premises.
The After Prom event in our town takes place at the Rec Center, and one year I volunteered to help out there.
I was assigned to the room where the kid lined up to play a game of chance. They could win tickets that were redeemable for prizes. My fellow volunteer was another mom of a graduating high school senior, like me.
“What will your child do after high school?” I asked her.
“She’s going to college,” said the mom. “I picked her major. She’s too young to make a decision like that.”
“How does she feel about it?” I asked.
“She’s not happy,” said the mom, “but I’m paying for the degree, so she’ll have to deal with it. I know what’s best for her. I’m not one of these moms who says ‘Follow your passion!’ She needs a steady career field, and I picked one for her.”
God put me here in this room, I thought, so that I could hear the mom blithely spout her nonsense and practice keeping my mouth shut. It was a long night.
A lot of parents feel the same way the After Prom volunteer mom felt. They pick their kids’ college majors and their career paths for them. Maybe their parents did the same thing. Who chose your career path for you? Was it your parents, a guidance counselor in high school or a campus recruiter who gave you your first job?
Maybe it was you. Maybe you knew from an early age what you wanted to be when you grew up. Some people do — most people don’t. They have to find their perfect career, step by step. It can take years. That’s okay! The path is the point — not the destination.
Whoever chose your career path back when, you choose it again every day when you go to work. You can’t say “Well, I’m in this career now, and it would be hard to change paths, so I’ll guess I’ll stick with it” and convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing when your body knows you’re not. Now that career paths are fluid and intertwining, we can’t use the excuse “It’s too late to change careers!” any more.
It’s never too late, and if you don’t love your work, your body will let you know it. You’ll get sick. It happened to me. I landed in the hospital at age 39 — way too young to have health problems brought on by stress. That being said, I’m grateful to my body for speaking up. I could have stayed in the wrong job for years otherwise!
You own your body and your mind. When you stick with the wrong thing just because change is hard — whether the wrong thing is the wrong boss, the wrong house, the wrong company or the wrong significant other — the nudges from the universe will start small and get bigger.
The knocks on the door will get louder. Eventually the job you  never liked may disappear. You may get the rug pulled out from under you. You’ll say “That was surprising!” when it happens, but six months later you’ll say “I had a feeling things were going to change.”
We always have an inkling. We are animals, after all. We evolved on this planet. Even when we’re not conscious of it, we are reading the landscape.
In our career coaching firm we hear from fifty-year-olds every day. They say “I’ve been in my career for twenty-five years, and I never liked it.” They get to the point where they realize that it’s now or never. They can invest more precious years doing something they don’t care about, or stop the train and figure out what they do care about.

You get to choose your career path and you also must choose. It’s your life, your path and your career. Who cares what your guidance counselor told you years ago or what your mom always wanted you to be? Your plan for yourself trumps anybody else’s plans for you, including your spouse.

You can only deny Mother Nature for so long. Why not take a step back and decide how you want to spend the rest of your life, rather than letting long-ago decisions or twists of fate make that determination for you?