In his Forbes article, Three Steps For Finding Your Perfect Job, Career, And Life, Louis Efron list three important steps for finding your perfect job. He says, “People who are happiest and most fulfilled live what is the perfect job, career and life for them. This does not mean living their life would be perfect for you. Like a snowflake, perfection is defined individually. It is achievable for anyone willing to put the effort into defining, discovering and pursuing it.”
Efron goes on to say, “The first step in your journey is to understand what you are most passionate about, love, and naturally do best. I agree wholeheartedly that it is important to understand what your passions are (Interests or WHAT you love to do) and what you are good at (Strengths or HOW you have learned to be successful). They may not be one and the same. In addition, there is also a piece missing. We need to understand our needs, or what we need our work environment to look like. This is what frees us to do WHAT we love HOW we can be successful in doing so. Read more
Annie McKee has written a compelling article in the Harvard Business Review about how important it is to be happy at work. In her article, Being Happy at Work Matters. Ms. McKee writes, “Added up, brain science and our organizational research are in fact debunking the old myths: emotions matter a lot at work. Happiness is important. To be fully engaged, people need vision, meaning, purpose, and resonant relationships.” On this point I agree 100%.
What I do not agree with in this: “There are clear similarities in what people say they want and need, no matter where they are from, whom they work for, or what they do. We often assume that there are huge differences across industries and around the world but the research challenges that assumption.” It is interesting to me that no research is quoted to support this finding.
Now that I am changing my career based on my Know Thyself Guide® findings, I wonder what my career path would have been like if I truly understood and pursued my real passions from the very beginning.
Basic research has always been an interest to me. I was a math major in college, focusing on some very esoteric areas of real and complex analysis. It was my intent to get my Ph. D. and enter academia, primarily so that I could continue research in this area. I shelved this idea following my masters because the market was glutted at the time with Ph. D. mathematicians. Imagine that now!
After our Camino walk, seven of us peeled off from the others and drove seven hours to the Basque Country. Our goal was to visit the relatively new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. One of my fellow pilgrims is an artist in her own right, meaning she can and does actually make visual arts her vocation as well as her avocation. As both a student and professor of modern and post modern art, she has interests and talents in teaching as well as making visual arts.
Here was a marriage of interests that really worked on this day. I reviewed my own Know Thyself Guide® and here is what I read:
You have a significant level of interest in the theory underlying the way things work. (In other words, I ask why a lot.)
You have an above average interest in the way things look. (So not surprising I am in an art museum.)
You have an above average interest in what is heard. . . How things sound. (The reason this is important became apparent later.)
Unlike my fellow pilgrim, I do not have any real strengths as an artist, and I fail to like or even appreciate much of what I saw this day. There was one piece of “art” that I swear was exactly like the plastic awning under which I sat for lunch. I did not get it. So I kept asking my artist pilgrim, “why?” Why did the artist do this? The teaching professor in her patiently explained how to view these pieces and the why’s and why not’s. It was a perfect match of interests–my desire to understand and her interest in teaching.
So the plastic piece still looks like an awning to me. I don’t really like it, but I appreciate it more. There were two other pieces that made a significant impact on me and all because of my third interest–how things sound. There was a large room filled with steel structures that you wondered through. My pilgrim buddies loved it. I could not wait to get out. Why? The sound. I could not take the noise. Conversely, there was a video exhibit that had deconstructed an Abba song. Each piece was a lovely sound and you could almost hear the whole piece the whole time you were concentrating on one component. That I really enjoyed.
This experience was a great lesson for me in the power of interests, as per the Know Thyself Guides®. Interests are those things which you would enjoy if pay or prestige were equal and it does not necessarily have anything to do with talents.
Understanding your interests -vs- your strengths is important when finding a job you’ll love.
Last week, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella made headlines for suggesting that women who do not ask for more money from their employers would be rewarded in the long run when their good work was recognized.
I could not disagree more.
I do not believe the gender wage gaps would be as great as cited in this article if that were the case. At a more personal level, this does not resonate with my own experience.
I grew up receiving these same not-so-subtle messages, mostly from my well-intentioned father. “If you work hard, and do a good job, you will be recognized,” he said. But in my father’s defense, he also said something equally as important. “If you leave an employer because you are not getting what you want, and that becomes a surprise to your employer, you are as guilty as the employer in creating the situation that causes you to leave.”
Well, I left a few jobs because I was not getting what I wanted. I was not getting the roles and advancement I wanted. More importantly, I was not being recognized in those jobs in the way I wanted for what I was achieving. And that went beyond compensation. I kept getting more work and assignments, but no public recognition from my bosses for what I was achieving. Did I say anything about what I was not getting? No. Why was that? I had received those subtle messages that asking was in appropriate, that the system was fair and would take care of me. I had no role models for people who were asking. If men were asking, I did not know about it. And even if I had thought it was OK to ask for something, I had no clue HOW to go about it. There were few mentors I felt comfortable asking. I was not able to fully reconcile the 2 messages from my father, nor my role in creating the circumstances that led to my leaving the jobs until I met a man who was a true marketing genius. He taught me that it takes equal parts of quality production (my father’s first message) and marketing (my father’s second message) to make a successful business. This is true for careers as well. It is up to each of us to market or sell ourselves, our accomplishments, and ask for the right pay, recognition, and opportunities in return.
My role: I was not marketing my successes. I was not asking for what I wanted in return.
So why was this so hard for me? For one thing, I had to get clear about what I wanted and needed. Once I got truly in touch with what made me Happy, Successful, and equally as important, made me feel Understood, I was better able to articulate what I wanted. I learned that compensation was one measure of how I felt appreciation, but there were others that were equally as important, like public recognition and ‘thank yous.’ Once I got clear and could articulate it, I then had to open my mouth and say something. This was much harder for 2 reasons:
It violated my father’s first message and the subtle messages I had gotten all along about what “good girls” did. This has and is taking a lot of practice to get over.
I am not naturally inclined to this kind of persuasion work. My interests and strengths do not make it easy for me to do this.
So, what to do? This is why I recommend engaging a trusted companion as a coach. Throughout my Know Thyself Guides® I suggest that individuals role play and practice situations like this. Even experienced negotiators and skilled sales and marketing individuals practice and role-play critical negotiations and sales calls before they occur. So someone, like me, who is trying to overcome years of bias messages (like good girls do not do this) and is not naturally skilled at this kind of interaction, must practice even more. In situations like this, it is important to engage a coach who is naturally skilled in these areas. They are often easy to spot. But another idea is to engage a more senior executive who seems to have been able to address this for him or herself. I have found they are often willing to listen, role play, and offer suggestions. Yes, I think women often have to work harder at this than men do. The coaches and mentors are not as available. We have to ask for that, too. And I do not think I am the only one who got the message that good girls do not ask for pay. This is a subtle bias that still exists in the workplace. But women have a role in changing that as well, by understanding what they want and need and then asking for it.
al arts her vocation as well as her avocation. As both a student and professor of modern and post modern art, she has interests and talents in teaching as well as making visual arts.