Pursue Your Calling in a Changing World
The biggest decision most people face in the fast-changing world of work is which career to continue to pursue as roles evolve and job descriptions have a shelf life of maybe three years.
Effective vocational decisions have to be based not just on your aptitudes or natural abilities, but also on your "deep," underlying interests. The most common mistake that people make in their career planning is to do something because they're "good at it." It's a story we hear all the time. A coaching client will say to me, "I'm an engineer. I’m successful. I’ve moved up the corporate ladder, but I don't like it and I’m unhappy. I have a desk on Mahogany Row with a key to the executive washroom but with all of the changes going on, I’ve lost my Mojo! What’s wrong with me?". When I ask why they chose to become an engineer, they’ll reply, "I was good at science and math, so people told me I should be an engineer. Plus, my father and grandfather were engineers." I’ll ask if they ever really loved engineering, and they’ll say, "no, but it was easy."
The really important question is, where do your passions or signature interests lie? Think of your interests or passions as a deep well. Once you dig deep enough to access the vocational aquifer of your interests, you can express and use them in many ways. You may have a particular aptitude or strength that you found made education easy, but without a deep interest in expressing that aptitude, at worst you'll fail or, at best, you’ll eventually be bored and dissatisfied.
Identifying those deep interests has been the focus of our research and coaching work for the past 30 years. Once you recognize that those deep interests are the best predictor of job satisfaction, the next step is to get in touch with your interest patterns and connect them with the activities that go on in business. Our tool of choice has been the Birkman Method. It is the industry’s pre-eminent and most comprehensive inventory of your passions (interests), natural strengths and motivational drivers (needs). Human interests are quite difficult to measure until we reach our late teens or early twenties. At that point, they gel -- we can measure and describe them. We each develop a unique signature of life interests. And that signature remains virtually constant over time. The pattern doesn't really change, although it may evolve as our career experience grows.
Our work with the Birkman vocational database taps into this deep integrated structure of passions, strengths and motivational factors and translates them into 22 kinds of work that go on in business. The Birkman database is integrated with the Occupational database at the Bureau of Labor (BLS) statistics If you look at your passions and explore how your interests can be expressed in specific business behaviors, then you'll have the basic elements to continue to align and make good career decisions for YOU.
There's one thing that everyone should do in the course of making a career decision: some reflection. You're going to need some systematic way of thinking through what you know about yourself, thinking through those times in your life when you were deeply excited about what you were doing and deeply engaged in doing it. And then you need to identify the themes that were present during those times.
In our coaching, we may ask you to come up with a list of times in your life when you were doing apparently different things-but at each of those times, you were deeply engaged. When you analyze and explore those times with us, you'll find themes that connect them to your Birkman Career Exploration Report. Those are your core passions that have expressed themselves over the course of your career. Thinking about them in a systematic way gives you the information you need to continue to make decisions in our changing world that express your “calling.”