Are you future proofing around life goals which haven’t yet happened?
Here’s why it could be stunting your career growth..
This month at Her Invitation, our focus is on how many women stunt their own career growth based on partners and / or children that don’t exist yet.
So what do we mean by that and is it really a thing? Well yes it is a thing and I know many readers might have little alarm bells going off RIGHT NOW!
As women, we are so pre-disposed to future planning. We create a blue print in our mind of what our life is going to look like,
how old we will be when we graduate,
how old we will be when we qualify,
who we are going to marry,
how old we will be when we get married,
what our house is going to look like,
where we are going to live,
how many children we are going to have and by what age,
how close together we will have them,
how we will bring them up
and so it goes on....
AND THEN.....we make life decisions based on that blue print. In our teens and early 20’s we make decisions....I know I desperately didn’t want to go to my gap year in Belgium in case my relationship with my English boyfriend broke down.
I went. It broke down. I’m still here and I have a multi-lingual degree (and a lovely husband I met when I was 29!).
I have had young delegates on my workshops - I can remember one young lady who shared that many of her peers who had graduated from Law School were not going to bother to do the work experience necessary to qualify as lawyers because they would be 27, 28 by the time they qualified and they wanted to be married by the time they were 30 so it wasn’t worth it.
Let me translate that for you.... Married by 30, pregnant by 31 and being a stay at home mum by 31 and ¾. Some of these girls weren’t even engaged. Some of them didn’t even have boyfriends - BUT IT’S IN THEIR BLUE PRINT SO IT MUST HAPPEN.
It is heart breaking that young women who are intelligent enough to get into law school are not going to max out on their capability because they MIGHT get married and they MIGHT have babies.
Now being a stay at home mum is a choice - and I know it’s the right thing for many families - it is of course getting easier for fathers to be stay at home carers (but that’s another blog!)..... but this choice of whether there is one stay at home parent or shared responsibility or even professional care is a choice that should be made in a real life situation at the time that the decision needs to be made.
So if you have ever had thoughts about not taking an opportunity such as a promotion because you won’t be able to give it 100% if you have a family, take it anyway - that family may not come along at the time you have it plotted out and you may find a way around the workload if it does. It’s not a decision for now...it’s a decision for the future.
Women stunting their own career growth based on partners and / or children that don’t exist yet is just one of the 15 ways we talk about how women can potentially hold themselves back. You can meet Gina and learn more from her about this and MANY other issues that women face by attending one of her next event in Worcestershire
