Apply New Thinking Habits in Choosing a Career

Apply New Thinking Habits in Choosing a Career
Author: Donald Mitchell


Choosing a career is one of the key ways that you select which irresistible forces you will be subject to, and what resources you will have available as you do. Like analyzing the circumstances to choose which irresistible forces can provide the most benefit to your organization, you should use similar analytical thinking in choosing a profession.

You can thrive if you have work that has great personal meaning for you, helps you learn and grow as a person, provides you with a sense of accomplishment and competency, and makes you feel appreciated and valuable. Most people pursue their life's work in terms that are too limited to be fully rewarding for them. What they miss is that the fit is a highly personal one, like custom-made clothing that fits only you.

Consider that many people pick a profession from choices that were highly visible when they were quite young, without knowing what else is around. As you can imagine, a lot of great jobs have no visibility at all to children.

You need to actually try different types of work before you can know how well they fit you. That approach is the best way to learn. Screening tools, such as tests that match your personality to different types of work, can help you come up with ideas that you might have considered on your own. Try some of them on for size.

Some people may not be able to find paid work that gives their lives the fullest meaning they would like. Don't give up. You may be able to do volunteer work to provide that meaning. Volunteering is on the rise, and the meaningfulness of the work is the primary benefit that many volunteers report.

In addition, volunteering can make you a better person to work with all the time. You'll develop a better understanding of how to help make work meaningful for others, as well as how to help others find the right work for themselves. Becoming good at understanding this perspective will help not only you, but it will also help you counsel others you care about who face these same issues.

You can also get experience by volunteering that you wouldn't get for years in regular employment. As a brand new volunteer, you can ask for a chance to supervise other volunteers and chances are your request will be honored.

If you want to meet senior executives in industry to find out what their work is like, you can volunteer to work with such executives on non-profit projects for which they are volunteers, too.