LIFE IS MADE UP OF TRANSITIONS, BIG AND SMALL. NOWHERE ARE THEY MORE OBVIOUS THAN IN OUR WORK LIVES, BUT, AS LIFE-TRANSITION EXPERT BRUCE FEILER TELLS GEORGIA GREEN, THE KEY IS NOTICING WHEN THEY HAPPEN AND TAKING POSITIVE ACTION
The career is over. That statement shouldn’t come as a shock: the linear, ladder-climbing career path we were taught about in school has been dying a well-documented death for years. We don’t work how our parents, or our grandparents, did: we no longer stay in the same job or industry for our whole working lives, and while money used to be the metric of meaning at work, it’s now one of many (in fact, a US study found that nine out of 10 employees were willing to give up a quarter of their entire life’s earnings in exchange for work that’s meaningful*).
‘We’re shifting from a time when most of us were forced to bend to someone else’s narrative to a time when more of us assert the freedom to write our own narratives,’ says Bruce Feiler, New York Times bestselling writer and author of The Search: Finding Meaning ful Work In A Post-Career World. It’s also a time when we’re more likely to experience what Feiler terms a ‘workquake’ – atremor, dramatic or minor, that can threaten to dismantle the solid foundation upon which our working lives as we know them have been built.
‘A workquake is a disruption or moment of instability that causes you to rethink, reconsider or reimagine what you do for work,’ Feiler explains. ‘There’s a never-ending barrage of interruptions – some voluntary, others involuntary, some unique to us, others shared by the entire planet. Some that grow out of changes in our workplace, and others that grow out of changes in our mindsets. I call these moments workquakes.’
According to Feiler, the average person goes through a workquake every 2.85 years. If you consider that a third of the workforce leave their jobs each year, with another third redesigning the jobs they’re currently in, it’s not an exceptional statistic**. In recent years, most of these shifts can be attributed to the pandemic (whether it’s working remotely, dialling back hours or dialling up flexibility). Still, this is not solely a result of Covid-19 – the quit rate has risen pretty much every year (except one – after the 2008 recession) for the past two decades.
In its simplest terms, a workquake can be likened to the feeling of the ground beneath us shaking, with the unnerving sense of volatility prompting us to rethink our work stories. Feiler says that in this situation, the majority of us become focused on introducing more meaning into our careers (Feiler recommends undertaking a ‘meaning’ audit – see below). Nevertheless, experiencing a workquake doesn’t necessarily mean that you should quit your job. And the reality is that most of us won’t be in a financial position to do so, but by
