Choosing Between Career and Lifestyle: Not Always an Either-Or Proposition

All your exes live in Texas. So you won’t take the job there. But the man of your dreams is in Ely, Nev., just off Route 50--”The Loneliest Road in America.” That’s where you should go to work.

But wait. If you stay here (even though you’re not sure you like the city), you could make partner in a year or so.

Then again, you really love San Francisco. Hiking on weekends, near the water, great road trips, cool people . . . maybe you should just move there and then look for a job.

Many considerations go into choosing a job. It’s just a matter of what’s most important to you. Is it the place? The people you are going to be near? Or the job itself?

There is no right answer. Some people have taken high-powered Wall Street positions even though they hate New York City. Others have ditched fast-paced jobs to move to Montana. And there are those lucky folks who have the best of all worlds. Like Lin Raether, a nurse with a case of wanderlust who finds work in the place of her choice.

Now is the time to be young and in the workplace, said Ron Krannich, president of Manassas, Va.-based Impact Publications, a workplace-related publishing company: “It’s a booming job market right now.”

You can pretty much chart your own path if you play the game right.

“Make that lifestyle choice.”

That’s what Krannich tends to tell people wondering what to do with their lives. “I’m a proponent to tell people to follow those dreams,” he said. That’s not surprising when you look at the books he and his wife, Caryl, have written: “International Job Directory,” “Jobs and Careers With Nonprofit Organizations” and the upcoming “Jobs for People Who Love to Travel.”

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‘Careers are fine, jobs are fine, but it’s really the lifestyle, family, culture that’s important,” Krannich said.

“Pick a place that you’d really enjoy going to,” he advised. Tons of jobs are available in spots abroad. He recommends first focusing on where you want to live, then on finding the job.

“Do it while you can,” he warned. “People get locked into mortgages” and other responsibilities, curtailing their freedom to hit the road.

How do you choose among location, career and personal issues? You don’t have to, said Nicholas Lore, director of the Rockville, Md.-based Rockport Institute, a career-coaching organization, and author of “The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success.”

“Probably the biggest mistake that people make when they’re faced with that kind of a choice is that the human brain tends to think ‘either-or,’ ” he said.

It’s like someone weighing a vacation in Paris or at the beach, he said. It might not ever occur to the person that he can vacation in Paris and go to the beach too (or, for those of us on a budget, go to McDonald’s and Max’s Best Ice Cream).

“I think the most important advice that I could give people who are faced with this choice is, do their best to discover a way to have it all,” he said.

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Easier said than done? Maybe. But Lore said many people, simply by recognizing it’s possible, “looked at their own situations and stepped back and designed a career that had all of it.”

Admittedly, if your dream job is in San Francisco but your family is in Pittsburgh, the solution may not be that simple. That’s when you set your values in a hierarchy, Lore said.

“It pays to look inside of yourself,” he said. “Instead of facing the choice straight-on, step back and look and assess and sort out what’s most important to you.”

And be careful whom you listen to, he cautioned. “One’s peers tend to discourage the possibility that one can have it all.”

And here’s an example of having it all:

Travel nurse Raether, 46.

“We get the best of everything,” said Raether, who has been a travel-nurse off and on for about 15 years.

Nurses take a one-year contract with a travel-nurse agency and make a “wish list” of places where they want to work, explained Robbie Agnew, senior staff recruiter of the Professional Nursing Service Division of Bonneville Health Recruiters.

They can be placed in their wish-list area for a three-month stint, with the possibility of extending the contract. The agency provides housing, and nurses are usually paid an amount above their normal salary.

For the most part, they have their choice of locations--they’re in great demand nationwide. Some nursing programs even offer jobs abroad.

Raether’s favorite assignment was on a Navajo reservation. She’s worked in Hawaii and in a prison. She’s been an emergency room nurse, an ob-gyn nurse, a generalist. “It broadens your career,” said Raether, now in Racine, Wis. “It’s an incredible way to see the country.”

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Amy Joyce writes for the Washington Post.