Eight Reasons Empaths can have late blooming careers
I'm writing this on the eve of my 40th birthday reflecting back on my journey so far. Firstly I felt lucky to be alive as I know that's not a given. But then a sneaky inner self critic quickly crept in ‘Well I'm really not where I expected to be with my career, I failed there’. I immediately caught that negative voice and thought ‘ouch!’. Then I asked myself ‘well why is that? There will be reasons why I have not ‘fulfilled’ my expectations in that area of my life’ - yet!
It led me to think of many conversations I've had with my highly sensitive clients and friends, many of whom also have echoed a similar frustrated sentiment, a sense of not having fulfilled their potential yet. So I thought, what is it about our journey as Empaths that may cause limitations on the way and make some of us late bloomers in our careers?
Idealists with heart
Many Empaths I work with are caring, often creative, idealists. Being sensitive by nature leads them to feel deeply moved by both the pain and the beauty in the world. This can often lead to careers as creatives, healers, health or holistic practitioners, carers, working in the arts, or for non-profit organisations. As idealists we can strive to make the world a better and more beautiful place, initiating a desire to help others, perhaps sacrificing your time, energy or financial needs to better a cause that you're working for. Perhaps not pushing for promotions to stay with an organisation or raising your business rates inline with your skills to keep people happy.
As often Empaths are natural ‘givers’ (as we receive great satisfaction from this) but this isn't always sustainable for our own well-being or capacity which can reach a tipping point at a certain stage in our lives where we need to rebalance. Sometimes we give without being able to receive - on many levels, which can lead to exhaustion or burn out, financial deficit or lack of personal time and other ventures such as a need for a spiritual or creative life, quality family time etc. We can reach a point where we have to re-evaluate and assess any limiting beliefs we may have in these areas to rebalance and also learn to ‘receive’.
Hard to hear your own inner voice
As an Empath sometimes it can feel difficult to have a sense of your own inner voice. This is because it's being crowded out by the emotional input that you can feel from others. Your boundaries are much more porous, so it's easy to pick up on the needs, drives and emotions of others - which can leave you confused, lacking in clarity, as to what are your desires and those which are not yours.
As you can be absorbed by the emotions of others, you may have the tendency to put the opinions of others first as they feel so strong. Your acute awareness of the feelings of parents, partners, teachers… the pain of sensing disapproval and the presence of self questioning may mean you defer to the opinion of others and put their thoughts before your own.
You may talk yourself out of your own dreams, compromising and going with the majority or mainstream as your inner voice is too quiet to direct you. You may also have set yourself aside to suit the majority of the family, caring for others, perhaps staying at home with the children or by becoming a caregiver in the family when others could be available, stepping in the role of nursing a sick family member, when actually you have other ambitions too.
Over time, however your inner voice was silenced, there may be a growing resentment, or a deepening pull towards the calling you originally sensed, even if gently, which could lead you toward switching careers later on and starting later.
Need to work differently as a HSP
When you're highly sensitive you quite often need to structure your work life differently which can take time to realise and effort to create. This might mean coming to the realisation that you need to make a shift in the kind of work that you do and perhaps retraining is necessary - as I did, which takes time to transition and build.
If being in a busy office environment, with phones ringing, people interrupting you, with ongoing meetings, being the unofficial office counsellor to colleagues or clients etc, is leaving you completely drained at the end of the day with nothing left for yourself, it might be time to rethink how you work, where you work or even if the industry you’re in suits you.
We are sensitive to our environments. If they don't work for us and support our wellbeing we can become overwhelmed or burnt out. We can never eliminate all stress, but we often can reduce it by choosing to work differently. That’s been my experience.
Support Systems
As highly sensitive people, we need to develop a network of friends and colleagues who understand us to be part of our support system. It can feel lonely being more sensitive than those around us and we can need help to balance out the areas we might struggle with as an Empath and advocate for ourselves. This support network can help us assert professional boundaries, navigate conflict if that’s uncomfortable for us, stand true to our beliefs and ourselves if we feel drowned out by the emotions of others for example.
It can take time to grow that support network, to find our tribe of cheerleading friends, colleagues, clients or coaches who deeply value our sensitive abilities. Who help you along by giving guidance and pointing out new paths or ways to use your abilities - as our way can often be different from the norm and we need to find a career that suits our temperament letting our gift of sensitivity and intuition shine.
Those mentors who champion your work are absolutely golden, they can be the difference between sticking or quitting on some days, I speak from grateful experience! We all need a community to grow and it can take time to find like-minded souls who understand us, our unique challenges and gifts, but they are out there waiting for you.
Hard won lessons on healthy boundaries
Empaths, often as emotional caretakers for others, can sometimes find themselves in sticky situations with people who will take advantage of that understanding such as narcissists, energy vampires and generally toxic people. Narcissists can show up in different realms of our life including work and highly sensitive people, due to their empathic nature, can struggle to create healthy and reasonable boundaries, when it comes to saying no, calling out unacceptable behaviour or simply walking away when needed. We are often trying to excuse actions and be compassionate, but end up neglecting the need to be kind to ourselves as well.
We can, in those situations, end up living with emotionally abusive behaviours at work such as bullying, manipulation, being controlled or held back, undermined, which are detrimental to our mental health and well-being, as well as our careers. These experiences can not only be derailing but you also may need to heal from emotional fallout and the damage to your confidence, alongside needing to extract yourself from the situation all of which can take time and energy. If this sounds familiar to you and you’re still stuck in it or haven’t recovered, I would advise getting some support.
Healing Health Problems
Our bodies are the storehouse of our emotional experiences and when you're sensitive stress can impact you physically, sometimes significantly more than others - as our high sensitivity includes registering pain! Living with a chronic health condition, injury or pain can be like a rope that holds you down, creating limitations in many ways - including your career. I know this from experience.
If, like me Western medicine can't offer you ‘the cure’ you need, you might find yourself turning to alternative practices for answers or help. This exploration can lead to a mind opening adventure as you discover a different understanding of the relationship between mind and body, and impact of our emotional wellbeing on our physical health.
So sometimes illness comes as a messenger, demanding we stop, reflect and go deeper to find answers to restore physical health. To examine ourselves and feelings we have bottled or denied that may be presenting in the body. The healing journey may just take you down different career paths like me, be enlightening or help you live differently.
Healing Overwhelm Journey
If you are in the throes of panic and overwhelm or chronic anxiety, or have been, which can happen more easily to Empaths - your mental health isn’t in a state to enable you to focus on being ambitious in your career as you're simply trying to survive. This was definitely the case for me, trying to survive the next internal hurricane of overwhelm, then calibrate after the storm, start trying to rebuild but always feeling on the back foot, waiting for the next storm front. No one can thrive in those conditions.
Some Empaths need to do deep healing, to recover, ground and restore - journey to a new landscape within with a gentler emotional weather system, to then be able to see the blue skies to vision as well as have the resources you need to start to grow and flourish.
Realising your gifts of sensitivity (and that you’re not failing)
Coming to understand your true nature in reality can take time and experience, training and mentorship. In a youth idolising culture whose gods are productivity and success, it’s easy to unwittingly absorb the ‘successful millionaire overnight at 25’ etc stories on social media that can leave you feeling like a failure.
If however you had no idea that you were highly sensitive and just thought you couldn't cope like other people, concluding there was something wrong with you - it can take time to realise what's really going on let alone, understand and capitalise on the gifts your sensitivity has to give to the world. That was certainly the case for me.
When you start to nurture and develop your sensitivity - something magical happens, you birth your intuitive powers. This intuition becomes an ability you can use in decision making in business, in deepening understanding in relationships, in managing and manning your boundaries with your first class bullshit radar (!) able to trust your knowing, in developing a rich spiritual life and beautiful connection with the magic that lives in the mundane. Living true, in dialogue with your naturally highly intuitive radiant sensitivity.
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