What is Intentional Career?
Posted on February 21, 2013 by Henrieta Riesco, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
Don't let career "happen" to you. Be deliberate and make it happen.
Let’s get some things straight. What do I mean by the word “career”? As you grow up, you go to school and once you are done (and maybe even before that), you may start doing other activities. You may get a job, you may create a company, you may start volunteering for various groups, and so on. The common denominator is that you start doing something that is somehow useful. You will try to fill the demand with whatever you can supply. And it can be for the fun of it, but most likely it’ll be to earn some money. You may start doing one thing and then switch to something else, you may be doing the same thing for many, many years, or you may somehow seamlessly move from one activity to another. All of these are examples of what I call “career”.
Now, the dictionary tells you that career has something to do with a lifelong or a long-term activity. We, however, are talking about how you are willing to spend your life. And I’m sure you don’t want to feel like your life has just kind of happened. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Career is what happens while we are making other plans”. We like being in control of our life and being able to decide how we spend our years. I’m sure you don’t want your career to just “happen”. In order to get what we want, we first need to know what exactly it is that we want and then try to get it. That’s what I call an intention. If you don’t want to wake up one day and wonder why you are who you are, and why you spend your days doing something you would never pick for yourself, then you must have a vision, and you have to intentionally make your strategy to get to what you want.
Intentional Career is about living your career day by day in a way that has meaning or purpose for you. It’s not about dreaming that one day at some point in the future you’ll do what you always wanted to do. It’s about doing things every day in a way that makes sense for you. You can feel your career is happening each day. You are making it happen; it’s deliberate. That’s Intentional Career.
