I think we all hope to contribute something to the world. It can be something really big like creating world peace or something small and local like providing fresh produce to the neighborhood coop. Whatever you decide your path is, turning your ideas into a career you love AND making a living can seem daunting, if not outright impossible. But, with intention and a plan you can actually create a career that embodies YOU with your interests, skills, personality, while honoring your values and what’s most important to you. The secret is to consider and integrate 4 key areas:
Personality – this is how we operate on a day-to-day basis. How we interact with others, how we react to situations and how we process things is often determined by our personality traits. While this is important to consider when choosing our career, it is only one part. For example, our personality may be really outgoing and we love people but our skill set is not necessarily on the social side, a career in public relations may not be the best option.
Skills – this is what we’re good at. These are usually things we learned in school. For example: We are really good in math but our personality is very outgoing and we are impatient with the steps in takes in math, we might not want to consider working in a math lab.
Interests – these are things that we like to do. For example, gardening, water skiing, yoga, playing chess and riding horses. While we are interested in these things, they will not translate into a career if we’re not very good at playing chess and our personality doesn’t sync well horses for whatever reason.
Values – these are the things that are important to us. If we ultimately do not do something that honors our values, we will not be happy with our choice. For example, we have an outgoing personality and love people, we have really good social skills and we are very interested in helping others we might be inclined to seek out teaching. But, we discover that money is more important to us than what a teacher’s salary allows, so we end up being frustrated and unable to decide what to do next.
When you can integrate all four of these areas and consider options that honor all of these areas, you move closer to creating a career you love.
Allison Field, CPC, MCC, ELI-MP – Career Design & Leadership Coach
I help people master their energy potential.
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