Is Your Own Career Planning Causing Clarity or Chaos?
As a self-proclaimed Type A person in nearly every aspect of my life, the idea of going into any situation without a plan was enough to put me into a doom spiral. Starting from middle school on, I dreamed of getting my new school planner (Bonus points if it was the early 2000’s and they had some crazy iridescent design). The feeling of writing tasks down, checking them off and closing the book on a complete checklist was my idea of a successful day. This mentality carried me through college, my early career, mid-career and even into early parenthood. Crossing things off my planner and checklist felt beyond satisfying...until it didn’t.
Growing up, I believed as long as I checked off my to-do list and followed my plan, I would meet and exceed any goal I set out for myself. 5 year plans? 10 year plans? I LOVED those questions because I am a disciplined rule follower and having a plan never failed me once. A few examples:
Graduating college with top grades? Check
Completing my masters in a field I loved? Check
Running 5 marathons? Check
Getting a promotion? Check
There was nothing I couldn’t plan my way into achieving. Yet, there was a flaw in this approach I did not see coming. While I was busy staying laser focused on my own checklist, goals crept in that didn’t really have a transactional “make a goal and complete a goal” vibe. Some of these goals included:
Spending more quality time with my young children
Dropping off and picking up my daughter from school
Reading more and reconnecting with interests I had before becoming a mom
At first, when I read through these new goals, I dismissed them as just thoughts that I could work into my plan. Yet, they didn’t really fit into my usual production goals. For a while, I ignored a lot of these instincts and would say things like, “maybe in a year or two when things calm down” as a way to tell myself I was thinking about these hopes, but didn’t have a way to fit it into my perfectly curated plan.
This is when chaos ensued in my own plan. I was burning myself out to ignore the simple reality that the career plan I made in my twenties as a single, carefree individual no longer matched the plan I hoped for as a married mom of 3 little kids.
So how do we move beyond our stringent curated vision and flex into a new one? There is no perfect answer, but the following steps are a solid start:
Take an inventory of the areas in your life that are most important to you and visualize your time spent: As I was thinking about my plan, the chaos ensued when I realized the amount of time I was spending on my transactional goals (excelling at my job, following timelines and deadlines etc.) far outweighed the amount of time I was spending on things that mattered to me most (ie: Taking my kids to school). Visualizing this disconnect on paper helped me realize that my thoughts were worth exploring.
Once you have a visual representation of where your time is spent, and where you would like to increase and decrease your time, test out the plan slowly: Being a planner by nature, I was not comfortable throwing caution to the wind and saying “alright, time for a change now!” I spent a few months being more intentional with the time and energy I gave to my kids. What I learned during this time is that I loved having more time to focus on my biggest priority. Was there a chance I could further dial down other areas of my life to get the time I longed for?
Begin your plan and build check-ins: Through testing my plan and a lot of self-reflection, I decided a career break and building an LLC was the direction I wanted to take. One of the ways I made this plan less scary was to intentionally set a 3-month and a 6-month check-in with myself to see how the plan was going and make any adjustments that needed to be made. I recently hit my 3-month check-in and realized while I love 80% of my original plan, I am going to add some additional house and childcare help in 2026 to create some space to focus on my LLC. One of the reasons check-in are crucial is that it pulls us out of the “permanent decision” mindset and allows us to test and make adjustments as we go. This is a crucial component to a flexible plan.
Changes are going to occur throughout our careers both involuntarily and voluntarily. Being able to build a flexible mindset and resilience when it comes to planning will carry you through both the expected and unexpected changes. While a well-crafted perfect plan may seem great, embracing the messiness and flexibility is really the sweet-spot to transformation.
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