Are you missing the clues to career satisfaction?
I was a very curious kid growing up. I was a voracious reader of science fiction novels and obsessed with Star Trek reruns. My sci-fi fascination and the fact that I was good at math and science made everyone around me think I should be an engineer.
While I excelled at math and science, I scored even higher grades in creative writing courses and art courses. I wrote sci-fi stories every chance I had. My bedroom was plastered with my drawings of aliens, starships, and robots. I built spaceships and strange machines using balsa wood, electronic components, and hacked-together parts from multiple model kits.
In my mind, there was a story behind every drawing and scratch-built model. I was a creative thinker and a visual storyteller but most of the adults around me found those skills to be interesting but not practical. I was encouraged to keep my “hobbies” active if I could but to focus on finding a pragmatic career path like engineering.
In college, as a student at WPI studying Electrical Engineering, I had the opportunity to teach Physics at a local high school as part of my interactive qualifying project (IQP) which is a sort of service-learning project for engineering students. I loved every minute of teaching that semester long course. I loved prepping for class and trying to come up with fun and engaging stories to make the physics concepts clear to my students. I loved standing in the front of the classroom and entertaining the students while sneaking in the hard-core science lessons.
When the teaching project ended, I turned my attention to finishing my engineering degree. I never paused to consider how much joy I had felt in the role of teacher. That had been an interesting project, but I had to get re-focused on becoming an engineer. I missed a major clue about a career path that would have allowed me to strive towards a much different professional potential.
Teaching was not something that anyone had ever mentioned to me as a potential career direction. That’s probably because I had never done any teaching until that Physics project. There was a linear path set before me and I had no sense that I could veer off that path. I completed my bachelor’s degree in engineering and was hired into a prestigious engineering leadership program at a large, multinational technology company. As part of the engineering program, the company paid for me to get my master’s degree in engineering.
Truth be told, I found the work to be uninspiring but instead of asking why the work didn’t resonate with me, I felt I just needed to try harder or learn more about engineering for it all to click. I watched many of my peers immerse themselves in the work and wonder why I didn’t feel the same level of passion.
I do recall that I excelled when I had to do presentations for executives or clients. I enjoyed public speaking. I enjoyed pulling together the graphics used for these presentations. I was telling stories while conveying technical information. I assumed that since it came easy to me, it was easy for others as well. I also erroneously assumed that there was not much value in someone who could present technical topics clearly and convincingly. In my mind, the value was only in the detailed engineering work.
I could do the work of being an engineer. I consistently received very good performance appraisals, but I didn’t enjoy the work or the environment. I did not enjoy being good at that type of work.
Contrast that feeling with my semester-long teaching project. I enjoyed that type of work – all of it from preparation to presentation to evaluation of students. (Okay, maybe not the evaluation part where I had to grade exams and papers but that was a tolerable, smaller percentage of the overall work.).
With great hindsight of 30 years in the rearview mirror, I realize the flow state I felt while teaching Physics in that high school classroom was a result of the joy of striving towards my truest potential. It took me a very long time to realize this was the case. After three decades and a number of career challenges, hurdles, and restarts, I am a professional speaker, trainer, consultant and a senior lecturer at Bentley University where I currently teach a variety of courses for undergrads, grad students, and executives. It’s a dream job and a career that allows me to focus on the work I enjoy doing well.
I like being good at the work of teaching and I am constantly striving to get better at the craft.
Many of you might feel the same level of frustration professionally. Maybe some of you have done projects or “extracurricular” activities that gave you clues about your first best destiny in life, but you ignored the clues.
The next time you feel a sense of disappointment in your career path, ask yourself if you enjoy being good at the work. If the answer is “yes,” you need to find a way to increase your mastery of the tasks. If the answer is “no,” you are in danger of burning out on the job. In that case, it’s time to look back over your educational years and your career and look for clues about the type of work that energized you. Sometimes this work is revealed in side projects, volunteer work, or hobbies that you’ve discounted as potential careers paths.
When you spend too much time doing work which you don’t enjoy being good at, you eventually get burned out and your on-the-job performance suffers. Sometimes the drop off is so dramatic that you might be fired or laid off form a job you were perfectly suited to do.
When you can spend time doing work which you enjoy you are in a period of growth. The growth period can last a lifetime if you have found your “calling.” Most people typically begin their work doing it poorly or average at best. The ones who enjoy the work the most strive for mastery which drives their performance up and
When reviewing these clues, don’t focus on what you would “be” but focus on the types of work you will “do.” For example, if you’re hobby is gardening you might not necessarily want to “be” a full time gardener but you might be able to find a job where you “do” the things you most enjoy about gardening as a hobby: working in isolation, planning and laying out planting patterns, paying attention to detail, diagnosing plant issues and developing solutions, etc. These skills are highly transferrable to any number of careers.
These questions and prompts can help you begin identifying your best career options:
What tasks do you do so well that they seem effortless?
For which skills do you receive the most compliments?
Which skills do you most enjoy using? Do you assume everyone else can do these as well? (Hint: They can’t.)
What hobbies, volunteer work, extracurricular activities put you into the greatest sense of flow where you are completed focused on the task and time seems to stand still?
Don’t focus on the answer to the question: “What are you good at?”
The key question to continually ask yourself is “What do I enjoy being good at doing?”