How three levels of career belonging changes everything
Lately, I've been thinking A LOT about the three levels of belonging because there's so much correlation to how we think (and don't think) about our careers.
The three levels of belonging are:
Belonging to self
Belonging to others
Belonging to something bigger than self
These levels of belonging were developed by Neil and Penny Barringham. They worked for years in community development in Australia, supporting people who were socially isolated, vulnerable from mental health issues and didn't know how to reconnect with their communities.
The Barringhams used these three levels to help the people they served make sense of their situations. Ultimately, their work was published in the Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health because there is a spiritual element in understanding these three levels.
For my research, I've been adding the word career so the concept becomes the "three levels of career belonging" which shifts the framework to:
Your career belongs to you
Your career belongs to others
Your career belongs to something bigger than you
For reference, my definition of career belonging:
Career belonging is being seen, known, and valued for who you are and what you do in your work by your self, others, and/or something bigger than you.
As I've mentioned in older newsletters, I believe the majority of people in the workforce are striving to achieve a sense of career belonging but they haven't known what to call it. Instead, most of us say we're striving to find career fit, when the word "fit" is about fitting in or fitting a mold, and honestly, I've yet to meet anyone who wants to be put in a box.
I believe applying these three levels of belonging to our careers changes everything, like how we:
talk and ask questions about our careers
see ourselves and how we want to be seen in our careers
make decisions about our career goals
navigate our career paths
uncover what we value in our careers
understand what success means in our careers
and the list could go on...
The essential question we need to start with when talking about our careers is:
Which level of your career belonging are you referring to?
This completely changes the focal point and adds new points of view.
Imagine, a friend comes to you because she's facing a difficulty in her career. She was just laid off or her employer doesn't value her and she feels stuck.
In addition to empathizing and offering support, you ask her, "How does your career belong to you? How does it belong to your employer? And, how does it belong to something bigger than you?"
These three levels shift the conversation. Each level of career belonging has different attributes, associations, values, and purpose in a person't life.
HOW TO USE THE 3 LEVELS TO ACHIEVE CAREER BELONGING
Honestly, right now I'm working on a Career Belonging Matrix (draft title) to help people achieve career belonging. The purpose of the matrix is to act as a self-assessment to help you understand how well you feel seen, known, and valued in each level of career belonging. This way you can identify gaps in your self-knowledge and adjust accordingly. The end goal will be a personalized set of career belonging action statements that help you achieve career belonging in all three levels. All this info will be part of my next book.
Until we pause to call out the existence of three levels of career belonging, they remain enmeshed together. What you call your career is actually a confabulation of stuff: your stuff, society's stuff, your boss's stuff, and too many other variables which bog you down.
This is why I LOVE the three levels. For the first time, it helps us parse out what's yours and what's not, what you have ownership and control over, how you want to show up in each level of career belonging and what steps you need to take to achieve more belonging.
This is why people lose their power and confidence in their careers. We get too focused on our career belonging to others ("Why didn't I get the promotion? ...My team doesn't understand me...My career path is dead...), and we don't realize the other two levels exist.
WHY CAREER BELONGING MATTERS
From my professional identity work, which was the precursor to this research, I realized these two topics (professional identity and career belonging) fit hand and hand.
First, you need to know who you are in your work, beyond your job title, so you can communicate your unique value and not sound like generic word soup.
Second, you need to know how your professional identity connects to the workforce, which is about defining career belonging instead of career fit.
As a result, you will feel seen, known, and valued by your self, by others, and by something bigger than you for who you are in your work, which is a basic and universal human need.
This is the full enchilada in my mind.