Is Your Job Good For You?
Ask yourself 4 guiding questions to uncover your dream career.
Does your career bring you joy? Are you good at it? Does the world need you to do it?
Answer “YES” to all three and you have a one-way ticket on the road to a prosperous, rewarding, meaningful, and downright dreamy career.
The second and third questions are concrete and objective. Either you are good at your job or you’re not. If the position is open, there has to be a need. Plain and simple.
Does your job bring you joy? Only you know the answer.
It’s entirely subjective, fluid, and downright personal. There is both beauty and chaos in the inherent individuality — what brings me joy, might be your vision of utter and complete misery. What happens if your chosen career shifts from being your dream to being a nightmare?
More specifically, what happens if you are good at your job, but your job is no longer good for you?
It’s complicated.
I went through the process of discerning what the answer to this transformative and dynamic question meant for me. I had a highly productive, meaningful, and personally gratifying career in a service-oriented field holding leadership roles that ranged from departmental to organization-wide.
Frankly, I was great at my job.
Over time, however, the work that I excelled at on the outside was slowly destroying me on the inside. This can happen to anyone in any position in any field at any time.
Joy is intimately personal — so is pain and suffering.
4 Discovery Questions to Guide You to Your Dream Career
In order to realign positive mental, physical, and emotional health while continuously moving forward, I’ve given the OG discernment questions a facelift.
Take an intimate look inside. Listen honestly and openly.
Explore where these 4 guiding questions lead you.
- What do you love?
- What am I passionate about? What motivates me to keep my wheels turning?
- What are my personal and professional goals?
- What will make my job GOOD FOR ME…so that I can be GOOD AT IT?
This self-discovery will change your life. It did mine.
1. What do I love?
Creativity — I love stretching my brain in new, unique, and imaginative ways.
Critical Thinking — I love diving into rich, intellectual, and multi-faceted topics that truly make me think.
Perspective — I love looking at the world from many different points of view and stretching my own archetypes.
Adventure — I love exploring personally uncharted territories in the mountains, ocean, new countries and cities, the kitchen, workshops, books, current events, media, and more. I look at learning as an adventure.
Connections — I really love the people I love. (I am a true empath through and through.)
2. What am I passionate about? What motivates me to keep my wheels turning?
Social Justice — I am passionate about compassion. For everyone. Connection is a fundamental component of humanity — let’s make it positive. There’s power in that. These are the social justice issues that speak to my soul:
- Women!! — Women empowerment and women’s rights (don’t touch me, make decisions about my body on my behalf, or man-splain me…I’m just getting started)
- Disadvantaged and Disenfranchised Communities — The cycle of poverty is real. Providing healthcare services, housing, quality education, and career opportunities for low-income communities is the first step towards breaking the cycle.
- Climate Change — I live in Alaska. It is currently 20 degrees warmer than normal for the end of October. I am wearing sandals, for Pete’s sake. As a kid, there would be 10 inches of snow or more by now. And our ice is melting and our polar bears are dying. Oh, and 2.5 million acres burned in wildfires this year. That’s more than twice the size of Rhode Island. It’s bad.
- Empowered Kids — Raising kids to be independently motivated, self-sufficient, courageous, and unafraid of failure (sorry not sorry helicopter moms, you’re not helping).
Destigmatizing Mental Health —
- Own It — The old adage, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” can be edited to say, “We care about folks with varying mental health concerns until it impacts me.” Ok, the parallels aren’t quite as direct as I’d like, but until I come up with a better analogy, this will have to do.
- Lose the Labels — We have to get rid of labels. Let’s start with Alcoholics Anonymous. “Hi, I am ________, and I am an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink in ____ years,” is a stigmatizing life sentence of shame, guilt, and suffering. No, you aren’t an alcoholic. You are YOU. You may have overcome an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, but ALCOHOL DOES NOT DEFINE YOU. (To be clear: If Alcoholics Anonymous works for you, that’s phenomenal. Let’s just give it a different name!)
Exploring New Places — Travel, geocaching, photography, writing, hiking, “fooding” (a word used to describe all aspects of being a foodie), museums, historical places, National Parks, big mountains, and anything outside.
3. What are my personal and professional goals?
Financial Stability — I am not looking to make millions, but I do want to be able to live comfortably within my means.
Time — I will give 100% to my work at work, which is where I want to leave it. My time away from work needs to be honored too. Flexibility in scheduling my work time is a priority too. Additionally, earning my stripes does not mean working more than 12 hours every day.
Growing My Brain — I want to be challenged, intellectually engaged, and able to be creative.
Project-Based — I like being able to start and finish a specific project or assignment within the scope of the overall mission. Doing the same thing every day and progressing slowly over time is not stimulating or exciting for me. Give me a huge project with a timeline and a big goal — I will crush it.
Collaboration — I thrive working in a team where each of us has a defined role. I love it when we are all able to capitalize on our collective strengths. What I lack in coding and IT skills, I make up for in my relationship building, creativity, and critical thinking abilities.
4. What will make my job GOOD FOR ME…so that I can be GOOD AT IT?
Exercise!!! — I need to be able to have at least an hour of uninterrupted time to exercise daily. This is a non-negotiable.
Manageable Stress — Any career has stress, but it needs to be a healthy amount. Burnout is not a badge of honor.
Valued — I know that I have a tremendous amount of skills, insight, creative thinking, collaborative abilities, leadership skills, and more to offer. Give me the freedom and space to use them!
Ambitious and Feasible Expectations — I thrive on challenges and big goals, but they need to actually be achievable. A unicorn jumping over a rainbow is awesome but unrealistic.
What’s next?
My responses to these questions are my non-negotiables as I explore new opportunities, get involved in the community in different ways, and maintain an open mind and objective perspective.
Though I cannot predict the future, I certainly have a strong, insightful, and personal framework to find what I am good at — and is good for me.
Anyone hiring?
