A Practical Guide to Finding A Career You Love

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A Practical Guide to Finding A Career You Love

According to a Business Insider article, the average person spends over 90,000 hours of their life working. This comes out to more than 10 straight years away from friends and family or hobbies and leisurely activities, and instead hunched over a desk, beside a hospital bed, on the phone with a client, taking orders from a table of guests, teaching a room full of rambunctious kids, working on a house’s electrical wiring, or one of the literally countless other activities that people in this country find themselves doing during the workday. In other words, the career we decide to pursue matters. And it not only has lifelong consequences for you, but for your larger community as well.

However, when it comes to selecting a career many don’t know where to begin. That’s why we created this guide. Inside you will find the following sections with helpful questions and worksheets included:

We can all recall those people who always seemed to know what they wanted to do. Maybe it’s that friend from elementary school who was always fascinated with planes and ended up flying them for a living, or that cousin who couldn’t help but be nurturing as a kid — be that to people or stuffed animals — and went on to nursing school. While your path might not be so clear cut, it doesn’t mean you can’t find a career that still brings you joy, satisfaction, and meaning.

Finding a career you love requires time, patience, trusting relationships and mentors, self-awareness, and even a little bit of risk. With that said, it’s important to note that not everyone, unfortunately, is capable of pursuing a career they love for reasons beyond their control. Perhaps because of family or financial obligations they can’t in good conscience look for another job, or maybe they have other health or psychological conditions that prevent them from doing so. Yet, even for some who find themselves in those situations, it still might be possible for them to move toward a better career fit — even if only incrementally over many years — and one day make the full time switch when circumstances allow. There are no shortage of examples of people who began a side gig selling framed calligraphy or playing guitar who eventually turned these things into full time jobs.

And yet, if you can’t currently make a career shift for good reasons, it’s still worth identifying the types of activities and engagements that excite and inspire you — the type of work that makes you come alive. It might be something that never commands a livable paycheck, but perhaps your gift for gardening, penchant for making people feel at ease and loved, or passion for lyrical poetry can be taken up after working hours as a way to not only invigorate and fulfill you, but also bring joy to those around you.

Whether you’re a student about to begin your career, currently in the middle of your career, or even retired from full time work, this modest guide will be valuable. Of course, finding a career you love isn’t ever as easy as reading an article online (unfortunately!), which is why it should be acknowledged that it’s a process that takes time. Finding a career you love involves exploring a host of complex and varied questions: What am I naturally suited to do? What am I passionate about? What do my tangible circumstances allow? What are my limitations? How has my experience and background prepared me for a certain type of work? What kind of environment, or people, fit me best? And what kind of impact will my work have in the world as an act of love and service?

Taken in this light, hopefully this guide can serve as a starting point — an invitation to begin thinking about these questions that will require time, effort, and commitment. At the end of each section, you’ll find a handful of questions to help you start thinking about finding a career you love. We encourage you to write out your responses to these questions, think hard about your answers, refer back to them again and again, and keep striving toward the worthwhile goal of finding an enjoyable and meaningful career that you love.

It’s precisely by approaching the question, “What should I do for a living?” in a serious and intentional way that marks the first step to being able to not only answer that question, but bring it to fruition in your life.

5 Steps to Find a Career You Actually Love (Like I Did)

Many of these people experience genuine dread at the thought of pushing through that revolving door at 8:55 a.m., latte shaking in hand. (To translate for 2020: Going downstairs, making yourself a cup o’ Joe, and slumping over the kitchen counter with your head buried in your arms.)

Many of my years becoming a professional writer were spent selling credit card terminals, administering insurance, and standing in shops handing out discount cards on behalf of a lawyer.

But, for most people, a job eats up 33 percent of your day. You might find that to be a prolonged enough period of misery to eat away at the things that genuinely make you happy, like relationships and having the goddamn energy to do anything.

Taking proactive steps to make money doing what inspires happiness has completely transformed the way I approach life. I thought I might share what I learned to help you spring out of bed for work.

Do you want to get paid for your hobby and do it non-stop? Are you trying to live the high life? Would you prefer stability for your family? Would you rather dedicate your life to fighting for causes you believe in?

Get your personal brand out there

Maybe even have a few headshots like a hungry actor ram-raiding agents around LA. The slicker your image, the clearer your level of investment in your new career becomes. And companies like invested people.

Make sure your personal brand is authentic, consistent, and tailored to each specific position for which you apply. Your brand should just be you. Because you, my friend, are totally worth selling to the world.

Many of my non-editorial jobs have been grinding, miserable experiences. On top of these, writing in my spare time meant that I was often working 15-hour days just to fit everything in.

If you’re in the same situation, you don’t need telling that it can suuuuuuuuuck. Boy, did those 8 hours a day stretch. As they warped and extended, so too did my spiraling depression and anxiety.

However, it’s important to know that not all crappy jobs are on the same level. I’ve had terrible jobs and terrible jobs. You can find yourself getting comfortable and even enjoying parts of a job that doesn’t suit you.

I took pretty much every job that made me miserable out of necessity, and going into any long-term situation without a strategy is a recipe for disaster. Doing so without knowing what you want can have even worse consequences.

I was lucky. I’ve known I wanted to write since I was first able to. But even with that certainty, what did I want to do with words? Editing? Writing? Proofreading? Marketing? Communications? News?

It’s very easy to get hit by option paralysis when you’re digging to find work you’d love, even for people like myself who already thought they knew. Here’s how I paved my own road to career contentment.

Unless you’re willing to take an internship of some kind, plunging headlong into your preferred industry without experience is going to take either a lot of extracurricular work or a small miracle.

That doesn’t mean crowing about achievements that haven’t happened or lying about your qualifications. Every single job has elements that you may enjoy or that allow you to surprise yourself with how good you become at them.

If you’ve no idea what your ideal job looks like, slowly build a FrankenJob. Taking an example from my own life, I sold ad space for a food industry publication for 2 months and got fired for… well, being sh*t at ad sales.

However, I knew that I didn’t want my next job to involve outbound calls and convincing people to buy stuff they didn’t need. That landed me in insurance, and the job met those requirements.

During my 3 years in medical insurance, I started writing whimsical Christmas e-mails and took over the newsletter. I also grew to love the world of medicine and the notion of helping people feel better.

It wasn’t journalism, but it was something I could say I did in an interview. With this said, the job was brutal and the public unforgiving. It was the final straw, but it wasn’t for nothing.

I stayed there until I saw a role come up at Medical News Today, one of Greatist’s sister sites. I managed to combine just enough clinical knowledge and just enough freelance writing experience to warrant an interview.

A job can make you happy for many reasons. It might afford you a lifestyle you like. The task itself might fill you with warmth and inspiration. You might love the effect the role has on the world, or you may just be fascinated by a particular industry.

Apply for as many jobs as you can, and not only for practice. You should take full stock of your emotions while you apply. Does it feel like a chore? Are you just applying for the sake of it? Complete the whole thing. Does it feel good afterward?

If you have these doubts and hang-ups during the application, imagine what 5 days of this every week would feel like. And then throw it in your bulging sack marked “Nope” and set it on fire.

Applying for a job, especially if you already have one you despise, should feel like an opportunity. You should want to get the application to the employer with the eagerness of a toddler showing off a finger painting, just to be able to start in the role sooner.

People often protect themselves from this excitement to temper expectations and cushion against fear of rejection and disappointment. However, it’s important to really feel that excitement.

Other career aptitude tests

The Self-Directed Search (SDS) is a career assessment test that matches people with jobs based on aspirations, competencies, activities, and interests. The result is a personalized report ranking and detailing how realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, or conventional you may be—a version of the Holland theory called RIASEC. Along with your personalized summary code, you’ll receive a list of careers with salary data as well as educational opportunities that best fit you and your results. The SDS also has specialized reports for veterans and students.

This test tells you which of the nine Enneagram types you are most like: the reformer, the helper, the achiever, the individualist, the investigator, the loyalist, the enthusiast, the challenger, or the peacemaker.

Formally known as the Clifton StrengthsFinder, this assessment tells you your top five out of a pool of 34 possible strengths. Muse career coach Elena Pastore often uses it with clients to “help them synthesize and understand what they are actually good at, what they thoroughly enjoy, and how to identify a job that is aligned.” It’s worth noting that “CliftonStrengths is not a personality assessment, and therefore cannot and should not be used to push people to a specific career path,” Pastore says. “This tool is best used to help individuals identify their talents and then determine what they need to thrive and what they bring to teams rather than predicting a specific career.”

After taking the quiz, you’ll get a customized report that lists your top five dominant talents, along with videos and supporting materials to help you achieve academic, career, and personal success.

Applicable across all areas of your life, the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is probably one of the most-used assessments by career centers and managers alike. “Many companies use the MB test to evaluate counseling, leadership training, and work-team development qualities,” says Muse career coach Steven Davis, a technical recruiter and owner of Renaissance Solutions Inc. So not only can your results point you toward possible jobs, but they can also “be a powerful tool for advancement, receiving recognition, and promotions.”

The MBTI gives you your personality preferences: where you get your energy, how you like to take in information, how you make decisions, and what kind of structure you like in the world around you. While these preferences can certainly point to careers that might suit you well, they can also give you a lot of valuable information about what kind of workplaces might be best for you, what your working preferences are, and how you can best relate to others at the office. When taking the test, Davis suggests that you “approach the test to discover more about who you are as a person,” as well as how you might communicate best and how others may perceive you.

This nonprofit research foundation has been studying innate human abilities and aptitudes since 1922. Its goal is to help people make informed decisions about their career paths based on the idea that the career someone finds most rewarding is the one that uses their natural aptitudes and strengths. By identifying those aptitudes, they help you home in on the fields that are most likely to bring you career satisfaction. Unlike most tests that can be taken online, these tests are only available at 11 testing centers across the country.

If getting to a center is not in your future (or the $850 price tag is too hefty!), you can get a taste for the Johnson O’Connor approach via a free career assessment test they developed for Oprah.com.

What is the best career test?

Different tools with resonate with different people, Pastore says. “Use that tool that works for you that you feel you can understand and identify with. If you don’t identify with any you’ve taken—that’s OK too!”

Source:

https://www.pointloma.edu/resources/practical-guide-finding-career-you-love
https://greatist.com/happiness/find-a-career-and-lifestyle-you-love
https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-11-best-career-quizzes-to-help-you-find-your-dream-job
A Practical Guide to Finding A Career You Love

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion And A Career You Love

I grew up in Siberia where my dad was a political journalist. He taught me to question everything around me and to take nothing at face value. My mom was a nonconformist by nature, best expressed by the fact that, if she wanted something, there was no stopping her. It didn’t matter how the system worked or what people around her thought or did. She set her own rules.

By the time I moved to the US when I was 16, I knew that I wasn’t going to accept an average 9-to-5 as a career. My time had to be spend on something big, all encompassing and long term and, most importantly, something I would be really passionate about and could really get behind. I set out for Cornell University determined to find my passion.

In college I moved quickly from one subject to the next looking for my passion, taking classes ranging from psychology to computer science, neuroscience, fine art and finally film. Although learning was always fun, I just couldn’t get sufficiently motivated by academic goals set in that artificial environment. This led me to leave Cornell only two classes short of graduation. I later found that solving real problems and building something around opportunities I discover is what I’m truly motivated by. Today, I’m fortunate to say that I have, in fact, found my passion and am doing what I love — building a startup around a set of problems that I believe need solving.

In the meantime, I continue to observe people of all ages around me struggle with finding a job they love. In looking at my own path of getting to do what I love, I’m observing four main lessons.

Many people hate their jobs and know that they want to do something different, but stay in their hated jobs for a long time nonetheless. Their main reason for not leaving is that they haven’t actually figured out what it is that they want to do. This thinking is flawed because you won’t learn or discover your ideal career or job by sitting around and thinking about it. If the current situation isn’t working, you need to find something else.

What happens when you leave even without knowing what you will do next is that, suddenly, figuring out your next steps becomes urgent. That urgency may be a bit uncomfortable, but it can also be incredibly powerful because it frees you up to invest all of your energy into finding the next thing. Finding the next thing goes from optional to required.

I personally have left several jobs prematurely, not only not knowing what I will do next, but also exited with no savings to see me through the period of not working. The very last job I left was a startup where I found myself wanting to do a lot more and the company not really needing what I wanted to give. I was at this startup for about nine months and found myself in a position where it felt that I was simply exchanging my time for money. Frustrated, I tried giving feedback to the management and eventually gave notice without much planning. To my surprise, I was offered two weeks of severance, which were much-much needed since I had no savings to hold me over.

Even though you may not have a clear vision for your career, you are probably curious about things which may or may not be obvious to you. It’s important to follow your curiosity and uncover your less obvious interests. The reason it’s important is that those interests tap into your unique motivations that separate you from others. Pursuing them sets you on the path of unlocking who you are and your creativity. Frequently, these will be things that do not appear pragmatic and sometimes may seem downright frivolous. A classic example is Steve Jobs’ curiosity for typefaces which led him to attend a seemingly useless class on typography and to develop his design sensibility. Later, this sensibility became an essential part of Apple computers and Apple’s core differentiator in the marketplace.

A good way to tune into these interests is to ask yourself what you would do if you had a billion dollars. By my third year of college, I looked through Cornell’s entire giant catalog and couldn’t get excited about any of the classes in it. I had sampled many of the disciplines and felt that I was at a dead end. Frustrated, I finally pushed myself to think about what I would be interested in doing if money were of no concern. To my surprise, that led me to fantasize about drawing and painting. I also realized that I perceived both of these disciplines as forbidden. I believed that my parents would disapprove and that it would be a highly impractical area of study to pursue. Yet, I also realized that I was genuinely excited about fine art and took the plunge which became an important stepping stone in my path.

My first startup was in New York City. At the time, I had college loans and limited income from freelancing as a video editor, and I lived with my dad and stepmom in New Jersey. One of the partners of my startup invested a small amount of money into the company — just enough to do the basics, such as open a small office in Manhattan. Commuting from my parents’ house was a pain, so I brought in a sleeping bag to our office, got a gym membership and would often stay at the office overnight. It was not ideal, but alternatives, such as spending my time on making money instead of working on the startup, didn’t make sense to me.

What Are You Naturally Gifted to Do?

One way to begin thinking about finding a career is to start with your natural abilities and gifts. Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D., wrote a book called Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, which serves as a comprehensive blueprint for finding work that aligns with your passions and talents and, consequently, leads to finding your “element.” In the book, Robinson breaks down the difference between aptitudes and abilities. Aptitudes are innate ways of being, and refer to inclinations and tendencies that are embedded within us as opposed to learned.

Think of that kid in school who could naturally grasp mathematical concepts with ease or the natural athlete on the blacktop who seemed to dominate in every sport. Abilities, on the other hand, are learned through diligent practice and experience. For that math wiz or natural athlete to find success in either of those endeavors, they will certainly have to increase their abilities through years of practice, hard work, and learning. And while someone can strive to make up for a lack of natural aptitude through hard work and practice, it will usually be harder for them compared to someone naturally gifted in that area.

It’s important to emphasize that this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue something because you may not be as naturally good at it as the next person, since passion and drive also play huge roles and you might still find tremendous success. However, your natural aptitudes can provide a starting point, since many people aren’t inclined to pursue activities that don’t come as naturally at the expense of pursuing ones that do.

Arthur Miller Jr. wrote a similar book to Robinson titled The Power of Uniqueness: How to Become Who You Really Are, which unpacks further the role aptitudes and our natural way of being can play in our career choices. Miller Jr. developed something called a Motivated Abilities Pattern (MAP), which captures the unique and unchangeable way each of us functions in the world. According to Miller Jr., “every time people do something they experience as satisfying and as done well, they are in fact repeating part or all of a recurring pattern of specific competencies and motivations.”

Every time people do something they experience as satisfying and as done well, they are in fact repeating part or all of a recurring pattern of specific competencies and motivations.

According to the theory, which is based on studying tens of thousands of individuals, we each have a unique constellation of traits, interests, natural abilities, and ways of interacting with other people. It’s not as simple as labeling one person a “people person” and another a “born leader,” but rather that we are all motivated to act and engage the world by a series of complex factors. Miller Jr. writes:

“Hand-in-glove with this idea came a growing awareness that the rich mix of talent and passion was not the result of anything a person had done or required or ‘become,’ but appeared to be completely inherent in that individual, a natural endowment that the person ‘just had.’ This suggested a name for the phenomenon we were observing: giftedness.”

Abilities – One’s natural abilities and talents, similar to what Robinson mentions in his book, such as musical ability, good with one’s hands, analytically-minded, persuasive, sociable, etc.

Subject Matter – The subject matter type (not the actual subject matter itself) that we naturally gravitate toward, such as abstract ideas and concepts, people and animals, numbers and figures, tools and machines, etc.

Payoffs – The reward for accomplishing a certain task, which might include the satisfaction from solving a problem, bringing systematic order to a system, gaining the reputation of others, having one’s work seen as unique, etc.

In order to determine what these five pillars are for an individual, Miller Jr. looks to the individual’s personal history and, specifically, three “achievement stories” that represent instances when the individual felt they accomplished something well that brought them satisfaction. While these stories can come from any period of life, it can be helpful to look at childhood because as children we may have had less societal pressure to conform to certain types of activities than when we’re older. These stories can entail anything, from working with a parent on a car’s transmission to teaching a sibling how to read to inspiring a little league team to victory. They constitute achievements that are deeply personal and meaningful to the individual, and so they shouldn’t be “obvious” achievements like earning good grades in school or winning a spelling Bee contest (unless those were truly meaningful events for the person).

From these three achievement stories it’s possible to observe certain themes that return over and over again. Perhaps someone always enjoyed accomplishing school-related projects because they have a natural affinity for ideas and concepts (Subject Matter). Maybe someone’s achievements always include collaborating with others, revealing their natural preference to inspire and work alongside peers (Operating Relationships).

Source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2014/07/02/3-practical-ways-to-find-your-lifes-passion-and-a-career-you-love/?sh=307818b71413
https://www.pointloma.edu/resources/practical-guide-finding-career-you-love
https://meratas.com/blog/career-you-love/
A Practical Guide to Finding A Career You Love

4 Practical Ways To Find Your Life’s Passion And A Career You Love

In the meantime, I continue to observe people of all ages around me struggle with finding a job they love. In looking at my own path of getting to do what I love, I’m observing four main lessons.

What Are You Naturally Gifted to Do?

Every time people do something they experience as satisfying and as done well, they are in fact repeating part or all of a recurring pattern of specific competencies and motivations.

What Gives You Life?

While by identifying your MAP you’re also considering what you’re passionate about as well what you’re naturally gifted to do, it’s worth addressing the importance of passion and drive with respect to finding a career you love more closely. You may be familiar with Joseph Campbell’s aphorism, “follow your bliss.” This might seem a bit naïve, impractical, and unhelpful. What if your “bliss” is playing fantasy football or eating freshly-baked goods (although, there are indeed people who make a living doing these very things…)?

That’s why when using the term “passion,” it’s important to clarify that finding work which you’re passionate about does not mean it will always be easy or perpetually pleasurable to do. No matter what the work is, there will always be days that are more challenging than others. However, when we find work that aligns with our natural abilities and passions, there is a sense of accomplishment and deep contentment that results, even on the harder days. It’s this type of contentment, or joy, that should guide us, not the mere absence of struggle or difficulty.

Robinson highlights one way of identifying if you’re not in a career that’s a good fit: if your “spirit is constantly heavy.” We all know the feeling of dread that accompanies certain activities we have to do. We may find such activities boring, dull, draining, and unfulfilling. And when those activities are not merely at the periphery of our days, but make up their center — like when we’re stuck in a career that isn’t a good fit — it’s a problem.

But since we’re all different — and we each have a unique MAP — those life-draining activities will look different for each one of us. We can’t assume that because our colleague, friend, or parent loves a certain type of work that we will too. Robinson brings up the example of someone who — believe it or not — actually enjoys their job of wading through sewers. Although, this might be a minority opinion, it’s nevertheless important to be aware that what others tells us will or won’t be fulfilling is not necessarily going to align with our own experience. We often hear from our culture how admirable it is to be a lawyer, doctor, or entrepreneur — and for those with the right gifts and passions it is — but not everyone will find such roles fulfilling. That’s why, while it’s important to be aware of your circumstances and the needs of the world, which we’ll discuss later, it must also be rooted in self-knowledge. As Miller Jr. writes, when someone does the thing he or she was born to do, there is an instinctive experience of fulfillment. It’s not something she is supposed to experience — it’s what she actually does experience.”

When someone does the thing he or she was born to do, there is an instinctive experience of fulfillment. It’s not something she is supposed to experience — it’s what she actually does experience.

This might be why there are many people who work very hard to gain that coveted job in the eyes of others only to find out once they get it they aren’t happy. As the philosopher Alain de Botton, Ph.D., discusses in a TED Talk, it’s an awful thing to sacrifice years of work and effort to reach a goal that, as it turns out, doesn’t make you happy. You may have the aptitudes to be successful at a lot of things, but if what you’re doing is not aligned with a deep passion for the work, you’ll most likely be unfulfilled.

Another method for determining if you’re passionate about something is to notice if you reach a state of “flow” when doing a certain activity. Flow, a term coined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Ph.D., refers to when we are engaged in an activity that is interesting, challenging, and meaningful to us. Have you ever lost track of time because you were intensely focused on some activity? Being in that state provides a pleasurable state of contentment, and is indicative of the type of activities that we enjoy.

This is what Rios attempts to do with her graduate and adult degree completion students, individuals who are sometimes older and already working in a career. She works to help them identify what they’re deeply passionate about.

“It’s important that I take the time to really listen to what students’ interests are and help them realize for themselves what they would like to do as far as a career or what they need to transition into,” Rios said. “It’s my job as a counselor to help them realize certain strengths that they have and help them realize what they’re really passionate about. This might mean asking someone, ‘Did you realize that when you talked about this your face lit up and I just got so much passion from you? Let’s explore that and talk about what that would mean.’”

Rios understands the difference between doing something you’re passionate about — and that feels right — versus doing something that doesn’t, not only because of her work with students, but also because of her own experience.

▶ Other news to help you #GetHired:

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Can you work in retail and also work from home? Many people were forced to work from home during the pandemic, but they were almost exclusively office workers. People who worked in retail often had to continue showing up for work despite the risks. Bloomberg reports that Apple is willing to test whether some retail tasks can be done at home to extend the flexibility to its store workers. Here’s what retail workers are saying about the possible move.

Entry-level jobs often ask for years of experience. You likely know this to be true if you’ve looked for an entry-level job over the past few years, but LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Report found that more than a third of job postings over a recent 45-month span asked for at least three years of experience. Dive into the data and see what others are saying by clicking here.

Resource:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswomanfiles/2014/07/02/3-practical-ways-to-find-your-lifes-passion-and-a-career-you-love/
https://www.pointloma.edu/resources/practical-guide-finding-career-you-love
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-find-job-you-love-andrew-seaman