A 10-Step Process For Finding Work You Love (And Why That Matters)
When I first came to coaching, I wondered if the work I would find myself doing, in the long term, would be supporting people to shift into new careers, to change from something they had just found themselves doing to something which truly fulfilled them. That was what I had been through, moving from work which sounded great but by that point exhausted and frustrated me (managing small arts organisations), to the holy grail: work which I loved doing, which filled me with energy, which used all my strengths and potential, and which contributed to the world in a way that was meaningful to me. And, for all the moments where my flawed humanity still gets the better of me and I find myself in existential angst, I am so much closer to that holy grail now than I was when I set out on my career change journey seven or eight years ago.
In my work as a coach, I have continued on the journey I started in that career change: how can I be as well-used by the universe as possible? In the end, most of my coaching work hasn’t coalesced around people making career transitions, but the importance of that work remains clear to me. Indeed, in the face of an ever-more-complex world, there is really only one way to be sure you are doing everything you can to make things better. That is: understand the work which only you can do (with your unique genes, abilities and experiences) and then understand yourself enough so that you are acting as skilfully as you possibly can (therefore being as sure as possible that you are making things better and not worse). For those of us who find ourselves increasingly concerned about the uncertainty and instability in the world right now, and who find ourselves asking questions about fulfilling our potential, this is an important thing to know.
Today, as the economic shocks of the coronavirus pandemic continue to ripple out, many people will be thinking deeply about their work, about how they spend their time and how they make their money. Things get broken in dark times, but things get made, too, and for some the coronavirus situation will be the involuntary stop which makes them look at their life and decide to create a change. For others, there will have been an uncomfortable thought in the mind for years that perhaps they should change their work to something more meaningful, more fulfilling, or just… more. Now, perhaps, for one reason or another, that thought is impossible to ignore.
Whatever the reason, the quest for that holy grail – the work that you love, are brilliant at and creates the change in the world you want to see – is an honourable and important one. This article is for the people who are about to step out on that quest, or who have already bravely stepped out but are looking for some guidance. It contains the best ideas and techniques I’ve come across – through my own journey and from my work supporting clients on their quests – and I hope it will help you find your holy grail. The world needs brave, smart people doing things that matter. It needs all of us using all our strengths to make things better and not worse. There are a lot of ideas here, and there’s a lot to take in. But then, this isn’t a small thing, finding our calling, finding the work that we do better than anyone else. If it was easy, you’d have done it already. Below, you will find ideas for reflection and action, and – I hope – the inspiration to get moving and start taking steps towards something new.
1) Do you already know the answer?
Master Coach Marcia Reynolds told me, when I interviewed her recently for The Coach’s Journey podcast, that when clients come to her for help with a decision that’s usually not what they need. What they need, instead, is help to be brave enough to take the decision they already know is right for them. So, before I start sharing ideas about how you might understand what the right next step is for you, just check. Check if this is knowledge problem or a courage problem. If it’s a knowledge problem, you might need the ideas in the Reflection part of this article: they come first. If it’s a courage problem, it’s probably time to skip to the Action section (the second half of this piece). Or, indeed, if it’s really just a courage problem, maybe you need to pull yourself together, remember that everyone gets scared and courage is just acting in the face of fear… and take a step.
And later, at the end of the quest, after you have found that work that helps you make that contribution you want to make, that fulfils you in the way you want to be fulfilled, come back to this article and check. Were you right? Was it a knowledge problem, or was it a courage problem? Did you know, all along, where you were likely to end up?
2) You are not going to find a computer program which spits out the right answer for you.
They had one of those at our school. You told it what you liked by answering a series of questions and then it told you what you were well suited for. It told me I should be a croupier or a Royal Marines Commander. Spoiler alert: I have not and do not want to be one of those. Well, I quite like the idea of being an officer in the marines, actually, but that will have to wait for another lifetime.
This is a process of inquiry, of deepening your understanding. You will need to work and you will need to reflect. You will need to experiment and take action.
The work you do to understand yourself – the next four parts of this article – are an investment. They will help with this journey, but, more than that, they will help you understand yourself. And you will need this understanding as you go out into the world and make an impact. Don’t skimp on this. Take your time. Once you have done it, any future career choices will be easier; indeed, choices in many areas of your life may become more straightforward: come back to these results and things will become clearer.
But, overall, remember: this process is going to require work. No one is going to just give you the answer, not a computer program, and certainly not me.
REFLECTION
3) REFLECTION: What do you love?
Gay Hendricks, in his book The Big Leap, where he coined the phrase ‘Zone of Genius’, provides a set of questions to help us identify that place where we are not just excellent but truly brilliant. (The Zone of Excellence, in Hendricks’ mind, is one of the things which most holds us back from our Zone of Genius). The first question Hendricks asks to help us find our Zone of Genius is: what do you love most to do?
The game, here, is to answer that question, collecting as many answers as you can. In a brilliant article based on the work of Pamela Slim, Natasha Stanley from Careershifters offers a two-list technique for understanding the stories of our lives.
First, she says, make a list of all the times you have been in flow. You probably know that feeling of ‘flow’: the activities where time just flies by, the things you could do all day without getting tired or bored. Collect these, but don’t just collect the obvious ones. Go back through your life, remembering all the times when you have been like that. Make the list over several days. Include what happened when you were six, and sixteen, and twenty-six, as well as now. Ask for help from family and friends: what did I used to just lose myself doing?
Then, make a second list: what are all the things which you are curious about in life? What captures your imagination, what do you wish you knew more about? What would you LOVE to learn to do, or to understand? What could you read about all day? Again, make this list over several days or weeks. Keep it somewhere you can update it when an idea pops into your mind.
If you want work that truly fulfils you, that fits right into your Zone of Genius, it needs to be something that you love to do, and something that you are so interested in that you would do it even if you didn’t get paid. At least, that would be great, right?
4) REFLECTION: What are your strengths?
One of my earliest and favourite insights as a coach was the idea of a strengths-based approach. Gallup, who run CliftonStrengths, my favourite psychometric test, and the only one I ever suggest private clients do, have incredible data on this. It turns out that if you spend time using on your strengths every day you are more fulfilled and more productive. Not only that, but workplaces which enable staff to use their strengths every day lose less days to staff illness and have fewer workplace accidents! Amazing, eh?!
What if, instead of doing what our education systems and performance reviews mostly seem to encourage and focusing on those things which we struggle with, improving them a tiny bit at a time and finding it exhausting, we focused on our strengths? What if we focused on the things which we have already, by accidents of birth or upbringing or genetics: our strengths and talents?
Well, it turns out that this is what pretty much everyone who does extraordinary work does. As Tim Ferriss says, ‘The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses.’
Not only that, but if Matthew Syed and other writers are to be believed, talent from genetics is a myth (or is mostly irrelevant), and what mostly counts is what we have practised. If there is something which you happen to have been practising, throughout the first decades of your life or work, developing a talent into a strength, now is not the time to abandon it… at least, not if you want to do the absolute best work you can.
A strengths based approach is, incidentally, why one of the biggest worries of career changers mostly doesn’t come to pass: the worry is that it has taken us X years to get to Y level of seniority or skill or income in one profession, and so it will take us the same number of years to get to that same level in our new profession. But a strengths-based approach enables us to shortcut that. Focusing on our strengths allows us to get the best results fastest, whatever ‘best results’ means for us.
I, it turns out, had spent thousands and thousands of hours developing my coaching presence over the first decades of my life. I had developed my ability to hold a framework in my mind whilst also staying present in the moment in relationship with others. In coaching, it turns out, that is pretty much the whole game. But I hadn’t been doing it by practising coaching; indeed, I hadn’t heard of coaching for most of my life. Instead, I had been doing this because between the ages of 11 and 26, pretty much my only hobby was acting. I was in tens of plays across school, university and beyond. These thousands of hours – as well as a family with a peculiar habit of creating generative conversations – meant that when I found coaching, I wasn’t training up weaknesses, I was developing and focusing on strengths. And that enabled me to move very quickly to the kind of income, reputation and fulfilment that I hadn’t found in years in my previous work.
So spend some time considering what your strengths are, your real strengths. Here are three ways to do it:
Take CliftonStrengths (I recommend the $50 version, because it comes with a vast amount of information and insight, but the cheaper version is worth it, if money is a problem). Read the short ebook that comes with it to understand the strengths-based approach (this bit is important) and then use their tips to apply your strengths to your life and your career change.
Consider your life story and the lists from number 3: what have you accidentally been practising this whole time?
Ask for help: get feedback from people across your life (not just work, and not just recently: ask the people who know you best). This is especially important here, because often the things that we are truly gifted at don’t feel like strengths to us because they come so naturally. They feel effortless. They’re just a thing we do. But effortlessness is what using our strengths looks like. And to others, these things that come effortlessly to us would be incredibly difficult or draining of energy for them. From the inside they feel normal; from the outside they look like super powers. So ask people: what are the things that I do well that you or others find difficult?
5) REFLECTION: What matters to you?
In some ways, the reason I fell out of love with my work in the arts was because I wasn’t using my strengths enough. But that was a fixable problem: moving to a different organisation and getting some strengths coaching would probably have resolved that for me.
But my work in the arts was almost certainly on a timer that would eventually go off. This is because the work I did didn’t contribute to the world in the way that I wanted to contribute. Participation in theatre was transformational for me as a young person, and great art can undoubtedly transform and enrich our lives. But, as a career for me, there was something missing. And when I heard integral coach Brett Thomas talking about his model for finding our calling, something shifted. Thomas asked about what we love, yes, and what we are good at, but he also asked: how do you want to contribute to the world?
And that is an important question. I wanted my impact to be broader and more varied than the arts could provide. I wanted to influence and be a part of the private sector and the public sector as well as the charity sector. I wanted to be contributing on the front line of something, not as an organiser. I wanted to be deeply connected to people, not simply facilitating something that inspired them. Those were (and are) all a part of how I want to contribute to the world. My roles in the arts didn’t provide them to me, and that left me with a fulfilment gap. When I discovered coaching, one of the things that helped me see that it could be the right thing was that it had the potential to be a contribution to the world that ticked all my boxes and - because of that - spoke to my soul.
So, what matters to you? What are your values: the concepts, ideas and ideals that are most important to you. You can choose them from a list. You can spend time making a long-list of all the values which feel important to you, describe each one in a sentence and then narrow it down to a few. I recommend forcing yourself to get down to five or six.
These values are important for two reasons: one, violating these values may be why your work is not fulfilling you. If integrity is one of the three things which matters to you most, and your workplace has low integrity, that’s going to be a problem. But also, these values may point you towards the areas of work which matter most. If aesthetics is one of your values, that tells you something about the kind of work that might matter to you (it isn’t one of mine, and one of my favourite discoveries about the human condition is that it is really important for lots of people – I’ve had multiple clients name it as one of their top five values). The same could be true of values of love, honesty, fun, nature… the list goes on.
Go back to the things that fascinate you and pique your interest: are there issues here that matter to you more than what you’re working on? What do you care about?
As my old coach Rich used to ask: what’s the cause that’s so important that it would wake you up at four in the morning with tears in your eyes?
Sit with these things. Understand them. You have great potential. You have a unique mix of skills. You have a lot to offer. So make sure you are offering it to something that matters to you.
6) REFLECTION: What do you want your life to look like?
It’s one thing to reflect on what your job might be in the future, but that’s not everything. Now, as you consider changing your life, is the time to create a life you actually want. It’s no use moving from work that you find dull to something you love if the new career stops you spending time with the children that are the centre of your world. It’s no good finally finding a calling and then finding out it will stop you ever doing the travelling that is what you will really remember at the end of your life. Make sure you don’t shift into fulfilling work that will somehow cost you your marriage.
Part of this journey needs to be about designing work that supports and enhances the other parts of your life. To do that, you have to understand what you want.
So consider: what are the fundamentals and foundations, as career coach Phil Bolton used to ask his clients, that matter to you? What do you need every week to feel good in your life? How do you top up your fuel tanks, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually? What things in life do you not want to compromise?
What, in five years, would be a remarkable life? Spend some time reflecting: write out, as Debbie Millman memorably recommends on the Tim Ferriss Show, an ideal average day, in 5- or 10-years’ time, if everything has turned out remarkably. Start from the moment you wake up, finish at the moment you go to sleep, going into as much detail as possible. As Millman tells her students: be careful what you wish for; she regularly gets contacted by people who have completed the exercise, who can’t believe how much of what they wrote about is reality years later.
Reflect on the experiences you want to have before you die. What would you be sad about at the end of your life if you had or hadn’t done them? What is the eulogy you would love someone to give for you? Write these out. Understand what you want and don’t want to happen. How might work support you with that? These are big questions, but better, by far, to know the answers now, than to realise them on your deathbed in 40 years’ time.
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7) INTERMISSION: Procrastinate and Ask For Help From Those You Trust
Adam Grant, in his book, Originals, talks about the value of procrastination to creativity. Once you have set yourself a challenge that requires innovation, leaving it for a while and allowing your brain to go to work subconsciously (or semi-consciously) is a good way of getting some new insights. Of course, new insights aren’t really new, they are just your brain rearranging the same information into new ways. That’s why we all have our best ideas in the shower, or when we’re running, or when we’re meditating, and not when we’re sitting down thinking ‘Think harder, you imbecile!’
So do the reflection above. Don’t skimp. And then leave it and go about your life. Keep coming back to it each time you have a new thought about something you love, a strength, a way you have been learning something for twenty years, or something about how you want your life to look.
Do things that interest you to job that creativity and innovation. Go to talks that pique your curiosity. Find some time to go to a class or read about something new. But not ‘to find out if that’s what you want to do for the rest of your life’ (we’ll get to that), just for the curiosity, for the love.
It was when I was doing the seemingly unrelated activity of reading about how to be a better boyfriend that I had the insight that led, in the end, to me working as a coach. I had been learning about relationships loads, not because I thought I might be a relationship coach, but because I was really interested. (It was also really useful to me in what was at the time the burgeoning relationship with my wife). I understood so much about what I was good at: people; what I loved: conversation; how I wanted to contribute: on the front line. I also had other criteria for my work, based on the life I wanted to live: I wanted it to be something that didn’t feel like work, and that the actual work was something I enjoyed (as opposed to ‘organising’, where I loved the things I’d organised but found the work stressful). And I wanted it to be something I would learn about for free anyway in my spare time. The answer looks obvious now, but as I sat on a train going north from London reading about relationships I suddenly thought: ‘Oh, all these books I’m reading are written by coaches and psychotherapists. I could do that.’ And it fitted all the criteria. It took me another two years until I trained at the Coaching School, via a couple of false starts, but it was that moment of apparent procrastination when the lightbulb went on.
It is also worth pausing here, in the intermission, to reflect on asking for help. First, it is important: I’ve mentioned it several times. Share the two lists you made, share your CliftonStrengths report, share your ideas for how you might want to contribute and what matters to you. Share the picture of your fundamentals and ideal life. But, be careful who you share it with. Sometimes, a journey like this can feel fragile, and many of us have thought about changing careers many times and given up because the doubting voices in our head got too loud. Some people in your life, if you share what you are working on, may feed those voices and it’s worth protecting yourself from that. In that group might be your parents, who are perhaps scared about the idea of you leaving something secure behind. Also in the group may be some friends and colleagues. They may get uncomfortable when you talk about pursuing a calling, because it shows them just how much their work is not fulfilling them (I used to be like this A LOT when I was frustrated with my work). These people and more may be trying to help but they can be dangerous at this stage. So when you are early in the journey, when the whole project feels fragile, talk about it only to the friends who you just know will get it. Or the ones you totally trust. And, as time goes on, it might really serve you to find a community of people who can help keep you going on the journey, spark inspiration and help in all kinds of other ways. They exist, in meetups, at CareerShifters and in all corners of the internet. You can hire a coach to help with this, too. Or, you can just wait and see if any appear. A fundamental person in my career change, who pointed me at Careershifters and various other places, I met temping at a Garden Centre. She is still running the brilliant vintage dress business that she had just started at the time.
Indeed, the advice I wish I had been given as I was changing career helps with finding others who can support you and it helps with one of the things I hated most at the time: introducing myself (I just didn’t want to be associated with the work I was doing at the time). The advice I wish I’d been given is this:
When people ask you ‘What do you do?’, say something like this: ‘It’s funny you should ask. I’m actually thinking about changing career right now. I’ve done a lot of reflection on what I’m good at, what I love and what matters to me, and now I’m in a phase of exploration.’ A few things might happen, including eyes glazing over, but what you’re looking for is the people who get really excited about this. They’re probably going through the same thing or have been, and they could be great partners on this journey.
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ACTION
There comes an uncomfortable moment in every career change journey where we have to start taking action. The cosy, often quite fun self-reflection is done (for now). But if you never take any steps out into the world, then nothing will change. The following three sections are designed to support you in doing that.
8) Resistance
Steven Pressfield, in his majestic book about winning our creative battles, The War of Art, defines one of the key forces that everyone who is a human has to deal with: Resistance. It will rear its head, according to Pressfield, if we are writing a book, or starting a business, or anything that includes commitment of the heart and the pursuit of any calling.
'Most of us have two lives,’ writes Pressfield. ‘The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.’
Resistance is the voice in your head and the excuses you make. It is the procrastination (of the unhelpful kind) and the fear. It is every time you listen to the people who say ‘Nah, don’t change, stay where you are’. It is every time you give in. Battling Resistance requires courage, it requires doing things when we don’t feel like it. It requires a real commitment.
What Pressfield advises to help with this is: turn pro. What he means is: treat your pursuit of a calling in the way you would treat an average job. Show up on time, do some work for a while, stop doing it when you’ve done your hours. Don’t take it too seriously (your life doesn’t actually depend on it, no matter what Resistance might tell you), but also don’t take it too lightly: actually show up and do some work when you’re supposed to.
During your career change, you will feel Resistance. You may be intimately familiar with it already. Either way, prepare yourself for more. And remember this rule of thumb from The War of Art: ‘the more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel towards pursuing it.’ If you’re really feeling Resistance here, that’s a good thing. That means you’re right on track towards something that is going to transform you and your life for the better. Now take the next step, the next action, no matter how tiny. Because our inspiration is always there, but it's at the moment when we commit to something and make the start that we let inspiration in.
9) ACTION: The Lean Career Change
The Careershifters blog was an invaluable resource to me in my career change. It was the career coach I wish I’d had. Perhaps the most important article that I read was The Lean Career Change, by Careershifters founder Richard Alderson. The essential lesson of it was to bring to your career change the ideas of the lean start-up methodology. Essentially, that means this:
Make a list of the most likely possible career directions for you at this moment in time. From all your reflection, from your (creative) procrastination, from the lists of things that you love and pique your interest, what directions bring up the most curiosity? Which give you a ‘little yes’? Which give you a little buzz in your chest? These little yeses, these little buzzes, they will be your compass for your career change. Choose at most three possible directions. (If Resistance has got you panicking at this stage, don’t worry: you’re not going to HAVE to do any of these things.)
Then, with each of those areas, create a ‘shift project’. For each shift project, follow this process:
Design an experiment to learn more about that project. The lower cost and lower risk it entails the better. Then run the experiment.
For me, after my insight on the train, the lowest cost, lowest risk thing I could come up with was: research counselling and coaching training on the internet. I did that, it cost me nothing, took me about an hour and that was it. Done.
Then, check in, do I still have that feeling of curiosity, that little yes, about this project? If the answer is yes, ask yourself: what’s the next lowest risk, lowest cost step I can take? Well, it turned out, for me, I could go on a free two-day workshop on coaching with a training provider, and there were open evenings for most of the counselling schools. Some of them cost £30, but that was still low cost and low risk. Then, do that experiment to learn more.
Then, do I still have the feeling about this project? About coaching: no, I didn’t. I didn’t like the workshop. It didn’t feel right. About counselling, yes: for several of the training providers.
Ok then. What’s the next lowest risk, lowest cost step I can take? (Repeat, repeat, repeat.)
If, with all of the projects you start with, you get to a dead end, go back to the last fork in the road and see if there are alternative routes you could take. Sometimes, that might mean going back to the start.
I got as far as a two-term, £900 counselling course. That’s not that low-cost, low-risk, but I had been through a lot of steps to get there. So when it came to the £900 investment, it felt worth it. I was confident that it was a good decision. I’d done due diligence. It was very promising.
Then, as I got towards the end of the course and had to think about the next lowest cost, lowest risk step (a two-year foundation course!), I realised that I didn’t have the feeling any more. It was absolutely gutting to have to go back to a previous fork in the road when I had got so far.
And, at that point, an old connection, Mike Toller, started talking to me about the coaching school he had co-founded with an old university friend, Phil. I got the feeling, ran several low-risk, low-cost experiments with them (a £15 event, long conversations with both Mike and Phil, conversations with my brother who knew more about coaching than me)… and the last five years have flown by.
The key lesson of the Lean Career Change is to stay in action, and to keep the risks as low as possible. Keeping the risks low stops out-dated evolutionary safety mechanisms getting the better of us. Be moving, be learning – all the learning will be valuable, and the two-term counselling course has definitely helped me in many ways – and in the end it will keep you moving in the right direction, keep you meeting people and keep inspiration dripping into your life.
10) ACTION: The Best Way To Network (With Integrity) During Your Career Change
Another lesson I am incredibly grateful to CareerShifters for (although I can’t find the actual article that gave me this insight is this) is the idea of sending this message to people:
‘I’m thinking about changing my life. What you do really inspires me. [Tell them why they inspire you if you can, in as much detail as possible]. Would you have time for me to buy you a coffee or give you a call, so I can understand more about you and how you got where you are?’
And what I learnt from using it was that people respond to it incredibly generously. And that makes sense, right? I mean, wouldn’t you?
I read about this on Careershifters, and these became low-risk, low cost next steps for me in my lean career change. I didn’t know how to find the people I was interested in, but when I came across them (one in the Guardian, one via Googling a semi-obscure couples counselling technique) I sent them messages like the one above. This was about investigating counselling (I came back to it later to support me in my coaching business) and I was gobsmacked that they made the time. I had a 100% record (2/2) as far as I can remember, and had two incredibly valuable conversations with very successful therapists. It turns out that unless people genuinely can’t make 30 minutes, most people will give this kind of time. They do this because mostly people are nice, and because they probably needed conversations like this when they were starting out or changing career, and know how valuable they are.
In the conversations, get really curious: what is life like for them? How do they contribute? What do they love? What frustrates them? What strengths do they use? Who do they work with? What difference do they feel they are making in the world? Listen for if their answers match with the results from your reflection.
These conversations are GREAT for getting a sense of ‘Do I want to run the next lowest-cost, lowest-risk experiment?’ And you can do as many of them as you need. You will get information about the fields you are thinking about, a true sense of life on the ground… and who knows what else might come up? Connections may be formed, friendships may be started, introductions may be made. In fact, a good final question for each person could be: is there anyone else you can think of who I should speak to?
Not sure who to send the messages to? Ask your friends (use the magic question ‘Who do you know?’), use google, try the authors of a book that you like (if they can’t do it, ask them if they can recommend someone who can). When you start worrying they might be angry with you or you might be embarrassed or something else, remember that it’s just Resistance, and that probably means you’re on the right track. And then take the next, tiniest, lowest risk, lowest cost step you can.
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And there you have it. That is essentially the ten-step process that I went through to find this work that I love. Do the reflection. Take action. Run your lean career change experiments until one day you wake up and realise five years have gone past and your career has changed beyond recognition.
This article contains the most important ideas that I share with clients who want to spend more of their time in their Zone of Genius and less of it tired and exhausted by focusing on their weaknesses. These are the ideas I used (or wish I’d used) and they are what I send to people who want to make a real difference in the world, and don’t feel like they are doing it.
Through it, and the links to other writers and thinkers, I hope you take the spark of belief that this is possible, that you can create a change in your life and do work you love. It doesn’t have to take years, it doesn’t have to cost thousands of pounds. Remember: you are a talented, unique human with amazing things to offer the world. The game is to offer those things in the place where the world needs them and in a way which lights you up and fills you with energy.
Remember: on this journey you’re not alone. There are other adventurers out here when you need us. And we’re willing you on to succeed. We want to see the amazing unique contribution that only you can make. And, what’s more, the world needs you to make that contribution. It needs all of us to make that contribution, and to make it skilfully: that’s how we steady the ship we are all on together and make tomorrow better than today.