You are not being irresponsible. You simply don't know.
A big concern I hear from women who want to make large career moves is the fear of being irresponsible. The problem with that concern is it relies on antiquated beliefs:
Staying the course is more responsible than shifting the course.
What’s already known is more valuable than what’s unknown.
It’s not more responsible to stay the course
The allure of staying the course originates in your parents’ era. It was both normative and rewarded to give your loyalty to a single company or profession. The rewards men reaped from that system are not translating for women today. Most career growth for women comes from switching companies. Often you see more capability in yourself than your company is willing to recognize.
What’s already known isn’t more valuable than what’s unknown
This belief is the greatest upholder of the status quo — the very thing many women want to see disrupted. This belief, when followed, rewards a small sliver of the world and harms the rest.
How you uphold those antiquated beliefs
Those two beliefs are untrue, illogical and damaging, yet you uphold them.
When a leap doesn’t work out, we blame it on irresponsibility. This method of responding to setbacks and failures perpetuates the narrative of irresponsibility and distorts responsibility of leaders.
We see the move as not well thought out. Poorly planned. Naive. Short sighted. Any mention of the knowledge we acquire in the process is absent.
This implies the right level of planning up front can prevent an unfavorable outcome. Not always. There are some things you can’t know until you experience them. This has nothing to do with responsibility (or lack thereof).
Some lessons can only come from experience
A friend and I connected recently about the hilarity of a common experience we'd both had. Neither of us had known such an experience was possible until we'd had it. We'd both hired and paid an interior designer that ghosted us. I would have never seen it coming.
If left unchecked, I can see how irresponsible I was in hiring the designer. I can point to the opportunity to do more diligence, ask better questions or advocate for a different payment structure. Maybe to all those things.
But, then I imagine how fear driven I'd have needed to be to do any of those things. And I know none of those would be worth that mindset, even if it had changed the outcome. I don’t want to be a person that driven by fear. I wouldn’t want to ask people to explain all the ways something might fail before I even start. I’d never start anything if I took that approach.
When you honor the idea that lived experience can be the only way to learn some things, an undesired outcome is no longer about responsibility. It’s about the fact that life is a process.
Risks and swerves in your course will advance your learning. And require you to trust yourself to be with whatever that path presents.
Call for Reflection:
What’s one area you feel like you’re being or have been irresponsible? Does that perspective rely on these antiquated beliefs?
Shine On,
Alicia