For most of our working lives, we’ve been handed the same story: Your career is a ladder. Climb it. Don’t step off. Don’t move sideways. And whatever you do, don’t leave a gap!
And we’re told that’s ambition.
But Author and Journalist, Helen Jonsen, offers another perspective in her new book, This Kaleidoscope Career: Empowering Women to Build Unconventional Careers and Redefine Success.
Helen invites us to look at our careers, not as a ladder you must climb, but a kaleidoscope, and she challenges the assumption that a successful career must follow a predictable, linear path.
She suggests we look at our careers as a collection of experiences, skills, passions, pauses, pivots and unexpected turns that, when viewed together, create a pattern; a pattern we may not recognize until we examine our career path differently.
The challenge is learning to see and explain the throughline.
Helen points to her own career as an example.
“My own story is the clearest example I have. I saw journalism as a straight line. My college degree, straight to a magazine or newspaper, build my career, move up to Editor-in-Chief. Instead, my curiosity drove me into broadcasting and into digital media when that became possible. I never stopped writing both for print and the ear. I added my visual creative side as well. But those skills also helped nonprofits tell their stories and public agencies. Somewhere in the middle, I became a business owner with my husband, using our TV skills to create video productions and serve international news organizations covering New York. That threw us onto the other side of media relations, media training, and speech writing. Curiosity drove me. Being able to express my throughline allowed me to make each move.”
We’ve acquired skills in places we never expected to use them. We’ve changed industries. We’ve started businesses. We’ve taken time off. We’ve cared for people. We’ve survived crises. We’ve followed interests that turned into expertise. We’ve discovered talents we didn’t know we had.
The challenge isn’t having a nonlinear career. The challenge is learning to see a pattern and explain the throughline.
As Helen points out in her book, a nonlinear career isn’t necessarily random. There can be a thread running through seemingly unrelated experiences such as a skill, passion, value, curiosity or strength that keeps showing up in different forms. That’s your throughline; the thread that connects all your experiences, which may look like a number of disconnected but show a pattern.
As Helen explains, “Curiosity was my throughline. I never stopped writing. I added my visual creative side as well.”
Same career. Different story.
Finding that thread changes the way you tell your story.
Read the full interview on Substack.com.
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