Using Career Ambiguity For Your Liberation

Becoming free from the experience of trying to figure it out

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I’m around a lot of people whose biggest challenge in life seems to be finding “their next thing” in their career. 

I know this experience intimately.  

For most of my career, every few years as soon as whatever I was doing was no longer filling my cup this ambient worry would start to surface…

What if I never find the thing I am supposed to be doing?

What if I never “make the most of myself” and squander this whole life thing?

Social gatherings and holiday parties would be soured when I hadn’t found my thing.

I now see how I’d unconsciously protect myself by strategically steering the conversation away from what was going on professionally.

Each time someone would ask me what I’m up to and I’d respond with a half-hearted answer, it’d feel like a little part of me died inside.

Of course, I was good at putting on a good poker face and remaining upbeat externally. No one really knew that I was in pain in my inner space.

I’ve done a lot of work here over the past 5 years and no longer feel at the whim of the inner roller coaster of career ambiguity. This post outlines a few of the key concepts and practices that have been most helpful to me.

Why Is This Even A Thing?

Assuming you're in a stable financial position, career ambiguity causing suffering seems to occur when one of someone’s primary sources of meaning comes from having a specific career identity.

When someone identifies with some role like entrepreneur, creative, or business person, they usually inherit a set of standards about what flourishing in the role looks like. These standards are usually defined by other people and cultures. In order to feel good, many people feel like they need to be meeting the standards.

For example, if you’re identified as an entrepreneur, but not working on anything, then you must not be thriving as an entrepreneur. If you’re an artist but aren’t creating art, then you must be failing as an artist.

I’ve certainly been here at various points in my own journey where I was identified with a role and set of inherited ideas that determined how I felt about myself and life.

In the context of careers, most people try to alleviate this situation by spending a lot of time focusing on solving the ambiguity.

They hire a coach, do unique genius work, journal about what they loved as a child, do a bunch of consulting until something pops…

All their energy is spent looking “out there” to solve the problem.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these activities. I think many of them are very helpful!

But if focusing on finding the next thing is all you do, it’s like building a sandcastle to stop the tide. 

Inevitably, the temporary solution will be subject to the next cycle of the tide. A few years after you “find the thing,” you’ll just be back in the same position running the strategy of looking for your next thing to feel good. This is an invisible prison that most people think is normal and just how life works. 

Because of the predominant external orientation and narrative in our culture, most of us never really consider there’s an alternative.

In my experience, the path to move from conditional living to the freedom of unconditional living where you feel pretty good all the time is working on your consciousness.

This is how we return to our natural state which feels peaceful, content, and at ease increasingly regardless of what’s happening around us. Life’s imprints have obscured this deeper state of being and made us forget that this is actually our true nature.

Transforming the information and energy at the consciousness level is how we return to embodying this experience so we can increasingly live unconditionally.

I should note that working on all the consciousness stuff does not prevent you from also taking the right action in the external world to go find your next thing. It’s probably a good idea to do that too. 

Many people focus solely on the inner or outer work, not realizing that the best outcomes usually result from doing both if you have the tools to navigate both. 

Working On The Inner Experience

What’s really causing the discomfort with career ambiguity? Did humans always feel a crisis when they didn’t know what the future held in their professional life? 

There are depths to both the answer and the ways we can approach liberating ourselves.

Some people would say that the root issue of the problem is that someone likely doesn’t love themselves or has low self-esteem. This is why they are on a professional treadmill which is really just a strategy to fend off any unconscious self-worth issues.

The approach would be we need to learn to love ourselves so that regardless of our professional situation, we are kind to ourselves and feel enough. There are many ways to work on self-love and self-esteem to including therapy, coaching, certain meditations, embodiment practices, and more.

This can go a long way.

A deeper and often extension of learning to love yourself is to contemplate, who am I trying to love in the first place? Who or what am I?

This is examining the world of identification. 

Who is it that needs to figure things out? Who needs to be working on something to be okay?

At a certain point in the consciousness journey, you become aware of consciousness patterns. Patterns are mental impressions or recollections we inherit through experiencing the world which directly influence our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. The Hindus and Buddhists call these Samskaras. 

We see that the response to uncertainty of needing to figure it out and getting down on yourself is really just a consciousness pattern emanating from the limited self (ego). This is the part of your being that doesn’t feel safe, needs to know, and has to have the world around you indicating you’re doing well for yourself to be okay.

Because these patterns are such a dominant contributor to the thoughts, emotions, and impulses in your awareness, most people think that this is actually who they are. They think they are the experience, instead of the experiencer.

This is why in my opinion concepts like Maslow’s hierarchy are less so inherit truths about human nature, but more so psychological needs at a certain depth of experience.

Behind the cloak of the ego and all the consciousness patterns, there is an eternal Self that is completely at ease watching the unfolding.

It doesn’t require the respect of others or even receiving love because IT IS LOVE. The inner experience is implicit and increasingly unconditional the more this Self manifests.

That’s not to say when your true Self becomes a more dominant contributor to your awareness, you won’t experience all the joys of the human experience that contribute to a sense of well-being like family, friends, achievement, and respect. Usually, reality reflects back to you a lot more of these things. The point is that feeling good in your inner space is no longer contingent upon having the puzzle pieces of the outside world perfectly arranged like it did in an ego-dominated experience.

One Way To Move Closer To Unconditional Well-Being

So practically, how does one move through experiences like career ambiguity to get closer to unconditional inner well-being?

When we notice we are trying to figure it out and/or needing to know with our career or anything else, this is just an indication that a consciousness pattern has been animated. Think of it like an if this, then that, relationship between the outside world and the software program of your mind. To change the program, you first need to know it exists.

When someone has achieved witness consciousness through contemplative practice like meditation, you can watch the pattern of “trying to figure it out” or any other inner disturbance playing out in your awareness as the thoughts, emotions, and impulses in your inner space. 

If you become caught up and lose yourself in the inner material, eventually you can come back to awareness and recognize what occurred. Sometimes this happens minutes later, sometimes it’s hours after the fact.

In all cases, it all comes back to noticing how we react to life.

Each time we catch these moments, we have an opportunity to work on the underlying information and energy in our consciousness (software program) that’s creating this situation. This is really what I mean when I say “consciousness work.” You are transforming the background layer that creates your inner experience. There are many ways to do this. They all start with becoming aware of your response to life. I outline a few of my preferred methods of working with these situations in this post and these meditations.

So next time you notice you’re worried, grasping, or down in the dumps about your career ambiguity, you can experiment with treating it like an alarm bell going off. Some inner material in my consciousness library has been animated that I can work with! 

From here you can use your preferred method to shift the inner material creating the reaction such as accessing the felt experience, feeling into it fully, and eventually replacing it with new information like unconditional trust. Gradually, the inner composition of your consciousness reference library will shift. This changes your automatic responses to life that occur as thoughts, emotions, and impulses in your awareness.  For example, instead of meeting a moment of uncertainty about your career with frustration or worry, maybe you just feel peace or trust that the perfect thing is coming.

If you work with these opportunities consistently enough a funny thing will happen.

One day you’ll wake up and notice you’re feeling great for no reason. You have no idea what your next thing is, but for some reason, it no longer feels like a big deal. There’s a sense that it will emerge when it's supposed to and the shift you made to relate to reality with a greater sense of unconditionality is actually the more important experience. You realize the career and other parts of life are actually like a gymnasium for this higher purpose. 

But then probably sometime in the next day, you’ll have a similar experience where something in the outside world animates your inner material, dropping you back into the limited self patterns like needing to figure it out. That’s okay. When this happens, this just means we have another chance to work at a deeper layer. 

As you increasingly work with these inner experiences, you may notice this weird thing where you find yourself grateful for these disturbances that come up. You start to see that they are actually the gateways to greater levels of liberation and life seems to have a funny way of orchestrating them for you on your behalf.

This cycle happens again and again, but with work, the frequency and duration of being taken out of peace softens.

Inner vs. Outer vs. Both/And

When many people realize the inherent limitations of relying on finding their next thing out there to feel good, they often throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

The pendulum swings from a total focus on the outer experience to a total focus on the inner experience. I know because this is what I did. This isn’t something that’s good or bad. It’s just a tendency to be aware of. Sometimes this extreme shift is required for someone who is very strongly externally oriented.

At some point though, you realize the purpose of life isn’t just doing shadow work all day. The obsession with the inner work softens and you start to come back to a more balanced experience of both inner and outer emphasis. This is usually accompanied by a budding inspiration where all of the inner transformation desires to express outward.

As far as career direction goes, it’s my experience that the most fun game occurs when you can earnestly move through life without needing to know. This happens when there is a recognition and deep trust that whatever we need will become available to us when we need it. 

This is the magic place. It’s where life returns to the awe and wonder we experience as children. It’s also where we learn to dance with the spontaneity and flow of the Universe. Instead of the little me needing to figure out what’s next, we notice that life seems to be moving us in a direction that we can start to flow with. The unfolding around us indicates how the flow wants to move and we have the free will to align to it.

At first, this might seem like we’re giving something up; like we are outsourcing our free will. 

The funny thing is that you eventually start to see that it is actually by aligning to the natural flow of life (the Tao) that your life actually gets way better. Like swimming in a current, we can try to fight against it or we can get comfortable going with it. One strategy is exhausting and the other one is easeful, yet exhilarating. 

It’s my experience that learning to align to the flow of life doesn’t just make everything better, but also creates a greater sense of unification with it. You move from trying to figure life out to increasingly seeing you are life. This results in deep fulfillment, connection, and often flourishing.

If You’re Occupied By Finding Your Next Thing

Instead of seeing finding your next thing as a problem to fix, why not experiment with seeing it as an opportunity to learn how to unconditionally be okay and gracefully occupy the unknown?

The external strategy can be used in tandem and will always be there if the inner work doesn’t yield anything for you.

The reward on the other side isn’t the eventual next career opportunity, but rather the state of being you cultivate. Though you can certainly enjoy your next opportunity too. 

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏