Is your career a garden or a jungle?
Picture a manicured garden.
Like the gardens of Versailles, above.
Neat. Orderly. Well-planned. Tightly controlled.
And carefully maintained at incredibly high cost and effort.
If you take your eye off the ball, the garden dies.
Now picture a wild jungle.
Like this rainforest, above.
Messy. All over the place. Completely unplanned. Utterly uncontrolled.
And zero maintenance required.
You can’t stop this thing from growing, even if you try.
Which one better represents your current job?
Does your current job go against your truest nature?
Such that it requires hours and hours of “weeding and watering and mulching and repotting” and every other kind of garden maintenance to keep it going?
Or does it flow with your truest nature?
Such that all you really have to do is step back and let it grow on its own, and you can barely stop it from flowering?
And I’m sure it’s somewhere on spectrum, not a black-and-white binary.
But where are you on that spectrum?
How much time are you spending effortfully gardening vs. effortlessly flowering?
Now step back and look at your career as a whole.
Your career strategy, career arc, the whole thing you’re trying to build.
Is it a garden, or is it a jungle?
Now, it’s up to you, what you want to do.
But I recommend building a jungle.
I recommend building around your true nature, your strengths, your flow.
Rather than building against it and requiring constant maintenance.
Now of course, the million dollar question is: How?
What would your jungle career even look like?
Does your true nature even have anything of value, that you could build your whole career around?
How do you make sure it makes enough money?
How do you make sure you’re not embarrassed to tell your friends what you’re doing?
How do you manage the transition between a garden and a jungle without burning your life down and sinking into abject poverty in the process?
That’s what I work on with my clients.
So come talk to me, and let me help.
You can drop by anytime for a no-strings-attached coffee chat ☕️
It’s not a sales pitch.
It’s just an opportunity for us to discuss whatever’s on your mind…
And I’ll give you some one-off coaching about your situation.
Or you can book a consult call, and we can map out a full coaching engagement.
So we can not just scratch the surface on the million-dollar “How?” question…
We can put our heads down and answer it, all the way through.
Until you’re firmly in the middle of your flourishing jungle, swinging in a hammock, watching the flowers bloom around you, and having the time of your life :)
What my clients have to say…
“I realized that I wasn't alone in a lot of my situations. In fact, what I was going through was very common.
And that there were tools and I could use to get out of this, and that I wasn't the first person in the world to go through and I'm not going to be the last.
And that Pooja has seen this before and that she is very well equipped and familiar with how to troubleshoot these things. That helped so much.”
—Client | VP at Major Financial Institution
I help high achievers build their careers around flow.
This requires…
Internally, learning how to access your flow no matter what’s going on around you
Externally, designing a career strategy that angles your flow at a high-priority problem that someone will pay you good money to solve
Tactically, navigating the transition from the role you’re in to the role you want
Today’s article focused on #2.
For more writing on all 3 of these, check out my table of contents.
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