Our jobs and careers do not define us, despite the first question many new contacts make, “What do you do for work?” To someone like me, I believe that humans are not defined by this, yet as a society, we seem to put our only stake on that aspect of our lives. Our purpose in life goes way beyond this one narrow aspect of what we’re expected to harp on. Throughout my own counseling journey, I’ve been susceptible to the dangerous thinking that work and career is life. That’s all I’ll ever be defined by. This is not true.

In “Wellness in Eight Dimensions” workbook by Peggy Swarbrick and Jay Yudof only list ‘occupational wellness’ as one of the eight dimensions. If you’re lost in defining who you are – your identity beyond your career, this goes a long way in determining your strengths and weaknesses throughout all aspects of your life. You might be doing better than you think in some dimensions versus others.

The idea is to create balance between these eight aspects:

Stress, addiction, trauma, disappointment, and loss can impact our wellness and the balance in our lives. It seems important to balance work with play and rest, to balance time out for recuperation and recovery with living our lives fully and productively, and to balance the desire for rapid change with the known effectiveness of slow changes to build good habits.

We must not discount our eating, sleeping, social, and personal habits (that includes your own hobbies outside of work). If we balance ourselves through all of our lives, our careers will not define us but only be a small piece of the pie that make up our lives. At the end of the day, the balance of these eight aspects will end up making our careers more successful buy building our internal support system that will lift all boats.

On a personal level, I keep adding to this worksheet as it is a living document. When I think of aspects I can add to ‘financial wellness’ for example, I’ll write it down as a point where I’d like to improve. Societal pressures such as a career defining us can leave us feeling burned out, overwhelmed, making it a rat race, and compare ourselves to peers with nothing but spiraling, negative returns. Our jobs are not a contest, and if you find yourself a workaholic or spending all your time improving your career, it may be time to look for something external with a work-life balance or improve other aspects of our lives to create these systems that makes us better at living our lives.