1) What personality tendencies do you have that limit your ability to accurately choose a career pathway? Everyone has blinding biases that impair judgment. Do you know yours? Remember, cognitive scientists (See Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s best selling book Thinking Fast and Slow) estimate you are only aware of about 5% of the processing your mind is doing at any given moment. Your current focus is best described as a spotlight narrowly shining on a small area in the huge theater of your mind. Meanwhile, 95% of the “action” in your mind theater remains cloaked in darkness. Do you want to choose a career amidst that much darkness?
2) How can you find a career pathway that is broad and deep enough to withstand your changing jobs 12-15 times in your lifetime? Statistics clearly show the Golden era of capitalism is over; changing jobs every 3-5 years is now the norm. In fact, many people change fields. How can you avoid dead ends? Especially when you might be enslaved by tuition debt for a career pathway you no longer enjoy?
3) How will your dark side limit your bright side? Everyone has a bright side of talents and a dark side of toxic qualities. If you do not have a personality expert nail down the dark side, it will eventually limit your career options, get you fired, and derail you from reaching your true potential. Your friends will rarely be brutally honest with you, and humans are wired to promote their best characteristics. You need to see more than what is in the mirror when you are making decisions with life changing financial price tags.
4) How many selves do you have inside? Most people have more than one personality, because we all adapt how we think and behave depending on the circumstance. If you never take time to understand your different selves, you are setting yourself up to have bitter end of life regrets about the selves you never lived out. Tactful career planning can integrate all of those selves, and prevent depressing end of life career regret by engaging each of your selves into a lifelong developmental career roadmap.
5) How do you find your Ikigai? Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “A Reason for Being”. How do you find what is at the center of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. In other words, how can you find what you feel called to do? When you find your Sweet Spot, which is your Ikigai, you find sustainable fulfillment and fun. Isn’t that what we all wish for? Finding this requires more than following your current passion, because as your learn more, you find new passions that may overshadow current passions.
How do you find your more enduring passions? This takes a rigorous approach that has integrity checks and a system of checks and balances.
Your career involves 100,000 hours of work, and people are increasingly working into their 70s given medical advances. So how do you win your career chess game? This game board has become even trickier. One reason is the Golden Era of capitalism ended around 1980. Since 1980, the Gritty Nomadic Era (GNE) of capitalism began and is still going strong. Our GNE involves a low level of loyalty on the part of the employer and employee, and more frequent job changes. The statistics speak for themselves.
So, how do you find refuge in this more tumultuous labor marketplace? You need to go through a process that identifies your full inventory of talents, and forces you to rigorously test drive a full array of work options which together engage your different selves. By doing this, you can find a career pathway that engages each of your different selves, allowing you to accelerate your professional advancement because it fuses the power of your internal team. Identifying who the members of your Internal Team (IT) is your best refuge, because this team fuels your ability to adapt to changing circumstances and allows you to not lock yourself into one job or field. These days, the most competitive workers can work across fields because they know their IT is flexible and dynamic.
But finding your IT takes a rigorous, methodological approach that weaves together piercing psychological tools with rigorous test driving of careers, so you give your different selves room to be clearly identified.
If you want to prevent unnecessary student loans and avoid mid life crisis dead ends, check out Precisely Engineered Career Guidance (™), a trademarked process that has been developed and tested over 20 years by a published personality expert. This expert is a Tucson PhD psychologist who has answered the call of millions of people who are looking for a reliable way to chart out a sustainably fulfilling and fun life that allows you to have A Legacy Of Honor and Awe. What I call ALOHA.
Sign up to receive notification of a book coming out soon that will outline the Precisely Engineered Career Guidance (PECG™) approach, as well as discussing how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is radically changing the toolbox you need to win your career chess game.
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