To Find Meaning at Work, We Don’t Need Better Titles. We Need Sense-Making.
Climbing the ladder and collecting achievements hasn’t delivered meaning. What’s missing is sense-making, understanding how we create value, not just what we’ve accumulated.
By Elina ·
Earlier in my career, I liked attending career development events and leadership talks. There was often a panel, people with serious-sounding titles, long lists of credentials, and interesting career journeys.
At some point, someone would ask about their career strategy. And almost without fail, the answer would be the same: “I didn’t really have a strategy.” “Things just happened; you need to learn to go with the flow.” “I stayed open to opportunities.”
They would describe their careers as a sequence of events: ups and downs, lucky breaks, being in the right place at the right time. I remember feeling deeply frustrated by these answers. Back then, I think the frustration came from the lack of the right answers, the randomness.
When there is no master plan or formula, that means there is nothing we can replicate or apply.
Now, with some distance, I see something else in those stories that still bothers me, but for a different reason. The problem isn’t that modern careers don’t follow a clean strategy. I actually get it now. The randomness is real, and our control is very limited. We do need to be open to opportunities and go with the flow sometimes.
What bothers me now is that these stories from successful people were missing sense-making and self-awareness.
If your story of becoming to achieve professional success is just your résumé read aloud, it tells me almost nothing. I won’t be on that exact team, at that exact moment, launching that exact product. I won’t have your analytical strengths, or your charisma in that meeting where you stepped in for your sick boss and suddenly became visible. Those events are not replicable.
So the real question is: what is?
What would be useful is insight into the inner journey:
How did you learn to recognize the value you were creating?
What skills did you build to show that value at the right time, in the right way?
How did you define the values you relied on when things were unclear?
When career inspiration narratives come purely in the form of jumping from project to project, title to title, milestone to milestone, can we be surprised that we’ve ended up with a crisis of purpose and meaning? We focused so much on careers as ladders that we forgot to tell the story of where the ladder leads, and why we are climbing it.
Shaping a Coherent Value Narrative
In this article, I want to offer a different focus. I want to avoid falling into personal branding or elevator-pitch creation, and instead focus on shaping your fragmented experiences, your daily grind, frustrations, and small wins into a coherent narrative of value.
I also want to clarify that by value, I don’t mean self-worth. Your worth is not dependent on your profession.
I mean something more practical: the way you contribute, help, create, and make things better for others and meaning for yourself.
If this sounds still too vague, the business language for what I’m describing is product–market fit. Whether we like it or not, as professionals we are also offering something to the world, the market: our judgment, capacity, and way of working, the product. This matters whether you’re employed, freelancing, or building something of your own.
This understanding becomes an internal compass for career moves, promotions, role changes, or entirely new directions.
Below are a few ideas, borrowed loosely from product thinking, that can help you define your own professional value proposition.
If you want to go through a more in-depth thinking exercise, I’ve also created a custom GPT that guides you through these questions and helps summarize and reflect your insights back to you. Send me a DM or comment “Value,” and I’ll share the link.
1. Recognize Patterns
To get to the essence of anything meaningful, we usually have to spend time in ambiguity.
When I worked on strategy with teams, I encouraged them to block time just to sit with the data, research, observations, messy inputs.
It’s uncomfortable and nothing makes sense at first. But only by staying there long enough do patterns begin to surface.
Careers are no different, but we often say, “It’s all the same. I’m just busy.”
But we’re doing things without noticing what we’re doing.
For example, you might complain about spending most of your time in meetings, but:
Are you the one who structures them?
The one who challenges assumptions?
The one who pushes toward a decision when everyone else is stuck?
We stop seeing patterns in our contributions when we only see the routine.
Reflection question:
Across different roles or domains, what type of situation or problem do you keep finding yourself in?
This is your market pull, the recurring problem that seems to exist before you even arrive.
2. The Pressure You Step Into
This isn’t just about what you do. It’s about who needs you. Who is under enough pressure that they’re willing to “hire” you, formally or informally, to help?
What does that pressure feel like for them? We are often so consumed by the problem and by finding solutions that we forget to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are helping.
Imagine you walk into a meeting where your peers are going in circles. They feel stressed and frustrated, and no one really knows where to start because everyone is new to the system. You’ve worked with this system for the past year. You’re able to ask the right questions, diagnose the issue, see something they don’t, and connect it to their context. You point them toward where to start, what to avoid, and who to talk to next.
You might not feel like you did something spectacular, but they say, “This was extremely useful.” Without your clarification, your ability to diagnose and connect the pieces, they would have spent weeks longer under pressure with no progress.
Reflection question:
What pressure are these people under that they can’t realistically opt out of?
3. Your Uniqueness
Many people can solve the same problem, but not everybody solves it in exactly the same way.
Your uniqueness isn’t a rare credential. One key component of it is your philosophy, your professional beliefs and your approach.
For example, one question I return to again and again, whether in business planning or coaching, and which has become part of my philosophy, is: What is the real problem we are trying to solve?
I believe that jumping to solutions before understanding “what is” often wastes energy in the long run. My approach emphasizes that finding the right problem is already half the solution, and that having a problem is not the biggest problem. This means bringing acceptance to the current situation, without panic or urgency to fix things, and working from where we are now.
Your uniqueness doesn’t need to be flashy. But when it’s a combination of skills, experience, values, and worldview, it becomes difficult to replicate. I like to think of it as a secret formula with a specific set of ingredients in particular proportions.
This metaphor also opens space for experimentation. Which ingredient would you like to add, strengthen, or rebalance?
Reflection question:
What ingredients make your professional contribution unique (philosophy, experience, skills, etc.)?
4. Assumptions You’re Making
Sense-making is not about finding absolute truth. It’s about working with incomplete information.
When you describe your professional value, you are inevitably making assumptions about yourself, others, and the world.
The danger isn’t making assumptions on its own, but being unaware of them. I remember seeing research where leaders assessed their own competencies and those assessments were cross-referenced with employees’ evaluations of the same competencies. Researchers regularly observed a bias toward favourable self-views.
The discrepancy itself isn’t necessarily the problem. It can result from expected differences in perspective. Employees don’t have full visibility into leaders’ interactions. However, it often highlights a lack of feedback loops and self-reflection, and as a result, lower self-awareness, particularly awareness of how others perceive us.
The opposite situation can also occur. You may feel under-appreciated in a culture where feedback is rare, and where contributions are taken for granted without explicit recognition.
Reflection question:
What assumptions am I making about myself and the world when I describe my professional positioning?
How can I collect more evidence of my contribution? Do I need to ask for more feedback from the people I work with to better understand why they value my input?
5. Your Aspirations
Finally, this is not a static exercise. You are evolving and changing, and so are the demands of the context around you.
You might feel like you’re just beginning, or that something no longer fits. As you build more understanding of where you are now and how your narrative brought you here, the question becomes: where do you want to go from here?
You are already contributing not only through what you know today, but also through your future orientation, your curiosity, desire to learn, to master, to share knowledge. These may feel like seeds of the future, but they already shape how you respond and interact now.
Reflection question:
What is the single most important change I want to make in the way I contribute professionally in the next six months?
Final Thought
Making sense of your career isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about understanding what you already carry and choosing where to take it next.
To support this process, I’ve built a guided reflection tool (a custom GPT) that walks you through these questions and reflects your insights back to you, helping with both sense-making and sense-checking. If you’re interested in trying it, send me a DM or comment “Value,” and I’ll share the link.
Originally published on Substack.