After having successfully mentored over 1000 people of all ages, I have come to find that each person has a Core set of Passions: a group of activities, that when they do them, they feel the most Full of Life!
The sad thing is the majority of people working, and the majority of students in college, have no firmly established and deep intelligence of what their Core Passions are. Instead, people find jobs through trial and error, and students eventually graduate with a major after changing majors on average about six times.
Is it any wonder that one of the most common regrets humans have is that they wish they had done something else with their life?!
The great news is there is a way to determine what your core passions are, relatively early in your life. People’s personalities are relatively stable by the time they are in high school, and so are their passions, aptitudes, and environmental preferences.
The problem is high school and college guidance offices most often utilize superficial methods or only help with things like what class to choose, rather than conducting comprehensive and in-depth career assessment.
Let’s face it, to truly help someone turn themselves inside out, you need someone who has very deep and broad training in the human personality, as well as elite level training in how to conduct career guidance such that a person’s core passions can be matched with those careers which allow those passions to be unleashed.
Too many parents focus on choosing the right college for their child, rather than focusing on choosing the right career guidance professional to help their students figure out what they are truly meant to do.
In a previous blog I discussed the fact that for many high school students a gap year is a great idea to help that student become more realistic and insightful about themselves, so they take college more seriously and choose a college based more on self-knowledge rather than superficial things like how highly ranked that college is.
If your child does not know what they are meant to do, and they simply go to a college because it has a good reputation, that does not help your child grow into an employed adult. Unfortunately, the naïve mythologies still permeating millions of parents’ minds is that if you get your child into the right college they will find the right career. Nothing could be farther from the truth! And a voluminous amount of statistics indicates sending your child to the college bus station with no clear destination in mind results in life changing heartache and depression.
Scary statistics relating to this idea.
The best high school graduation gift you can give your child, and/or the best career gift you can give yourself or someone you know, who is not fulfilled in their job, is to undergo a truly comprehensive career assessment in order to determine a career that deeply connects with those Core Passions!
Each person’s Career Sweet Spot – where their inborn aptitudes, passions, and environmental and economic needs intersect – is discoverable. However, it takes a multistage, systematic, and rigorous data analytic process because the human personality is one of the most complex things on our planet.
Here is a movie of my career guidance process that I have developed over the last decade:
Some previous blogs I have written that further discuss this subject:
Counselors using “Deeper” scientific tools help youth find life long careers