Cycle of Psychological Success

Last week I used my own professional career as a process of finding the right fit in order to be the person you are meant to be. This week I’ve been working on a new research project and one of the articles I reviewed, Psychological Success: When the Career Is a Calling by Douglas T. Hall and Dawn E. Chandler included the following model:

The gist of this model goes like this: we begin a process of career exploration, putting forth effort to find work that aligns with our needs and values. When this goes well, we experience objective success - we can see we are good at something, and that is also often accompanied by external validations such as promotions, raises, and praise. This can lead to subjective success, where we feel validated in our choices and accomplishments. This then leads to our revising our identity - internalizing the successes and gaining confidence in our new-found competence. I often ask physicians, for example, when they internalized their identity as a physician. The response is variable, but the vast majority of them required some sort of external validation - patients demonstrating trust in the physician’s decision making is often one of the key external events that sets forth the identity change - internalizing “I am a doctor.” This identity change gives one more confidence, and combined with a sense of success, leads to more effort and the cycle repeats itself. 

Hall is famous for popularizing the concept of the “Protean Career”, often referred to as “the career with heart”. The Protean Career assumes the world is constantly changing, and in order to be successful, we have to change with it. But the theory also emphasizes the importance of finding work that is subjectively meaningful (that’s the “heart” part). The fact that we have to constantly adapt is why the success model is a cycle. Through iteration after iteration of the cycle, we find what we are good at and what we enjoy, developing confidence in our abilities while sorting out how to be true to ourselves.

As I described last week, the first years of my career were not a roaring success. Not terrible - I never got fired - but not satisfying. Thanks to the Army I was able to try a lot of things, and some things I was good at and some things I was not. The thing I found I was good at was understanding finance, and with modest success I put more effort into it and eventually was given the chance to do it full time and it worked out. I internalized those successes, and began thinking of myself as a “finance guy”. But even as I was becoming a finance guy, I was drawn to opportunities to teach. I joined a journal club at one duty assignment, then started journal clubs at my next two assignments. I realized there was a lack of training on analytical skills available to people in my organizations, so I started teaching classes on how to use Excel and Access. When I applied to go to PHD studies so I could become a professor in the Army-Baylor program, my boss (who was a graduate of the program) took me aside and asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that because it would cut me off from future promotions. When I told him I understood that and was willing to make that sacrifice (of objective/external success), he nodded and said something to the effect of, “I think this is your calling - I just wanted to be sure you understood the costs.” I went through many cycles of learning and I continue to do so. 

I think if you are lucky, you stumble early on into a career that gives you both objective and subjective success. More likely, it will take many iterations of exploration and effort to find where you belong. Along the way the world will change (there was one personal computer in the clinic I worked in for my first job) and opportunities will change, and you will have to change with it, so the iterations of exploration never really end.

I hope Hall’s model is useful to you either for yourself or when you mentor younger folks.