A Framework for Sustainable Work (Part 1)

Career Ecology Framework: A way of working shaped by ecosystems, not algorithms.

What if we stopped treating our careers like ladders and started tending to them like ecosystems: cyclical and in relationship with their environment?

---

Two years ago, in May, I found myself standing in the middle of a client’s freshly weeded garden bed dripping with sweat and tired in the good way.

I felt more myself than I had in years.

The job I’d just left with Elpha had been mission-driven with exceptional leadership, full of kind people, and generous autonomy. But still, I’d gone through the cycle of burnout. Like I had in every full-time role before that. For a long time, I believed the burnout meant I hadn’t found the right job yet.

So I kept tweaking the variables:

• Growth: At Buffer, I started my career in Customer Support, working in the business. And moved into People Ops, working on the business.

• Meaning: I left Buffer for Hipcamp, pulled by the mission to get more people outside.

• Autonomy: After Hipcamp, I worked alongside my sister to start her company. Then, onto consulting, hoping more control would mean more variation.

• Stability: I took the highest-paying Head of People job I was offered, supporting a B2B product I didn’t understand, thinking the ‘boring’ product would help me set boundaries.

• Back to Meaning: Stepping into the Head of Talent role at Elpha to build community for women in tech.

And every time a job felt good at first but then strained, I turned the blame inward. I told myself I was the problem. Too idealistic. Too impulsive. Too much in the wrong ways and not enough in the right ones. There’s a kind of grief that comes with realizing you’ve done all the ‘right things’, believe in the importance of your work, but still feel wrong inside of it. It is disorienting and more common than I think we talk about.

But the longer I spent searching and thinking about what I actually wanted, the more I realized:

There isn’t a right job. But perhaps there is a right relationship to work for different seasons of my life.

Maybe what I needed wasn’t a better match. I needed a better model.

The Meaning behind the ‘Right’ Job

The more my trajectory diverged from the People Ops leader path I had been building, the more I began questioning where that path originated in the first place.

I started to notice it wasn’t just me asking these questions. Friends, clients, coworkers, so many of us, were feeling stuck in the same pattern. Trying to wring meaning out of roles that no longer fit, instead of noticing that what we needed might be redirection, rest, or even release.

I’m not sure I can say it (anything!) better than Anne Helen Petersen:

“We are living under duress but with more relative ease and wealth than any other point in human history. We are waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to make a life: how to orient ourselves towards what matters, and what that even is.”

As Petersen and Labor Journalist Sarah Jaffe have both argued, our generation was sold the myth that the right job, pursued with enough passion and resilience, would lead to steady success and deep fulfillment.

When we believe our jobs are our primary source of meaning, we're more likely to:

• Ignore and suppress the signs of burnout

• Accept low pay and long hours because "we're doing meaningful work"

• Blame ourselves (whoops!) for the dissatisfaction, rather than questioning the structures around us

When we stop allowing work to be our primary source of identity and meaning, we can start to imagine healthier models for growth.

What Nature Teaches Us About Growth

So I started looking for more stories and models about alternative, even contrary, approaches to growth.

I was looking for a model that could hold the pendulums I was experiencing. One that accounted for them, rather than looked down on them. And one of the oldest, clearest models comes from our sweet, sweet earth. 🌎

That’s when I came across a teaching from Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), a holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, that reframed everything for me. While describing how everything in the natural world moves in circles–the sun, the moon, the seasons, the ways his people built their homes and communities–he said:

“The power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.”

Reading this, I felt something unlock.

The way we’ve been taught to think about careers as linear paths of constant growth is outdated, unsustainable, and disconnected from how natural growth works.

Plants bloom in specific seasons that best meet their needs. Forests require periods of rest, shedding, and even controlled burns to regenerate (don’t read this as set your career on fire. Or, maybe do!). In nature, dormancy isn’t lazy or unconventional. It’s part of a healthy cycle.

What if we let our careers grow the way ecosystems do? What if we had language to more objectively evaluate our internal environments and how our external environments influence them?

Not the throw-pillow version of trust the season you’re in, but a grounded, practical framework based on the emotional and professional cycles we all move through. A tool to support recognizing what type of work environment will meet your current needs vs. what you think you should want.

An Alternative Way to Think About Work, Borrowed from Ecology

This is the goal behind the Career Ecology Framework.

Rather than treating our relationship to work as a ladder to climb, it aims to account for careers as living systems. In reality, our relationship to work moves in cycles: seasons of renewal, momentum, questioning, and stillness.

The Career Ecology Framework has given me language to distinguish between:

• My internal experience (season)

• My external context (ecosystem)

• The relationship between them (match or mismatch)

And with this framing, I’ve been inching closer to an internal steadiness that helps me move through changes proactively, not reactively.

My hope is that recognizing what season you are currently in will make you a better and more sustainable career strategist. That it can help give you language to identify when you're in the wrong ecosystem and lead to action, small or big, to change that.

---

Up Next…

In the next post, learn more about the four seasons of the Career Ecology Framework and how to recognize which one you are currently in or moving toward.

---

---

Want to talk about this live?

If something in this post resonated with you, I’d love for you to join me in a live session called Find Your Fit: Reshaping Your Work, Not Yourself.

The deets:

• 🔥 Hosted by: Campout, a digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious. The crew at Bonfire lovingly cares for this community.

• 📆 Join live: Wednesday, May 7 @ 12pm EST

• 💌 RSVP: here!

---

For the Comments

💬 I’m curious: If you had to guess, what season do you think you’re in right now?