When Career Anxiety Strikes I A Guide to Confidence in your Career

Finding Your North Star: A Simple Values Exercise for When Career Anxiety Strikes

I’ve noticed something lately in conversations with colleagues, friends, and clients: there’s a particular flavour of anxiety that shows up when we’re feeling unmoored in our careers. It’s not quite burnout, and it’s not exactly dissatisfaction… it’s more like a nagging sense that something’s off, even when things look fine on paper.

If you’ve felt this way, you’re not alone. And I want to share a grounding exercise that’s helped me and many others cut through the noise when career direction feels uncertain.

The Three-Part Framework

When anxiety about your career path creeps in, it’s often because one (or more) of three core values has drifted out of alignment. I think of these as the three legs of a stool! When one wobbles, everything feels unstable.

1. Meaningful Work

This is about purpose and impact. It’s the answer to “why does this matter?” Your meaningful work doesn’t have to change the world (though it can). It might be solving elegant problems, helping people directly, creating something beautiful, or building systems that work.

The question to ask yourself: Does the work I’m doing feel significant to me? Not to anyone else, to YOU. When you talk about your work, does your voice change? Do you lean in or pull back?

2. Relational Energy

We spend so much of our lives at work, and the people around us shape that experience profoundly. This value is about the quality of your professional relationships and the energy exchange that happens daily.

Consider: Do my work relationships generally give me energy or drain it? Are you surrounded by people who challenge you to grow, who you trust, who make the hard days bearable and the good days joyful? Or do you feel like you’re constantly bracing yourself?

3. Value Recognition (Financial + Intellectual)

This is the two-sided coin of being seen and compensated appropriately. Financial recognition means being paid fairly for your contribution and experience. Intellectual recognition means your ideas are heard, your expertise is respected, and your growth is supported.

Ask yourself: Am I being valued for what I bring? Not just in salary, but in opportunities, in decision-making power, in the way your contributions are acknowledged?

Using This as a Grounding Tool

Here’s how to put this framework into practice when career anxiety shows up:

Take fifteen quiet minutes with a notebook. Draw three columns (or three boxes, or three circles – whatever speaks to you). Label them with these three values.

In each column, write honestly about where you are right now. Not where you think you should be, not where you were last year. Right now.

• Which value feels strongest and most aligned?
• Which one is causing the wobble?
• What specifically about that area feels off?

This isn’t about making immediate changes. It’s about clarity. Because once you can name what’s misaligned, the anxiety often loses some of its power. You move from “everything feels wrong” to “ah, I see – it’s specifically this.”

Sometimes you’ll discover you’re actually in better shape than you thought, and the anxiety was just noise. Sometimes you’ll realise one area needs attention, but the other two are solid. And sometimes, yes, you’ll see that significant change is needed, but at least now you know what kind of change.

The Permission to Check In

I want to normalise something: these values aren’t fixed. What felt meaningful to you five years ago might not resonate today. The relational energy that worked in one season might not serve you in another. Your definition of appropriate value recognition can and should evolve as you grow.

It’s not flaky to reassess. It’s honest.

Career direction anxiety often arrives when we’ve been running on autopilot, and something inside us is trying to get our attention. This framework is simply a way to listen.

A Question for You

If you had to rank these three values by how aligned they feel in your current role right now, what order would they fall in? I’d love to hear what resonates (or doesn’t) about this framework. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from the conversations these prompts spark.

Here’s to finding your footing, wherever you are on the path.

Hungry for more, check out the Career Accelerator here. Is it one day, or day one?