Straying from societal expectations: How I improved my relationship with work (Part 1)

Redefining what “success” meant to me regardless of how others might view it

I’m back with another topic in my series about straying from societal expectations (first one about deciding if I should have more than one kid), and how it helped me achieve more fulfillment and alignment with my priorities.

Today’s topic is about my journey to changing my relationship with my job and career, contrary to what I saw many others doing and what I thought society “expected” of me. My mindset changes towards work have been one of the most life-changing shifts I’ve made in the last couple years. And as much as I wish I didn’t have to experience work burnout to force me to deal with the issue, I am also grateful that it gave me the perspective I needed to take action and change my circumstances. 

Like I mentioned last time, in dealing with societal pressures, I’ve found that the key to tuning out external noise stems back to (1) acknowledging the pressures, (2) questioning its validity and if it’s necessary to attain your goals, and (3) choosing to take risks on different decisions (should they differ from “societal expectations”). Continued practice of doing this has helped me build confidence in my own decisions across different facets of life. And I’ll show I applied this framework to my career.

I’ve broken this article up into 2 parts. Part 1 today is more about a critical mindset shift in redefining what “success” meant to me. Part 2 will be about taking action to achieve my work goals after redefining success.

Upward progression at work = more money = “success”

Growing up, I feel like external expectations around going to school were to work hard, get good grades, get into a good college, get a good job, and make money. Once you got a job, society painted success as making more and more money by climbing the ladder in whatever field you’re in, growing your own business, or just having a naturally lucrative career (e.g. medicine, law). 

This was certainly the achievement-driven life that was linearly mapped out for me as a first-generation Chinese American. To my parents’ pride, I was a good student, and my hard work led me to a prestigious university. After graduating from college, I got a good-paying first job during the 2009 recession, got my first major promotion to a Manager at a different start-up when I was 24, switched jobs that quickly helped increase my pay by 50%, got my second promotion to Sr. Manager at 28 at a large tech company, switched to another company, and got my 3rd promotion to Lead/Group Manager at 31. I’m now 36 with a 15 year career, almost exclusively in marketing. 

With my last promotion at 31, I started to think to myself, “Is this all that life is about?” I was making more money each step of the way; I was leading bigger and bigger teams and overseeing larger scopes of work, on my way to becoming a Director. Although it felt nice to be seen as a leader within the company (and praised by my parents and friends), I actually felt pretty drained by the responsibility and work. Each promotion, although really nice (especially the pay increases), almost felt like it was getting less and less fulfilling every time. I felt proud of my accomplishments when promotions happened. But I finally started questioning, where was I trying to go? What was the end game of all this “success”?

Thoughts passively swirled in my head, but nothing urgently challenged me to think about it further until I had a baby. 

How becoming a working mom forced me to question the societal notions of “success” 

Before having Mara, I’d see many of my female colleagues with children work their asses off and somehow also take care of a family behind the scenes. They made it look so (relatively) easy (which I now know is FAR from the truth, so to any working mom out there, you are a superwoman). So that’s exactly what I thought I needed to do when I came back from parental leave: learn how to balance the same amount of work and a family. 

I gave birth to Mara right before my 33rd birthday (July 2020), and I spent the next 8-9 months on maternity leave due to a mixture of parental and COVID leaves. Being a mother was magical and incredibly hard. I had serious postpartum anxiety during my leave that lasted for months. When I returned to work in April 2021, I still had underlying, moderate postpartum anxiety (that I tried to deny), and I made the mistake of joining a frantic, high visibility team that worked around the clock. Spending all my time either on work (in a high-stress work environment) or mothering (with my lingering postpartum anxiety) quickly burned me out (more here). I didn’t want to admit it to myself because I thought it was something I just needed to power through, and I didn’t want to appear weak. There were other mothers on the team, and they seemed to be doing it. So maybe I just needed to grow thicker skin and adjust to this “new norm”. And everyday, I felt like a failure for not excelling at work like I used to.

A breaking point happened in February 2022 involving my family (thankfully they’re all okay), and my doctor approved 3 months of mental health leave for me paired with intensive therapy. 

I knew something needed to change about my relationship with work, but I honestly didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t until my 2nd or 3rd meeting with my therapist, where she asked me to evaluate my “values” in life, did I have a wake-up call that I was spending an outsized amount of my time and mental energy on something that was pretty far down my priorities list (work) and nearly no time on things that were truly meaningful to me. Work by nature is often at least a 40 hour work week, but the anxieties it was causing me were bleeding into my personal life. And it really challenged me to think, is “success” in life only defined by what you do at work? Or could it (and should it) also be about how aligned you are in progressing in your overall life values?

Realizing that I was MORE than work, and reframing what “success” could be

If you often experience anxiety (like I did), I highly recommend taking a look at the common values and Values framework that I wrote about here and pictured below.

This list highlights prominent domains of life that are valued by most people and served as a starting point for me to identify what facets of life are most meaningful to me and assess the extent to which I was living life in accordance with those values (ie. whether or not I’m putting energy in the most meaningful areas on an everyday basis). 

In doing that exercise, I was slowly able to understand more about my myself, my unique priorities, and how that knowledge can help redefine what “success” and forward progression in life could look like. Everyone’s values are different; my personal top values revolved around Parenting, Marriage, Personal Growth, family, and Recreation (more in the article linked above). Each of these were also paired with goals that I had for myself; for example, my Recreation goal was to, “have hobbies and interests outside of work that personally bring me joy, energy, and could become a personal passion.” By establishing a clearer perspective on what mattered most to me, I slowly started to disassociate my identity solely with my career (or even being a mother, which also took up a huge part of my life), which was helpful in not viewing success as binary (if I wasn’t a good worker, I was a failure) and having more opportunities to progress towards other meaningful goals. 

I realized that my identity and “success” as an individual could be multi-faceted and revolve around multiple personal values. For example, my Parenting goal was to be a loving mother who is present with her kids and teaches them good values. Making progress towards that goal could involve regularly being present during bedtime with Mara, reading her books and teaching her new concepts. Personal growth was another priority to me; my goal was to continue doubling down on self-improvement so that I continue growing mentally and creatively. So making progress towards that goal could involve regularly going to therapy, sharing my learnings via this Substack, and building confidence in creative endeavors like expressing my style (which I’ve started to do a lot more on my Instagram). 

Ultimately, having a grasp on my values in life made me realize that I could be “successful” in life, even if I didn’t continue climbing the corporate ladder and burning myself out at work. Great success and fulfillment could come from putting in the time and energy to be a present mother for Mara, a loving wife to Tommy, an appreciative daughter to my parents, a growth-minded individual, and a supportive friend. My worth was so much more than work.

Wow. That realization was game-changing; it made me realize that all these years, I was assuming that society’s definition of “success” (which often is tied to work) was what I needed to adhere to in life; it subconsciously dictated the amount of energy I put into work and often traded off time with my true priorities. But in reality, I could have my own views of success that didn’t primarily revolve around work. And I could find more fulfillment from working towards my other goals (Parenting, Marriage, Personal Growth, Family, and Recreation) rather than spending an outsized amount of energy on work like I used to.

But I am a normal person (can we all just win the lottery one day!); I still need to a job to generate income to support myself and my family. As part of identifying my values, I identified that my goal for “Employment” was to have a job that can comfortably provide for my family, where I enjoyed those around me, and felt like my work was helping others or was meaningful to me. I didn’t care to be promoted whatsoever, and I was even open to making a lateral or downward move career-wise to achieve more balance. So what were my choices to improve my relationship with work?

Concluding that you are more than work and a peek at what’s next

So far, I hope you takeaway that “success” does not have to be solely tied to work (even if work is something high on your values list and meaningful to you). Success can be redefined in ways that are in line with our overall values, and making progress towards all of them can give us a sense of fulfillment (and/or forward-progression) that we often crave and associate with just work. All of that can also make our lives feel more balanced.

In Part 2 of this newsletter, I’ll continue sharing more about how I changed my relationship with work by using my improved mindset to explore different options for work and ultimately take action to improve my circumstances.

As always, thanks for reading and always open to hearing from you about your own experiences <3