Would You Choose Your Career Again Today?
When Work Stops Matching What MattersInside this issue
On My MindIt’s so easy to mistake endurance for alignment. You get good at the work, people start depending on you, and the years keep stacking up. Eventually, continuing can feel like the responsible choice even when the life around the work has changed. That tension came up throughout my conversation with Dave Albrechta. Dave spent nearly a decade as a litigator before redesigning his career around mediation, coaching, and a more collaborative approach to law. His story made me think about how long we can remain committed to an old definition of success simply because we worked hard to reach it. I understand the feeling of work following you everywhere. When you run a business or have responsibilities in your job, there’s rarely a true vacation. A customer doesn’t know you’re away when they send an email or need an order. Even during a great meal with your family, part of your brain can remain tuned to the possibility that something needs your attention. That constant mental connection to work comes with a cost. You may be home physically while a customer, deadline, case, or unfinished problem still has part of your attention. When that becomes normal, it gets harder to recognize how much of yourself work is taking from everything around it. Fatherhood can make that tension more visible because it changes what we expect our work to support. Dave described becoming a parent as adding an identity that immediately moved to the top of his list while somehow continuing to receive less priority than his career. I think a lot of dads understand that contradiction. Family matters most, yet work often receives the clearest boundaries, the best hours, and the fastest responses. Dave pointed out the disconnect he noticed between the values he taught his sons and the behavior his work required. At home, he taught his boys to acknowledge another person’s experience and work through conflict, but at the office, he participated in a legal system built around blame, escalation, and proving the other side wrong. That made me wonder how often our kids experience our work without ever seeing us do it. They see the attention that follows us home. They feel the stress that changes how we respond. They notice what happens when a notification arrives during dinner and how available we remain to everyone outside the house. Our kids may never understand the details of our jobs, but they understand the patterns our jobs create. I keep coming back to a question from this conversation: Does the way I work reinforce the values I’m trying to teach at home? The answer may point toward a career change, but it could also reveal the need for a stronger boundary, a different schedule, or a better way to use the skills we already have. Separate the Work From the Way You Do ItWhen work starts feeling wrong, it’s easy to assume the entire career has to go. Dave’s experience shows why it’s worth slowing down before making that conclusion. He still valued helping people, solving difficult problems, and using the skills he developed as an attorney. The problem was the adversarial environment surrounding those skills. Why it MattersCareers are bundles of different experiences. A single job can include work you find meaningful, responsibilities you tolerate, and conditions that slowly drain you. When those elements stay tangled together, your options can appear more limited than they really are. You may believe you have to accept the entire package or leave it all behind. Separating the pieces creates more possibilities. How to Do ItDivide a page into three columns:
In the first two columns, focus on specific responsibilities and working conditions. “I hate my job” won’t give you much direction. “I enjoy advising clients, but I’m drained by constant urgency and unpredictable deadlines” gives you something you can evaluate. The third column is for abilities that aren’t limited to your current role. These might include listening under pressure, explaining complicated ideas, negotiating, managing projects, building relationships, or helping people make difficult decisions. Dave carried his ability to understand conflict, ask questions, and guide clients through uncertainty into mediation and coaching. The setting changed, but the underlying skills remained valuable. Why it WorksExperience rarely becomes useless simply because your current job no longer fits. Identifying your transferable skills helps you see options beyond staying in the same role or walking away from everything you’ve built. Pro TipPay attention to the conditions surrounding the work. Sometimes the task itself isn’t the problem. The pace, culture, incentives, schedule, or definition of success may be what needs to change. Write a Note to Your Future SelfDuring the long process of winding down his litigation practice, Dave kept a journal. He used it to process difficult days, but he was also creating a record for the version of himself who might eventually feel tempted to return. He knew that time could soften his memory of the stress. The journal preserved what the experience actually felt like while he was still living it. Why it Matters Once a difficult season ends, we tend to remember it selectively. We may miss the income, status, familiarity, or parts of the work we enjoyed while forgetting the anxiety, exhaustion, and tradeoffs that caused us to reconsider it. That can pull us back toward circumstances we’ve already outgrown. How to Try It After a difficult day, write a short note to your future self. Answer three questions:
Keep the note factual. Capture the circumstances, how they affected you, and what you learned before time starts rewriting the story. Why it Works The note gives your future self evidence. You’ll still be free to reconsider an old role or responsibility, but you’ll make that decision with a more complete picture of why you stepped away. It also helps you identify patterns. One difficult day may be temporary. The same experience showing up repeatedly may point toward a deeper misalignment. Pro Tip Record the good days, too. Career clarity comes from understanding what you want to preserve as much as understanding what you want to leave behind. Time to Sprint: Run a Career Alignment CheckMisalignment doesn’t always announce itself through a dramatic breaking point. It often appears gradually through interrupted evenings, recurring anxiety, thinner patience, or the feeling that your work no longer reflects your priorities. This sprint will help you identify one place where your work and values have started moving in different directions. Why it Matters You can’t make a thoughtful adjustment when all you know is that something feels off. Naming the specific tension gives you something concrete to evaluate. How to Do It Minutes 0–5: Name What Matters Now Write down the three values or priorities that matter most in your current season. They might include:
Choose what matters now, not what you think should matter. Minutes 5–15: Look for the Conflict For each priority, write down one way your current work supports it and one way your work competes with it. Avoid general answers. Identify the actual meeting, expectation, schedule, habit, or responsibility creating the tension. For example, your job may support financial stability while an unpredictable schedule makes it difficult for your family to count on your presence. Both things can be true, and seeing them together gives you a more honest picture of the tradeoff. Minutes 15–20: Decide What to Preserve Write down the parts of your work you’d want to carry forward if your role changed tomorrow. Think about skills, relationships, types of problems, or moments that make you feel useful. These are clues about what you may still want from your work, even if its current form needs to change. Bonus 5 Minutes: Choose One Experiment Identify one small change you can test during the next two weeks. You might:
The goal is to gather information before making a major decision. Why it Works Clarity often comes through testing. A small experiment can reveal whether you need a boundary, a different role, or a more significant transition. Pro Tip Choose an experiment that produces evidence. At the end of two weeks, you should be able to describe what changed, how it affected you, and what you want to try next. Your MoveWhere has your work stopped reflecting the values you want your kids to see? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response. Connect with DaveDave Albrechta is a mediator, coach, attorney, and recovering litigator who helps people navigate conflict, career transitions, and difficult decisions with greater clarity. Through his coaching and integrative legal work, Dave helps clients slow down, reconnect with what matters, and make decisions they can stand behind. Dave also hosts Lawyers as Healers, a podcast exploring how lawyers can approach conflict with more humanity, understanding, and compassion. It’s especially worth exploring if you work in law or another profession where the system’s incentives have started conflicting with your values. Follow Dave On his website: https://www.davealbrechta.com On LInkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-albrechta-9313ab11/ Check out his podcast, Lawyers as Healers: https://www.davealbrechta.com/lawyersashealers On the Show This WeekContinue the ConversationThis week’s conversation is about what happens when a career you worked hard to build begins pulling you away from the life you want. Dave shares how becoming a father exposed the growing gap between his professional identity, his personal values, and the behavior he wanted to model for his children. We also talk about the patience required to change direction without abandoning your responsibilities. Dave’s story offers a grounded look at career reinvention as a process of reflection, support, experimentation, and gradual change. In this episode, we discuss:
Check it Out🎧 Dave Albrechta on Redesigning Your Career Around What Matters Listen on your favorite podcast platform The Last LaughThat’s a pretty sweet counteroffer… |
