721: (2 of 8) Career Reflection: Use Your Past to Find What Career Actually Fits You with These 10 Questions | What Fits You

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: You could reflect on your career for the next decade and still end up exactly where you're at right now, asking the same questions in the same cycle about what kind of work fits you, what kind of job you should be doing, what business you should be starting, and never be any closer to a real answer.

[00:00:17] That's because reflection alone isn't going to get you there. It takes intentional action toward work that fits you, your values, your strengths, even your income expectations, and other pieces that you're going to need to be able to support your life. The hard part is that for any action to be truly intentional, you have to know exactly what you want first.

[00:00:37] You have to know where you're going. And by the end of this episode, you'll have made significant progression towards knowing what you want by having answers to 10 very specific, very powerful questions. This is day two of the What Fits You eight-day mini-course. Yesterday, you started uncovering your signature strengths.

[00:00:56] Today, we're using your past as a platform to get clear on what you actually want from work going forward. Now, if you haven't already listened to the introduction to What Fits You, go back a couple episodes in your feed and start out with that introduction. That way, you have the full context before we dive in.

[00:01:14] You can come back and pick up here when you get there. Also, if you want the complete course experience, including the actions and guided exercises, register for free at happentoyourcareer.com/8day. So how do you figure out what you actually want out of work, and is reflection on the past your key to career happiness?

[00:01:32] The short answer? H-E-double hockey sticks to the no. Mostly because I love hockey and a little because reflection is not a magic bullet alone. Reflection is not the problem. Directionless reflection is. In day one of this mini-course, I mentioned that we've worked with thousands of leaders and established professionals who are trying to figure out what's next.

[00:01:53] But the interesting part here is that across all those people, most of them have spent significant time reflecting on their careers in one way or another. A lot of times, they've done the thinking, they know that something is off, and many of them can articulate exactly what they don't want with remarkable precision.

[00:02:12] What's far more difficult, and what they often can't do, is answer the forward question, "What do I actually want in the future?" Because so many people feel like if I knew the answer to that, I could get there. By the way, that particular gap between knowing what you're leaving and knowing what you're running toward is where so many people stall for years and sometimes, like, decades.

[00:02:35] Most people come to this process expecting the answer to be something completely new, something they've never done before, a total reinvention, or they come and say, "You know, I'm in marketing, I gotta get the heck out of marketing." This is rarely how it works. Years back, we got to work with Lisa, and we actually shared her full story on episode 222. We'll link it up in the show notes.

[00:02:56] When we got to work with her, at that point, she thought she would find a brand-new career, maybe something that she had never, ever explored before. However, her background and love of being an advocate for women's health and her experience working in health clinics actually set her up so well to become a consultant for women's health clinics, which was an amazing opportunity for her, and it fit what she was trying to build in so many different ways.

[00:03:21] The interesting thing is she never would have guessed that until she did the hard work of defining what she wanted and what she needed and what actually fit. When you begin to define work that genuinely fits you, it actually almost always feels familiar, like coming home after a long time away. Not because you're doing the same thing in a different place, but because the core of what energizes you has probably been present in your life in pieces throughout your career and other areas.

[00:03:49] You just haven't had a framework for seeing it clearly in a way that relates to the real world. Now, we introduced Morgan on day one, and she's another great example. She came into the process convinced that her organizational development background meant she needed to find a completely different kind of role, a newer company, a different culture, more aligned leadership, all the things, right?

[00:04:10] And what she discovered was that parts of her work that she'd loved all along, diving deep into patterns, generating ideas, disarming people in conversations to be able to get to honest information, well, those were clues to her actual strengths. They were also clues as to what she wanted to spend more time doing, and they'd been present across every single role that she'd ever had.

[00:04:34] Now, of course, there is no job title out there that you can search on Indeed or LinkedIn that is pattern diver, idea generator, disarmer of people in conversations extraordinaire. But once she could see these clearly, her direction stopped feeling like a reinvention, and she started to focus her attention on what would feel much more like a homecoming.

[00:04:55] Morgan Dunn: I cannot stop thinking of new ideas for things. I am super big in maximization, ideation, and I just, I can't stop doing those things.

[00:05:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: Your past isn't the thing holding you back here. Used intentionally, it's the most accurate map that you have going forward. So this is where I want you to grab a pen, grab a piece of paper, open a document, get on Google Docs, whatever, and prepare to answer these 10 reflection questions.

[00:05:22] By the way, the easiest way to get all of these questions sent to your email and get all kinds of additional resources is just go over to happentoyourcareer.com/8day, put your email address in. We'll send you the guided exercises, the emails, and then you'll be subscribed to our list to get future resources as well, which is phenomenal.

[00:05:42] Okay, question one here, and you can pause in between if you want. What do I love enough to do for free? Not what you're good at, not what pays well. What would you keep doing if nobody was compensating you for it? There's probably some pieces that you already do, even within your current job, that you keep gravitating towards.

[00:06:01] At your level, this question starts to cut through a lot of noise because you've probably spent years doing things you're excellent at that maybe you would never voluntarily choose, at least pieces.

[00:06:12] What causes time to feel different? Okay, this is a pretty common question, I know, but still really useful. What makes you lose track of that time? Flow isn't random. It shows up consistently around specific kinds of work and specific kinds of problems. What is that for you? What do you notice about it?

[00:06:28] Question number three. If you had to teach something, what would it be? Now, I'm not asking what you're qualified to teach. That's a different question. What would you want to teach? What would you be excited to teach? What's the thing you find yourself explaining to people because you can't help it?

[00:06:43] Number four, what do people consistently come to you for help with? Now, I'm not talking about your official job description. I'm talking about what do people that know you, whether it's, you know, coworkers, direct reports, friends, family, what do they keep pulling you aside for?

[00:06:59] Interestingly enough, part of how this company started was because people kept taking me to coffee, asking about career changes that I had made, and how I had gotten some of the results that I had with, you know, $40,000 increases off cycle or, you know, changing from one industry to another. So, case in point, right?

[00:07:17] But the pattern is what we're paying attention to here. The pattern in those requests, the pattern in those interactions, tells you something specific about how other people experience your value.

[00:07:28] Number five, what makes you feel genuinely great about yourself? I'm not talking about proud in the resume sense. I'm talking about great in a way that you'd feel if you could do this kind of thing, this kind of activity, this kind of interaction every day, whether it's for work or otherwise.

[00:07:44] Number six, what do you enjoy regardless of what other people think? Okay, if you've had roles that sort of keep you performing for an audience, it can be hard to separate out what you actually want from what you've been rewarded for. But what would you choose if nobody was watching and nobody was keeping score?

[00:08:00] Number seven, what have you loved doing in the past? And what about now? Sometimes those lists are different.

[00:08:06] Number eight, what has hurt in the past that you don't want others to have to go through? I think that some of the most powerful career fits come from this question. The experience that cost you something often becomes the thing that you're uniquely equipped with and deeply motivated to help others with. It also creates a really powerful emotional connection that can't be duplicated as it relates to you getting to serve other people, helping real humans in one way or another. So don't ignore this question, even if it's not obvious and apparent at the beginning.

[00:08:36] Number nine, what challenges or difficulties have you overcome or maybe that you're still working through? How did you do it? The way you've navigated the hardest or most difficult things in your life says something specific about your strengths, how you tend to behave when chips are down, and what you value the most.

[00:08:53] By this way, to this day, I still use this as a topical area for interview questions because it helps me understand how people truly behave. We also use it in our clients in helping them to navigate and figure out what is the right support for them, too, because we get clues from this type of question that can be used everywhere for what allows people to be successful and how they behave.

[00:09:17] Question ten, what causes or beliefs do you feel strongly connected to? Now, of course, I don't mean what you think you should care about, but I do mean what actually moves you. Those can be two different things. The things you find yourself reading about, talking about, or even frustrated with that more people aren't paying attention to.

[00:09:36] Okay, I want to give you a bonus question here. If you were to stop living today, I know, super morbid, but if you were to stop living today, what would you regret not having done yet? What would you want people to say about you that they honestly couldn't say right now? This one is uncomfortable, and of course, that's the point.

[00:09:55] Okay, with all these questions, I want you to write down whatever surfaces. There's such a human tendency to qualify and never fully get out your individual thoughts because we don't consider it to be realistic, so it never makes it on the page. Recognize that that could be happening. We find that that's a huge place we have to help our clients because it's such a blind spot.

[00:10:16] When you're done, I want you to read back through everything and start looking for themes. You'll notice a pattern now with the first couple of days that what we're doing is we're building a set of clues. Each set of clues allows us to start to recognize further patterns and dig a little bit deeper. In this case, what themes kept coming up?

[00:10:35] What surprised you? What showed up that you'd been ignoring, maybe? Pro tip here, by the way, if you started a Google Doc or a notebook, then keep everything through this entire eight-day mini-course all in one place. It makes it easier to look back on. Also, we're gonna come back to these in day three. So your action for today, work through all 10 questions, plus the bonus.

[00:10:55] Write these answers down. Come back, leave a comment right here. Which question hit the hardest, and what did it surface for you? Day three drops next, and I want you to subscribe or click follow wherever you're listening so that it lands in your feed automatically here. Also, if you're like me, then journaling and reflecting like this is great, but I get even more when I get to process verbally, and I tend to move much faster when I'm working with trained experts.

[00:11:20] So if you find that's true for you, too, or you want to be able to have help seeing some of these blind spots, drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put conversation in the subject line, and our team will reach out to you to understand your situation and help you build a plan to find your right next step. Until then, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios.