Most of us have been taught to think about our careers in a very particular way. You start somewhere near the bottom. You work hard. You move up, step by step, promotion by promotion – climbing a ladder. It’s neat. It’s structured. It makes sense on paper. But it doesn’t work for everyone. And if you’re honest, it might not be working for you.
Because real life rarely moves in straight lines. Interests change. Priorities shift. Opportunities appear that don’t fit neatly into the next ‘step up’. And sometimes, you don’t actually want the next rung on the ladder at all.
A different way of looking at it
There’s another way of looking at it – the idea of your career as a river. Not something rigid and fixed; something that moves.
A river has a direction, but it isn’t straight. It bends, it widens, it narrows. Sometimes it speeds up, sometimes it slows right down. Sometimes it joins other rivers. Sometimes it pools in one place for a while.
When you start to think about your work and your life in that way, something shifts. You’re no longer asking “what’s the next step?” You’re asking “where is this going?” And more importantly, “where do I want it to go?”
It also makes it a bit easier to be honest about what’s getting in the way.
In the river model, those things are the rocks – the blocks, the stuff that slows you down or stops you moving at all.
That might be something practical – money, time, commitments, or something less visible – fear, self-doubt, the expectations of other people. The point isn’t to pretend the rocks aren’t there – they are, for all of us. But once you can see them clearly, you’ve got options. You can move them. You can work around them. You can figure out how to break them down. Or you can choose a different route entirely.
There’s also the idea of the riverbanks – the environment you’re operating in. Some environments give you space. Others don’t. Some support the direction you want to go in. Others quietly push you back into a shape that doesn’t quite fit.
And then there are the unexpected bits – the opportunities you didn’t see at first – the side paths, the things that don’t exist on a traditional career map at all. A different way of working; a portfolio of work instead of just one job; a shift sideways rather than upwards; or even a conscious decision to stay exactly where you are, but do it differently.
None of those fit neatly on a ladder. All of them make perfect sense in a river.
What’s shaping your river?
You don’t need to sit down and map your entire life out to use this idea. You can just start with a few simple questions:
- Where does my river feel like it’s flowing easily right now?
- Where does it feel stuck?
- What are the rocks?
- Where do I actually want it to go next?
There isn’t a right answer. The point is simply to start thinking about your life in a way that gives you more options, not fewer.
If you want to explore this a bit further, there are a few simple worksheets in the resources section that can help you map things out.
And if you’d like to talk it through, I offer one-to-one coaching sessions where we can look at your ‘river’ together and figure out what might need to shift.
You don’t need to have it all worked out. You just need a place to start.