What to do when you’ve climbed your Everest

By ZoWun | Career development

By Zoë Wundenberg

I was one of the many millions of sports lovers who watched Ash Barty’s incredible performance on Saturday night to win the Wimbledon ladies crown.

Watching someone achieve a lifetime dream was remarkable.

However, Todd Woodbridge’s comment about the reality of the experience was a telling one.

He said that his response was, “is this it?”, explaining it as being a feeling of surrealism and one that didn’t sink in properly for some time.

This really spoke to me, as the achievement of a goal – especially one that is as momentous as winning Wimbledon – can leave you feeling somewhat cast adrift, like your life’s purpose is suddenly behind you. So, what’s next?

The problem with the question, “what’s next” after achieving such an enormous goal, is the question of whether any other goal can now compare.

So the biggest challenge in setting your sights on achieving your dreams is not actually the achievement of the dream, but having a plan to help you through the other side once you have achieved it.

The same principle applies to non-world championship sporting feats of glory.

There are plenty of articles out there about why gunning for your dream job is important, about how to set yourself up for success, how to pursue your dream job and so on, but there isn’t a lot out there addressing what to do when you get there.

If your dream job is dreamy, and you love every day, then woohoo! But you need to keep yourself motivated, so identifying what this will mean is important.

Are you the kind of person who needs to be challenged? Do you want to continue to make more money? Do you want to pursue further development? Or education? Or promotion?

These questions are important to ensure that you don’t lapse into comfortable apathy and wake up one morning realising that you’ve lost your way.

But, if you finally land that dream opportunity only to discover that it’s not what you thought it was going to be, or you do in fact feel a little cast adrift, then all is not lost.

Very rarely does the achievement of one’s dreams come without sacrifice.

This means that the price we pay for our goals is an even heavier burden if the goals don’t turn out to be what we expect.

Many of us double down at this point and refuse to cut our losses because of the sacrifices that we made to get there.

But the truth is, that this just compounds the sacrifices and without any promise of a pay-off: it becomes self-punishment.

Experience is never wasted – everything that we go to forms a part of who we become, how we think, what we see in the world around us. There is power is pivoting when our dreams become nightmares.

Feeling like you’ve already climbed Mount Everest and have nowhere left to focus your energy after the achievement of your goals is a danger to focusing on one tangible outcome.

Our career development structure is traditionally developed around the idea of achieving a dream job title, without a whole lot of energy being put into how we want to feel about our work.

Recently, we’ve seen a shift towards identifying our values and ensuring our work connects with a broader sense of purpose than a specific title, and this means that our career planning needs to be a continual evolution and requires ongoing attention throughout our careers.

For Ash, the next goal is likely Olympic gold, then the round of grand slams continues, but keeping your eye on this prize after you’ve just achieved your life’s ambition will be psychologically challenging.

Ash strikes me as someone who is incredibly resilient, dedicated and genuinely passionate about her career, and I’ll be one of many (again) cheering for her from home as she fights the next fight.

But for the rest of us, it’s vital to ensure that we can see beyond our dreams and that we don’t pin everything on the achievement of that goal.

Because whether we achieve it or not, there is always going to be a tomorrow and we need to make sure that we are planning for that too.

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on July 12, 2021.

Empowerment or Endangerment?

By ZoWun | Career development

Do women feel pressured to ‘have it all’?

I recently heard Jane Caro on the ABC’s The Drum talking about ‘empowerment.’ She understood the concept to have become a stressor and an expectation – that to empower women (in particular) to have both a family and a career is to put undue pressure on girls to live up to high standards of a perfect family, a fabulous home, a great figure, volunteering in the community, and managing a successful career. In essence, she believes that through this concept of ‘empowering’ women to ‘have it all’ we are putting them in the position of feeling like they have to ‘earn the right’ to this and as a result, all being ‘empowered’ means is to feel totally exhausted as they struggle to juggle all the balls of life at once.

The response to this interview was widespread affirmation that women all over the country are experiencing this level of exhaustion as they balance the needs of home, work and (usually last on the priority list) their own health and wellbeing.

However, is this really the story of a person who is empowered?

To be empowered is to give someone the authority or power to do something on the one hand, but on the other, it means to make someone stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights. It appears that somewhere between these two arms of the definition of empowerment, we have lost our way. Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we necessarily should. We are in a society where women can ‘have it all.’. However, there is a difference between empowering someone to have the choice to build a career and have a family, and expecting them to.

Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we necessarily should.

Many of the clients that I see are women returning to work after they have started a family. It’s not ‘empowerment’ that drives them back to work. Usually, it is the need to put food on the table. In ‘Mum-land’ there is a lot of pressure to be the perfect parent: women appear to be excellent at shaming each other and it is a widely held fact that you literally cannot get it right whether you breast or bottle feed, use cloth or disposable nappies, dress your girl in pink or blue, co-sleep or let baby cry it out – everyone has an opinion and everyone believes their opinion is ‘truth.’ Whether a mother returns to work (and when she chooses to do so) does not escape this social scrutiny and the development of social media for 21^st century mums only magnifies this scrutiny.

As individual as the choice to use cloth or disposable nappies is, so is the choice to return to work. This decision is metered by many factors including balancing the cost of daycare with the salary they will earn, investigating the value of returning to the world of adulthood and leaving the Wiggles behind for a few hours, and understanding the importance of continuing to build a career that means something to them. Socially speaking, people are going to judge you no matter what you choose: if you choose to stay home, you could be considered less valuable to society (even the government is known to support women returning to work – a working mum is a tax paying mum!) despite the fact that you are raising the next generation of Australians (a full time job in itself!). If you choose to go back to work, then you aren’t fulfilling the ideal model of motherhood because you are choosing to put the children in daycare and ‘not raise them yourself.’ This social judgment creates quite the conundrum that often pits mums against each other when we really need to be standing together and supporting each other.

At the end of the day, returning to work or staying home is a choice that you need to make based on what’s important to you and what your family needs. Trying to manage a perfect life is to succumb to social expectations and pressures. However, to feel confident in your decision, knowing that it is the right one for you and your family is to be empowered. What Jane Caro was describing was mummy guilt and overwhelm – to really be empowered, we need to be free to make our decisions outside of social pressures and away from Facebook.

Unemployment’s not so Black and White

By ZoWun | Employment/Career Statistics , Unemployment

There’s life, and work, after Defence

By ZoWun | Career development

The ANZAC day tradition is entrenched in our national identity, however, as proud as we are of our ANZAC heritage, the transition to civilian life following a career in the military is often a journey fraught with challenges.

My own grandfather was in the British army during WWII. He got out after the war ended and went back to his trade as a carpenter. He found it so hard to work alongside people who couldn’t share in his experience of war and who, subsequently, just didn’t understand who he was, that he re-enlisted in the British Army and became a career soldier among people ‘like him’. However, staying in isn’t an option for everyone.

The culture of the Australian Defence Force is unique in that it doesn’t just offer a job, it offers a way of life, a community, a family…

The culture of the Australian Defence Force is unique in that it doesn’t just offer a job, it offers a way of life, a community, a family that is often characterised by camaraderie, honour and commitment outside of the regular 9-5 hours of a civilian job. Moving into civilian life can be a culture shock for Defence members and can result in a loss of identity, feeling cut off from the community of Defence families, no longer feeling respected as a serving member, and along with that, a loss of personal status.  Additionally, sometimes, military training is not recognised in civilian labour markets which means all that training and development that you undertook during the course of your service can feel useless because it just doesn’t get you anywhere on the outside. All of this can impact your ability to connect with other people, build friendships with civilians and rebuild your professional identity. As a result, depression, anxiety, PTSD and other mental health challenges can rear their heads and it’s really important to ensure that you are well-prepared with appropriate resources and support networks to assist you in the transition from military to civilian life.

Defence Force veterans can come up against bias and prejudice (conscious or subconscious) in the civilian labour market, but these struggles don’t have to define your experience. Common issues include hirers being prejudiced against ex-military members because of preconceived ideas about their inability to think independently, being hard task masters, inflexible and being fierce sticklers for following rules– we’ve all seen those military movies with those frightening drill masters screaming in soldier’s faces, spittle flying! However, modern military members know that this is far from the case. When you are applying for work, you can shake this impression by following the same rule that civilians need to follow when it comes to applying for work: tailor your application to suit the needs of the job.

Your résumé and cover letter needs to be about you, but it also needs to be about the hirer and their needs. Your job in applying for positions is to make it as easy as possible for the hirer to identify your value to them and thus be able to align your skills and experience with the needs of the vacant position. Acronyms and jargon often become such an ingrained element to Defence personnel’s language that it creeps into application documents under the guise of assumed knowledge. In reality, all this does is complicate and confuse civilian hirers who become bamboozled by terms they don’t understand and this clouds the value that you bring to the work place. Focus on communication skills, relationships building, listening skills, genuine leadership characterised by empowerment and staff development. Break your skills down into translatable categories that will create meaning for a prospective employer: consider business acumen, leadership, communication and team work as the cornerstones for your areas of expertise, and remember that you need to help the hirer understand how your military service empowers you to work ethically and honourably with a sense of accountability and drive that is second to none. There are also industries that offer a similar sense of belonging and camaraderie that you can consider such as the police force and even mining.

Military service is something to be proud of. It can also be a great asset in the civilian labour market if it’s pitched appropriately.

I want to get into mining!

By ZoWun | Career development

‘I want to get into mining,’ is a statement I still often here from clients. For many, winning a job in mining is perceived as being similar to winning the lottery – it means a big salary that can open doors for people in their lives.

During the mining boom, opportunities were more widely available despite still being quite difficult to land. This fever doesn’t appear to have been diminished much by the downturn in the mining industry. When mining traineeships are advertised, people tend to go a little crazy and the number of applications that are submitted for a small number of jobs can number up to 1000.

I hear from a really broad spectrum of people who are apparently interested in getting into the mines as mobile plant operators: from labourers and tradespeople to hairdressers and teachers. Across this diverse group, there is a common theme: they are looking for a big pay cheque. They don’t often want the actual job in the mines, they want the salary that goes with it and there is a big problem with this.

Working in the mining industry is not an easy job. Reverse parking a 380t+ dump truck under a 300t+ digger is obviously significantly harder than reverse parking a Holden Astra at Big W. It might be considered ‘unskilled’ work, but operating mining equipment is a huge responsibility and it does take confidence and a particular skill set to be able to master. The people who succeed in this industry are the ones with a genuine passion for the work – who live and breathe the industry and the equipment, with a real buzz for operating such huge and powerful machines. To succeed, the pay cheque has to come second to the love for the job.

Then you have the living situation. For many, moving into the mining industry means FIFO work – this is not for everyone. I speak to a lot of people with families that are wanting to ‘make the sacrifice to provide for their family.’ This is honestly a really noble approach, however in reality, nobility doesn’t protect your mental health or repair broken relationships as you find yourself spending more of your life away from your family than with them. This can breed resentment, loneliness, separation issues from children (for both the parent and the child/ren), and we’ve all seen the reports on mental health issues and suicide rates in FIFO workers by not-for-profit organisations like Lifeline and various government agencies.

Furthermore, the pay cheque can be a bigger burden than saving grace.

Furthermore, the pay cheque can be a bigger burden than saving grace. People tend to get into debt based on the salary that they are earning – it allows them to get the loan for their dream home and to finally purchase that super powered GT. However, the mining industry is far from stable and jobs are not as secure as they used to be. Technological development is driving change in the industry and they are moving away from manned operation and moving towards remote control for cost and safety reasons. This means there is an increasing number of people who have got themselves into debt to a level that they can’t sustain back home in other industries and this is causing greater pressure and stress on their home-life. Mining might seem like the answer to their prayers, but even if they manage to get into a traineeship, it can be a personal, familial and financial disaster.

This story has an important theme – when you are looking at your options when it comes to job choices, consider what you will be doing on a daily basis and whether or not it is something that you would genuinely enjoy. There is nothing worse than dreading getting up in the morning because you have to go to work and even when the pay cheque is substantial, there really is no price that you can put on being there for your children, your spouse and being able to sustain a healthy mental outlook.  You also need to consider the projected developments in the industry that will define growth and continued labour stability as technology is driving change in the marketplace and impacting jobs across the board. There is a lot more to consider than the salary.

What is career development?

By ZoWun | Career development