Kinga Malec · 19 September 2026
“What does fulfilment look like to you?”
It’s a question I often ask when someone tells me that they’ve built a successful career, but somehow it no longer feels fulfilling. And very often this question makes people pause and think for a long while. We spend a lot of time defining what we want to achieve in our careers: the next promotion, a certain salary, more responsibility, a particular company or title. Yet, we spend much less time asking ourselves what actually makes a career fulfilling to us. And perhaps even more importantly: whether our answer to that question is still the same as it was ten or fifteen years ago.
Whose definition of success are you using?
When I graduated from business school in 2011, I had a fairly clear picture of what a successful career looked like: a prestigious corporate job, a good starting salary and, ideally, a company name that impressed people when you told them where you worked. International graduate programmes were particularly attractive at that time. The possibility of moving countries every six or twelve months added another layer of prestige: you weren’t simply building a career, you were building an international career.
Then came promotions. Every two or three years, another step. More responsibility. A better salary. And, of course, a more impressive title. I still remember telling people that I’d had my annual review and received a promotion. One of the first questions would often be: “What’s your new title?” Interestingly, I cared much less about the title. I was usually more interested in negotiating the salary. All of these things — progression, money, titles, international experience, business travel and the lifestyle that came with them — were part of the picture of professional success I had grown up with.
Some of that definition undoubtedly came from the world around me. Family, peers, university, corporate culture, society and even the images of success we absorb through films and television all influence what we think a successful life is supposed to look like. But I don’t look back at that period and think I was living somebody else’s life.
I genuinely enjoyed it.
I loved having an international career. I travelled extensively. I progressed. I learned enormously. My corporate career gave me leadership experience, resilience and a commercial foundation that I rely on today as a business owner. That’s why I don’t particularly like career transition narratives that suggest everything that came before the change was somehow wrong. Outgrowing a definition of success doesn’t mean it was the wrong definition for you then. Sometimes you simply arrive at a point where the things that used to matter most don’t carry quite the same weight anymore.
What matters to us can change
As I moved through my thirties, other things became increasingly important to me: freedom, independence, time with family and friends and, particularly, having greater control over my own time. “Freedom” can sound rather abstract until you think about what it actually means in everyday life. For fourteen years of corporate life, I knew that certain periods of the year simply weren’t mine. September and October meant budgeting. Holidays were difficult or impossible. The same applied to other particularly busy periods. Imagine receiving an invitation to a great trip with friends one year in advance for the end of September and already thinking: If I’m still in this job, I’m probably not going to be able to go. Or wanting to sign up for an evening language class, only for another last-minute work requirement to appear. None of these things individually made me dislike my career. But gradually I understood that control over my time had become much more valuable to me than it had been earlier in my career.
Today, my working life can look rather strange from the outside. Some weeks I work across the weekend. I attend networking events on Sundays. I have coaching calls in the afternoon and late evening. I host webinars at midnight to fit the time difference with the US. There are certainly weeks when someone could look at my calendar and say, “You work all the time.” And yet I experience considerably more freedom. I’m not a morning person (never been). I like having a slow coffee, eating breakfast without rushing and starting my day gradually. Whenever possible, I therefore structure my meetings and coaching sessions later in the day. Someone else might prefer five intense days in an office followed by a completely protected weekend. For me, having control over my mornings can be more valuable than that arrangement. That’s the important part: freedom doesn’t necessarily mean working less. For me, it means having greater ability to choose the trade-offs myself.
Knowing the name of a value isn’t enough
This is why identifying your values is only the beginning. Two people can both say that freedom is one of their most important values and mean completely different things. For one person, freedom might mean working from anywhere in the world. For another, it means deciding their own working hours. Someone else wants autonomy over which projects they work on. And another person may be perfectly happy working from an office every day, but wants the authority to determine their own business priorities.
The same applies to family. For one person, valuing family might mean having every weekend completely protected from work. For another, it means having enough energy when they come home in the evening to be genuinely present with their children. For somebody else, it means being able to say: “My child is starting school this week and I want to be there”, without having to justify months in advance why that particular week matters.
And growth can mean learning through increasingly challenging responsibilities at work. Or it can mean having enough time and mental space outside work to study, read, create or pursue completely different interests.
So simply saying:
Freedom matters to me.
Family matters to me.
Growth matters to me.
doesn’t tell us very much yet.
A more useful question is:
What would I actually see happening in my everyday life if I were living according to this value?
Values also require trade-offs
There’s another reason values aren’t as simple as choosing your five favourite words from a list. Important values can pull us in different directions. Freedom matters enormously to me. So does financial stability. When I decided to leave corporate life and eventually build my own business, I didn’t suddenly stop caring about financial security because freedom had become more important. I prepared for the transition. I built savings. I made investments. I created enough financial leeway to give myself time to build something new. I don’t want to romanticise career change. Deciding that freedom matters to you isn’t, by itself, a reason to resign tomorrow. Sometimes the more useful question is: What would need to be true for me to live this value without unnecessarily sacrificing another value that’s equally important to me?
Last July, for example, I decided to spend four weeks travelling around Europe and spending time with friends and family. I still had a handful of coaching calls, but I deliberately worked much less. That meant I earned less that month. It was a conscious trade-off. I decided that, at that particular moment, freedom and time with people important to me mattered more than maximising that month’s income. My previous financial preparation gave me the ability to make that choice.
Living according to one value doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning another. Sometimes it means creating the conditions that allow both to coexist.
Are you actually living the values you say matter to you?
There’s a difference between knowing your values and living according to them.
Someone can tell me that family is their most important value while routinely missing family events, answering emails throughout the weekend and coming home every evening too exhausted to engage with the people they care about. That doesn’t automatically mean family isn’t genuinely important to them. It gives us something to explore. What does family actually mean to them? How would they ideally like that value to show up in their life? How is their current working environment helping or preventing them from living it? And what would have to change?
The same applies to freedom, growth, achievement, stability, contribution or any other value.
Four questions can be surprisingly revealing:
What does this value mean to me?
How am I living it today?
How would I like to live it in the future?
What’s getting in the way?
Turn your values into career criteria
This is where values become useful for career decisions. If freedom matters to you, don’t stop at “I need more freedom.” Ask what freedom actually looks like to you. If your answer is control over my time, what would a working environment that provides that look like? Flexible working hours? Fewer last-minute demands? Hybrid work? Location independence? More autonomy over priorities?
Once you get specific, an abstract value starts becoming a set of criteria against which you can evaluate real career options. And this is also why feeling unfulfilled doesn’t automatically mean you need an entirely new career. Perhaps the work itself still suits you, but the environment no longer does. Perhaps your priorities have genuinely changed. Perhaps you’ve achieved the version of success you spent fifteen years pursuing and are ready to define what success means for the next stage. Or perhaps you’re questioning for the first time whether some of the criteria you’ve been using to measure success were ever really yours.
Those are different situations. They may require very different decisions.
Before asking “What should I do next?”, ask a different question
When something no longer feels right professionally, it’s tempting to jump immediately to solutions. Should I change companies? Should I change industries? Should I start my own business? Those questions matter. But I wouldn’t necessarily start there.
I’d start with: What does fulfilment look like to me now? Not ten years ago. Now. Not according to your peers. Not according to your family, LinkedIn, a famous life coach on Instagram or whatever definition of success you absorbed when you were 22. Because sometimes the career hasn’t fundamentally changed. The criteria by which you’re judging a good career have. Understanding those criteria can be the first step towards figuring out what should come next.