🎧 TUNE IN on Apple or Spotify (or wherever you listen to podcasts).
In this episode, Kyra kicks off the first installment of a three-part series on careers in their later chapters by exploring the guilt that so many people feel when they start to question the path they’re on. Drawing from her own experience leaving a well-established corporate career, she explores both the pull toward staying and the pull toward leaving, and why that trap keeps so many people stuck. She then offers a reframe around ditching the finish line construct in favor of thinking about your career in chapters. She moves through Senegal, Portugal, Germany, and Colombia, each offering a different cultural lens on what it looks like to treat experience and expertise as something that deepens rather than expires with age.
Episode Takeaways
Rethinking your career in its later chapters often comes with a particular kind of guilt, and it usually runs in both directions…the weight of leaving something stable and the cost of staying too long.
Countdown mode is a well-studied mental posture. Framing your career as a series of chapters rather than a ticking clock is much more expansive than working towards an imaginary finish line.
Cultures around the world, from Senegal’s griot tradition to Portugal’s Universities of the Third Age, treat accumulated knowledge and experience as something that grows more valuable over time.
The later chapters of a career don’t have to be a winding down in the conventional sense. Redesigning your path starts with understanding: 1) what you actually need, practically speaking and 2) what you want your days to look and feel like.
Sources
