Am I On The Right Career Path?

For many years my dream job was to run a clothing boutique.  Starting when I was in high school I helped my Mom plan and shop for her wardrobe when she traveled with my Dad, who worked for Boeing.   These trips, usually to Asia or Europe, were 3 to 4 weeks long, covered multiple climates and included casual to dressy occasions.  Oh, and she was limited to one suitcase.  I then moved on to helping my friends shop for clothes so they could find just the right thing for a specific event or when their weight fluctuated up or down.  This is still one of my favorite things to do!

So running a clothing boutique made sense as my dream job.  I could do what I love all day and get paid for it!  Who wouldn’t love that?

How wrong I was.  It didn’t take long to learn that working in retail meant sore feet, an aching back and seeing the worst in people.  I loved helping women find something new to wear that communicated the best of how they saw themselves.  Unfortunately, I often had to smile through my frustration when they brought those great outfits back the next day because their husbands didn’t like this new image.  After a few months I headed back to banking.

Why was I so off track?  Looking back years later I see that I wasn’t off track.  I had just put the wrong job description to what I love to do.  That early experience was the first time I tried to create a career out of my passion, but I only dealt with the surface layer – I loved to help people shop for clothes.

It took me a number of years and a lot of distance to see and connect the dots that led me to being able to articulate my passion and my purpose: to see potential in people and help them bring that to the surface.  Whether it’s helping people choose something to wear, challenging my staff to grow by giving them more difficult assignments, or coaching people on how to navigate their careers – those are all pieces of the same puzzle. 

There’s a wonderful quote by Steve Jobs from his commencement address at Stanford:  you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect the dots looking backward.  How frustrating is that!  It’s like my horoscope, which never makes sense at the beginning of the day, but is more clear at the end of the day.

Want to find your purpose?  Start with searching for the dots – those common elements and themes that travel with you no matter what circumstances you’re in.  Resist the temptation to apply a job description.  You can do work that expresses your purpose any time and any place in your job, with friends, and with family. 

Here are a couple of ideas to help you spot your dots:

What draws you – what do you read, what interests you, what do you love to talk about?  Delve down into the weeds and get specific.  What is it that interests you; why does it interest you?  Make lots of notes.  My favorite books to read have always been self-help books and biographies.  I’m fascinated by people’s lives and what drives them.

At work, what do you do in every job? Regardless of the subject matter of my job whether running a big program to reduce deposit fraud, increasing the number of localized software product releases, or defining requirements for a new product, what I actually did was the same:  empower people and get them motivated to get moving in the direction we need to do go.   Some of my clients have said things like create order out of chaos, rally people around a common vision, build bridges across the organization, fix a mess.  What is that you can’t help but do?

Find those common threads and begin to follow them.  When you know what to look for, you’ll find those threads everywhere.  Once you do, your job description will be secondary.  Find and connect the dots, choose work you love that’s meaningful to you, and you’ll be on your way to the career of your dreams.