photo credit: h.koppdelaney

navel-gazing.  n. Slang. Excessive introspection, self-absorption, or concentration on a single issue.

If you’re unsure about your next career move, job boards aren’t doing you any favors.  You complete an online profile, and perform a keyword search, and sift through experience requirements like “3-5 years management experience” and “2 years experience with a multi-state manufacturing operation” to find those positions you might qualify for.  Then, and only then, do you start to consider whether you might like the job.

What if it was the other way around?

Administrative Assistant

Company X seeks administrative assistant for its downtown offices.  Must love client contact and get a kick out of writing Excel macros.  Serious enjoyment of computer use required.  If you make a career out of using your office skills to make life easier for an overscheduled, overcommitted executive, this is the opportunity for you.

You are much more likely to be productive if you love your work.  But hardly anyone recruits for “love.”  They barely even talk about “love.”  They ask you what you’re good at, and what you’re not so good at.  They ask what you’ve studied, applied and accomplished.  But I’ve seen candidates with impressive resumes who wouldn’t be able to perform in the role, because their passion is in the wrong place.

Setting your career compass is about finding your passion.  It’s about understanding what makes you tick before you walk into that interview room, so that you can look at an opportunity and figure out if you will be able to bring your best, or if you’ll be phoning it in every day.

Answer this question:

What would my life look like if I did only that at which I excel?

Besides the fact that very few of us would ever parallel park, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where doing only what you excel at wouldn’t bring phenomenal success.

Now, because we all occasionally do have to parallel park, we can’t eliminate other activities entirely.  What we can do is do more of that we love on a daily basis, and less of the other junk.

Setting your career compass is about charting a course that gets you closer to self-actualization.  And any course is determined by both a start and and end point.  So many people try to figure out how to get where they’re going without knowing where they are.  So in my checklist, the first step is navel-gazing.

Navel-gazing: Self-analysis for fun and profit

Yes, you’ll find that I’m pretty no-nonsense about my titles.  I could call this step “self-evaluation,” “talent awareness,” or any of a hundred psycho-speak variations.  But “navel-gazing” appeals to me for its mild self-deprecation.  See, for a lot of no-nonsense business types, “navel-gazing” is a waste of precious time better spent on something that might bring them results.  But the truth is, navel-gazing is actually the same kind of analysis that we apply to other areas of the business world applied to our single greatest business asset–ourselves.

So, what’s the problem we’re trying to solve here?  Answer this question:

Do you feel confident that you know what your calling is?

Consider this your personal SWOT analysis.  Well, more of an SO analysis.  Because here we focus on what is or could go right for you.  Let’s save analysis of what’s wrong for performance reviews.

Identifying your skills, talents and passions

Here’s where we do your “personal inventory.”  What do you have in your warehouse?  What product do you offer?

In general, navel-gazing is a two-step process: information collection, and theme identification.

Information collection

Sure, you may think about your professional skills all the time.  But true perspective comes with being able to step away from the detail and look at all the pieces of the puzzle.  Some people choose to partner with a coach to help them through this process.  If you’d like to tackle it yourself, you must record your output in order to be able to gain perspective on where you are.  Consider brainstorming (or mind mapping) or in some way recording your answers on paper.  Write in paragraphs, or set up columns for skills and interests and place your thoughts accordingly.  The key is to keep the thoughts coming, so however you record them, make sure it doesn’t get in the way of generating new ideas.  Make it easy for you.

There are a number of assessments, tools and exercises that can help you catalog those things intrinsic to you that bring value to your employer.  But you can get a good start at it by answering the following questions:

What is your greatest professional accomplishment?

What parts of your job/career really get you going?

What excites you?

What infuriates you?

What are you most often praised for?

What lines do you most often cross?

What kinds of special projects keep coming your way?

What piece of your work do you talk about outside the office?

Which of your projects keeps you up at night?  Why?

And there are hundreds more.  These questions are prompts, designed to get the ideas flowing.  You may have your own questions and answers that help identify what you love about your work, and where your greatest contributions lie.  Keep thinking, keep recording, for as long as you can.

When you think you’re done, set the notes down for at least 24 hours.

Identification of themes

Here’s the hard part.  You have to figure out what all this raw data means.  It’s the analysis of the information that gets you the payoff.

Take a separate sheet of paper and make two columns.

Look for connections that identify either talents or passions, and list them on the new page accordingly.  Maybe your volunteer work teaching and your meeting facilitation point to a talent for public speaking.  Maybe your lifelong enjoyment of gardening indicates a passion for the outdoors.  The key is to look at everything you have, and then look deeper.  Seek connections.  Look for underlying causes.  Break things into their elements.  Mark up your notes as you go, using arrows, asterisks, whatever works to show relations between the items.  When you feel like you’re done, set it down for 24 hours again.  Come back with a fresh set of eyes and look again.

When you’re done, you should have a list of those things that you show a natural aptitude for, labeled talents, and those things that you have a natural affinity for, marked passions.

Here’s an important point: It is possible, and highly desirable, that something appears in both columns. If you’ve continually received accolades for your work in engineering design, and you could work in CAD for hours without noticing, engineering design should appear in both columns.

The point

The kind of work that makes you charge out of bed in the morning–or, at least gets you to the coffee pot a little faster–almost always marries your talents and passions.  It’s work that you enjoy, and that you’re also successful at.  Win-win.  Any potential job opportunity should be measured against this standard.

The Offer

Don’t know where to start?  Wondering where to go next?  Contact me. Include “Coaching Entry” in the subject line and you could win a complimentary 1-hour coaching session to help you set your own career compass.  Best of luck!

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4. Are you the phoenix? Coping with career challenges
5. Interview Question of the Week New Grad Edition: How did you choose your major?

Tagged as: Career, Coaching, effectiveness, job change, motivation, passion, skills, talent