EP27: Put your career privilege to work!
It is absolutely true that many people are not in a position to quit their corporate job and pursue purposeful, regenerative work. If you need your job to pay the bills and put food on the table, this podcast is not for you.
However, if you recognize that you have reached a stage in your career with more options than most, it's time to understand what career privilege means—and decide how to use it.
In this episode, I explore my understanding of career and financial privilege, the role it has played in my own career transition, and why I am so passionate about guiding people to use their advantages to create meaningful change.
Learn about the opportunity those of us with career privilege have to help deconstruct capitalistic, corporatized systems, build better ways of working, and give back.
Discover how you can actively restore nature, create and serve communities, and play an active role in meeting the challenges of climate change.
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Full Transcript
Alisa: Do you know what feels really comfortable to me? When I come to a podcast episode with it kind of perfectly scripted in my mind, and I just feel so confident in what I'm going to say, and the outline and the structure are perfectly clear to me, and I can just focus on this really kind of polished delivery.
You know what's really uncomfortable? When I talk about subjects that really test my comfort zone. When I'm right at the edge of what feels natural to me to talk about, and when I'm straying into challenging, potentially controversial, new, difficult topics, and then all of a sudden I'm having to I feel my way into it, and I'm having to trust myself, and I'm having to deal with my own emotions and my own perceptions around how it might be received.
But you know what? I don't believe that what we talk about here at Regenerative Worklife is supposed to be comfortable. I don't believe that what we talk about here at Regenerative Work is supposed to be comfortable. I believe this is all about stretching our comfort zone and being vulnerable and trying things out and putting ourselves out there and be willing to make mistakes and get uncomfortable.
So I am leading by example and I'm going to talk to you today about a subject that is tricky to talk about. And that subject is privilege. Specifically, career privilege and what we can choose to do about it.
Welcome to Regenerative Worklife. I'm Alisa Murphy, and if you are ready to step out of the corporate grind and into regenerative work that brings you life, then you have come to the right place.
Thank you so much for joining me. So today's topic was inspired by a comment that I received on my YouTube channel, and it read, "I've been poor. When you come visit us, the 99.9 percent of humanity from your ivory tower, I think you'll find that most people work what they can find to pay the bills". Okay, so my first response to this was kind of, ouch!
I do find in general that YouTube comments tend to be quite aggressive in tone, but this was definitely at the more constructive end of the scale. I've had really personal, insulting comments. I had one that simply read, What is she talking about? This commenter is making a really good point.
By the way, if you want to come and tip the balance in favour of slightly more supportive comments on my YouTube channel, you can find me @regenerativeworklife and I would love for you to come visit and subscribe.
So yes, "when you come visit us, the 99 percent of humanity from your ivory tower, I think you'll find that most people work what they can to pay the bills". I absolutely agree with this comment. And I think what's happened is, this was actually a comment on one of my YouTube shorts, which are short extracts from my podcast episodes that get taken completely out of context.
You know, the way the algorithm works is it kind of pushes the shorts out, tests out who might be interested. So, of course, someone seeing this has no idea of the wider context of my business and what I talk about. And something that I try to be Really clear about is the fact that, unfortunately, this work, as things are today, is not accessible to most people.
I am not trying to pretend that everyone is in a position where they can quit corporate. and explore regenerative opportunities. I recognize that, unfortunately, that is a select small percentage of the population. Specifically, it's a percentage of the population that enjoys a certain amount of career and financial privilege.
That is my audience. That is who I am here to serve. What I am really interested in is how can people who recognise that privilege choose to do something with it that matters, that makes a difference, that potentially even plays a role in dismantling the very systems that are creating this inequity. So, if you do happen to be listening to this podcast, or you see this as a clip, and you are in a corporate job and you have really good reasons to be in that job.
So let's say, I, it could be absolutely anything. It's not for, I'm not trying, it's not for me to say what a good reason it is. You may be in that job because it allows you to support your family, to pay your bills, to put food on the table, because you have, I don't know, medical bills, um, you have debt that you need to pay off.
Even if it's, you're just in that corporate job because that is what feels good and right to you and you are happy being in that job, good for you. Like, carry on. I am absolutely not judging you. I'm absolutely not suggesting that everybody needs to quit working for corporate. Do what you need to do. This podcast isn't for you.
I'm delighted that you're here, I hope there may be tips from time to time that apply to everyone, but specifically my audience is for those who are lucky enough, privileged enough, to be in a position where they can make radical choices in their career. That is the position that I found myself in. I built and grew a successful company, I sold that company to my team, I had the financial privilege of the income from that sale, and I realised I was at a point in my career where I could really, really think about what it was that I wanted to do next, where I could take more risk than I had ever been able to before, where I could try something completely new.
And that is what brought me to the work that I do now. Helping professionals out of corporate and into regenerative work. I didn't have a blueprint for that. It meant starting out on my own, trying something new, but it mattered to me. I felt deeply that it was important work and I wanted to use the fact that I was in this position in my career to find a way to forge a new path, to give back and to help make a difference for other people.
So the chances are, if you're still listening at this point in the episode, that you recognize that you may also have that kind of career privilege. And I think I should mention that that doesn't mean that things feel easy to you. I think sometimes when we hear the concept of privilege, we, we sort of take that to the extreme.
We imagine that to mean that everything is just kind of laid out for us, is so easy for us, that there are no obstacles. I know I had a sort of similar misunderstanding when I first came across the concept of white privilege, and I felt, no, I haven't had a completely privileged existence. Well, no, I hadn't, but I had had a dramatically more privileged existence than people who didn't look like me.
And it took me a while to understand that, it took me a while to absorb that, but I began to see that my privilege was actually patently clear, that the obstacles that I faced were almost insignificant in comparison to the obstacles that people, for example, of the global majority might face taking the same journey.
So what that means is you may have career privilege and it might still be difficult for you to think about taking those first steps into regenerative work. Quitting your job may well mean that you need to make lifestyle changes or certain sacrifices personally or as a family. And yet, you may still recognize that you do have that possibility, even if it's going to be hard.
And you can also have privilege, even when things have been tough for you, when you've really had to work hard. I mean, I worked hard in my business for well over ten years before I got to the point where it was successful. But I also had a lot of privilege that helped me get there.
Now, just because you may recognise that you have career privilege and potentially financial privilege alongside of it, it doesn't mean that you have to make changes. It doesn't mean that you have to follow this path that I talk about out of corporate and into regenerative work. What you do with that privilege is entirely up to you.
But I suspect you're here because you don't want to use it to keep propping up the same system. I suspect you're here because you recognize the truth in what that commenter said on the YouTube, how inherently unfair it is that only a few of us get to make these kind of choices. I suspect you're here because you want to do something about that.
There's no obligation, but there is an incredible opportunity. An incredible opportunity to deconstruct those capitalistic, corporatized systems. An opportunity to build better ways of working. An opportunity to give back, to restore life, to use the position that you find yourself in to actively restore nature, to create and to serve communities, and to play an active role in meeting the challenges of climate change.
So if you are hearing this and this concept of career privilege is resonating to you, if you want to find out how you can use that privilege for good, to create change, that is what I am here to do. I would love to speak to you about the possibilities I see for your career. You can book a discovery call with me at regenerativeworklife.com/discovery.
Thanks for listening today.
Let's all see if we can push the boundaries of our comfort zones a little bit, because I don't believe we serve anyone by staying safe and cozy. We need to challenge ourselves. We need to push back.We need to break some limits and we can do that together.
I'll see you next week.
