Transcript:
- Hello and welcome to the "What's Career Got To Do With It" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages a listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope that this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way.
- On today's episode, we are joined by special guests, Jules Odendahl-James, Director of Academic Engagement for Arts and Humanities. As we discuss and answer, however many to the question, what even is career success? So, hey, we're gonna start off with that one. What even is career success? And I'm gonna turn right to our guests!
- Oh hi!
- Welcome!
- Thank you! Career success. I think the nice part about it is it can be self-defined. You have to find out what you're happy with and think about that. But most people are gonna look to external forces. How do I know I'm moving up in my job? How do I know that I have skills to change when I'm asked to change at my job? How do I ask for help and not feel like that immediately puts me under a microscope that I'm not doing my job? And then the notion of really thinking about the parameters of jobs. 'Cause I think post-pandemic, we're all thinking about where do we take our enjoyment? Where do we take our satisfaction? What do we wanna feel like, figure out for ourselves for future plan? And that doesn't always have to include working all the time. It can include stepping back, figuring out what you enjoy, being with people, and then coming back to a career space and bringing that new rejuvenation to that space, which is great.
- Absolutely. Everyone else, what we got?
- I think that's the end of the episode.
- And we're done. Cut. All right, I would say career success is just that fulfillment. And are you at that point where you're aligned with your values and your passion and that purpose, which we know, we've talked about previously, purpose can change, but in that space, like are the stars align for this moment with those things?
- I think when I hear career success, I don't know why I'm losing my voice on a Thursday. I think I took it more so internally with self, like am I fulfilled right now? Am I making a difference or feel like I'm making a difference somehow? Am I being true to being the servant leader that I say that I am? And within this career is all of this allowing me to do that? So I think that's where my brain power went when I thought about career success.
- Kai's just looking at me right now with the first glimpse.
- I think, yeah, everything has been said and we don't wanna overdo it. And I think there's a special part of thinking about, there is tangible results that we can like look to or point to and say, "yes, I did this." But there also, there's this inner search within ourselves of like, "have I been successful? Like what am I doing? Is this right?" And I think there's that moment where we feel like we finally step into that. I wanna talk about that tension though that exists between the two of those. I think there there is a great deal of tension that exists from like the outer tangible results to what we find in ourselves. And so what is that for you? What have you found in your journey that you're like, all right, I see this as successful, but something else is telling you this might not be successful.
- When you said that, the first thing I thought about was often people put a timeline to success and how fast it should happen. So especially for, again, our audience, thinking of going into graduating from Duke, most students think, "okay, I need to get some sort of like project lead role immediately as an undergrad." Whereas the real structure of it is you want to have a solid starting point where you give yourself time to grow and gain that skillset to grow into those opportunities that give you the sort of success you see, the folks you aspire to be like, you know, having and
