The road trip to a fulfilling career (1 of 3): Setting the Destination
Posted on March 13, 2022 by Shawn Yates, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
Create your fulfilling career journey by discovering your core values and using them to set the destination of your career road trip!
Finding a fulfilling career is no small task whether you have 20 years of experience or are just getting started. There are thousands of possible destinations to choose form and each destination has hundreds of ways to get there. Aligning your passions, values, experience, goals and dreams with the possible destinations and you have a staggering volume of variable to think about and decisions to make.
As I think about how I help clients think through all these choices, it came to mind that a good analogy may be taking a road trip. Now, I have a lot of experience with road trips because with 4 kids, we always took road trips for vacations – never flying! Similarly, I have a lot of experience with my own career and of course helping clients define their career path.
So, I thought I would combine those two experiences and together this article to share my thoughts on the road trip to finding a fulfilling career.
The first step in taking a road trip is deciding where to go. Will we go to the beach? Disney? Grand Canyon? Skiing? All of these are great choices. But of course, we can’t do them all, so we have to decide. We look at many factors including budget, travel time, time of year and what we did on our last vacation.
In your career road trip, you have the same starting point – the end. Start with the end. You must pick your destination. In this case, you want to include factors such as your core values and beliefs, your monetary goals, your passions, location, and experience.
One of the things I do with clients very early on in our engagement is to help them define their core values. To find their core values, I have them think of a time the felt totally alive, engaged, and fulfilled. We explore that memory and define what about it made them feel so fulfilled. That helps them to put words and expressions around their core values – the thing that fulfill them.
With those core values in mind, plus some of the other factors I mentioned above, we set about the process of choosing a career destination. Well, with the career it may be more of a direction than a pinpoint destination. We create an action plan that guides the client through researching different industries, companies, and career paths. Always keeping the core values and other factors as guideposts.
In the coaching sessions we explore the results of the research with questions these:
• What was appealing or not appealing?
• How did things align with the core values?
• How did things align with other factors such as financial, location etc.?
• What sparks of inspiration came while researching?
• What were unexpected learnings?
Usually after just 2-3 coaching session focused on this exploration, the client is ready to narrow the focus and start plotting a course toward a destination.
There we are, after many hours of internet research, lots of number crunching and probably a few passionate discussions with my wife, we finally chose a destination for our vacation. With the destination locked in, its time to plan the trip. Which car will we take? Highways or backroads? Nyquil or Unisom for the kids in the car? Just kidding, but side note the invention of the in-car DVD player was AMAZING for road trips with kids.
And so it is with our career road trip. The next step is to plan the route to the destination and that is the topic of my next article. I hope you will join me there!
