Metaphors Help Your Career Blossom
Create a healthy and sustainable career.
In today's fast-paced and ever-changing world, early career professionals and graduate students may struggle to maintain a healthy, high-performance mindset, leading to burnout and a negative career outlook. But fear not, researchers are proving that career metaphor choices can offer powerful and practical insights to create healthy mindsets to help your career blossom.
Why do metaphors matter?
First, let's define a metaphor as a figure of speech that compares an object or action to something else, not meant to be taken literally, but to help explain an idea or emotion. For example, saying "life is a journey" is a metaphor that helps us understand that life is a process with ups and downs, twists and turns, and various destinations.
Career guidance and coaching mentors can also play a crucial role in helping early career professionals and graduate students develop healthy mindsets. Metaphors offer a common language that helps to build more powerful and insightful relationships. Recognising, reframing, or developing agentic metaphors can support career preparation and development and empower clients to thrive and not burnout.
Current research shows that your metaphors matter more than you might think. Findings demonstrate that individuals who used metaphors to talk about their career as a journey, a story, or as encounters and relationships had higher levels of career agency and job search self-efficacy, while those who used metaphors of career as a prison or competition for instance had lower levels of career agency and job search self-efficacy. This highlights the power of metaphors in shaping our mindset and approach to our career paths.
Face career challenges and setbacks with a growth mindset.
In their seminal work, Metaphors We Live By, scholars Lakoff and Johnson, argued that our everyday language is filled with metaphors that shape our thinking and behaviour. Rather than being at the mercy of our metaphors, we can consciously choose career metaphors and use them interchangeably to help us see things differently and align with our goals and values. For example, instead of viewing your career as a prison or competition, try viewing it as a journey or a story, where you have agency and control over your choices and actions. This can help you approach challenges and setbacks with a growth mindset, rather than a fixed one.
Whether you think about your career as a journey, a construction, or a prison, no metaphor is always good or always bad. However, some career metaphors may be healthier than others. What is important is noticing our metaphors. This is because we understand our career differently depending on the metaphor we use, either deliberately or subconsciously.
Final thoughts
By understanding the power of metaphors and consciously choosing constructive ones, we can develop healthy, high-performance career mindsets that promote career agency, job search self-efficacy, and positive outlooks. And with the support of career guidance and coaching mentors, early career professionals and graduate students can thrive in their careers and avoid burnout.
Further reading: The dimensional structure of metaphors of career and their relations to career agency, job search self-efficacy, and negative career outlook
International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance
Creed, Allison; McIlveen, Peter; Perera, Harsha
Vol. 21 Issue 2, pp. 285–308, 2021.
