Most of my work is to encourage people to “be all they can be”.
On many of the leadership development programmes at Massey, people ask me what they should do in their job or career to get more from their work. My reply, “Don’t ask me what you should do but what you could be”. Wouldn’t it be great if everybody wanted to run into work on Monday mornings? It would not feel like work then, would it?
To do this you need to find a job that you love; it is not too difficult to find “A job” but to find “THE Job” now, that is a different challenge. The first part of this challenge is to find out as much about you as possible:
- What are your values?
- What would excite you enough to get you to go in on that wet July morning?
- What are your strengths and limitations?
- What are your emotional skills; your “emotional intelligence”?
- What form of resilience will keep you on track and believing in yourself when the going gets tough?
- How will you manage your relationships with others?
- How quickly do you adapt to transitions?
- Can you manage your own stress and anger?
- What mood do you take into a room with you?
- Last, but not least, how will you deal with failure and success?
Once you have a clear understanding of who you are there is another set of hard questions to answer – matching who you are to what jobs are out there. “How would I match up to the jobs on offer?”
- What jobs would really describe me and my sense of purpose? But perhaps another way to ask this is “Where would I fit in?”
- Which organisation aligns with my values?
- Where would I be allowed to use most of my strengths to a purpose that I believe useful for all my life energy?
- Where would my limitations be accommodated rather than cursed?
These are just a few of the questions that everyone who has a job they love has answered.
So if you want to make a start on that, the related pages in the links below will give you an opportunity to look at some of your values, understand and start developing some of those emotional skills, review how you approach interviews against a checklist that you have made and a quick guide to success at work and in the new job.
Watch Mike’s career Webinar here.
FURTHER RESOURCES
Values link: values
Emotional Intelligence Link: EQscales
Interview Link: interview
Success at Work: success