St. Louis Business Journal
Self-acceptance is the key to career fulfillment

By Anna Navarro

August 2001 - What does unconditional self-acceptance have to do with career satisfaction?

Everything. Until you totally accept who you are and what you want out of life, it's pretty hard to find a career that is fulfilling.

When Grace came to see me, she was a physician specializing in work with older patients, and the way she described her situation was that "my work is eating me alive."

Her patients were very emotionally needy, as older adults often are. Their ailments were chronic, and she believed they were frequently made worse by the fact that being ill was sometimes the only way many of them were able to get human attention.

Having worked with many physicians, I know that those who are well suited to patient care have a knack for being both empathetic and detached from their patients at the same time. This was a skill Grace seemed to lack, and I doubted she could develop it.

She felt totally drained by her work. The work exhausted her emotionally and the responsibility of being on-call after hours was seriously disrupting her personal life.

As I began to explore with Grace what her other options might be, we ran headlong into a huge obstacle.

Every time I pointed out to her that she seemed happier when she was working with information than with people, especially needy people, she agreed. But if I took it a step further and suggested exploring work that did not involve direct service to patients, she would retreat and become uncomfortable.

As I probed into this incongruous reaction, Grace began to share aspects of growing up that shed light on her dilemma. She was raised in a very religious family, where the ONLY work that counted as valuable was serving others in fields such as medicine, education or social service.

She was a very bright student, and did very well in math and science starting in elementary school. Her mother, a nurse, urged her to become a doctor. She put a Doctor's Kit under the Christmas tree for Grace at an early age.

By the time Grace entered high school, she was set on a career in medicine. She was easily accepted into a pre-med undergraduate program, and later, into medical school.

During her residency, her father became ill and she sought the advice of one of her supervisors, a physician who specialized in working with older patients. She found him very helpful. Her admiration for him and his work led to the decision to specialize in gerontology.

The problem was that this kind of work was a very poor fit with her personal strengths. Grace was by nature an introvert. She was good with logical analysis, numbers and science. But intense and prolonged interaction was not her forte.

It was not until Grace was able to step back and look at her history through this perspective that she began to realize why she was having difficulty accepting that she would be happier in a job that DIDN'T require a lot of intense interaction. A lack of self-awareness combined with guilt had led her to work for which she was not suited.

As I explored with Grace what she DID enjoy doing, I learned that she had a "hobby" of investing in healthcare stocks, and that she had been very successful in growing relatively small investments into a very respectable portfolio. She had a knack for picking winners, and used her medical background to good advantage in both the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries. This despite the fact that her "real" job kept her from spending much time investing.

Rarely do I work with a person for whom an alternative career path seems so obvious. The solution had been there all along, but it had been obscured by the difficulties Grace had with self-acceptance.

Still scared, Grace resigned her medical practice and used her savings to pay for an MBA program. She got her degree in finance and today, five years later, she is happily situated in a brokerage firm as a financial analyst specializing in healthcare stocks.

Grace's story is unfortunately, not unusual. I've worked with many, many clients who were blocked in their search for fulfilling work by a lack of self-acceptance, sometimes compounded by a lack of self-knowledge. Unconditional self-acceptance, often achieved only after overcoming guilt at not meeting your own, or others expectations, is a fundamental building block of career satisfaction.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.