Whilst studying some years ago, the "Wheel of Life" concept was introduced to me as a means to look at myself and review how I'm feeling about things. If you're unfamiliar with this, the idea is that you split a circle into 8 categories of your choosing and regularly rate how happy you are with each one. There are plenty of templates available and this is the one I like to use:
I don't review this often enough and decided to spend a bit of time on it yesterday. Despite generally feeling quite miserable about life still, things have picked up quite a lot since I last reviewed it 6 months ago. Whilst this proved a useful reminder that I'm feeling better about things, 2 categories were much lower than others - Career and Personal Growth.
In many ways, these 2 categories are linked and the underlying meaning to me is:
Continue to learn.
Which certainly applies to Personal Growth and I was quickly able to think of a lot of activities / hobbies that I could do to help me feel better in this regard. When I started to think about Career though, I struggled. Perhaps with good reason...
What is my Career?
I've been a full-time dad for over 4 years now. Whilst I've done a little bit of work on the side, it's been minimal and there's little doubt that what I would have said was my career is becoming little more than a distant memory. So I asked myself what my career is now? Surely everybody has one in some sense and then I wondered, what's the definition of career?
So I looked it up:
an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress (Source)
Ok, so I've got something to work with now. My occupation was as an IT developer which slowly moved into management. Always within IT though so is my career IT? Or was my career IT? (If you hadn't guessed by now, when it comes to my working life, I feel like I've lost my identity.)
So could full-time dad / househusband be considered a career? "Opportunities for progress" feels like a stumbling block here. Unless stopping my baby from throwing their half-full bowl of cereal onto the floor when they've had enough counts as progress (and if it is, it would be my current career goal). I'm not feeling it though. So is IT my career that one day I'll return to? Then what does that make being a full-time dad? Is it a job? So this time, I looked up the definition of job:
a paid position of regular employment.
a task or piece of work, especially one that is paid. (Source)
Is it a Job?
Well, I'm not getting paid so I guess not. Maybe one day, my children will be counting their money like in the above image but I'll probably have to wait a while for that. So what do you call something that you spend the majority of your life doing that you don't get paid for? Is it a hobby...?
an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure (Source)
Nope. Definitely not.
So after much thought (which I've significantly summarised in this post), I don't know what to do to improve my feelings about "Career". Is it a case of accepting that I no longer have a career and the mental act of accepting that will make me feel better about it?
