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How to Clarify your Career Goals

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Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.
– Elbert Hubbard
Consider these two questions. If you are looking forward to identifying your goals these are the two essential basic questions that you have to ponder on. It is not easy to arrive immediately to the answers, but the quest to finding the solutions and musing over their interpretations is worth the effort.
  • What are your personal goals?
  • What are your career goals?

How different are the two answers? When exploring at depth, do you see a correlation between these two answers?

Sure enough, they could be different, but in true essence they should not be. The answers to the above questions give you a broader outlook on where you want your career to be and how you want your future career to shape up. When you combine your personal goals and career goals you can arrive at a more satisfying career and job than when you judge them as two separate concepts.

In the short-term answer these questions – again honestly and with some insight:

  • Is this the job or career you want to be in?
  • Are you using your skills effectively and to your satisfaction?
  • Does the present job / career inspire you?
  • Do you aspire for more success and contentment at work?
  • Would you work better in a different work environment?

When you go through this process of questioning yourself in order to find the right answer, you are well on your way to analyzing your present career health. And, thus in the process of finding a path to a healthier future career.

Stop what you are doing now and spend time to investigate what you want to do in future. Make short-term and long-term goals, your short-term goals must be such to move you towards your long-term dreams of a satisfying career. The answers will come once you are clear on your goals on what you want to do. Don’t consider it a small step or a quick answer; most of us go through our whole lives without even taking time to question, let alone finding the answer to this ever important question of our lives. Don’t just keep doing what you are doing right now and be in waiting to expect a different result.

“If You Always Do What You’ve Always Done, You’ll Always Get What You’ve Always Got”

Stop, think, take charge of your career, but clarify your goals first.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.
– W. Clement Stone

 

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Filed Under: Career Self-Help, Work Smarter Tagged With: , , , ,

Is Business a Satisfying Career?

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For many women re-entering the workforce, starting a home based business or a small-scale business is a favored option. Though myths and stories are many around starting a new business and most importantly sustaining it, a question here to ponder at – is business a satisfying career?
Business week has a great resource of articles on business startup topics at www.businessweek.com/go/07/gettingstarted. On this website, I enjoyed reading Stacy Perman’s article where she says “Launching any venture means confronting the possibility of failure.” According to this article, In 2005 some 671,800 new small businesses were launched, according to the Small Business Administration. Now the bad news: About 544,800 of them closed not long after, felled by any number of issues such as capitalization and market forces.
However, there’s no standard method of measuring startups and failures, and a 2005 Monthly Labor Report gives a considerably more optimistic picture: 66% of new businesses survive the first two years, and 44% the first four years.
The debate on whether starting a new venture will be viable or sustain the market is something to be taken up upfront during your decision phase on launching your new career as an entrepreneur. But don’t let the many questions and complexity of starting a small scale or home based business daunt you, the feeling and the satisfaction of having done what you had dreamt of for long is much greater than having not done it at all. But we all want to be successful in our lives, and a lot depends on your vision and expectations of the business you launch to finally term it as a success or failure eventually.
Two famous quotes that might get you on the right track:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
“You plan to fail if you fail to plan.”
No matter what direction our career takes, you would be wondering always as well as evaluating as you go on — is this a satisfying profession? No one but you and only you will be able to answer this question, and I agree with Paula A. Sneed, a former executive vice president at Kraft Foods, who spoke with Kellogg School students at an event and presented five rules that she believes can help people capitalize on change and realize their goals:
  1. Keep a big, preposterous, ridiculous dream in your life
  2. Have a strategic plan for your professional and personal life
  3. Be a reality shaker
  4. Keep only the right people in your life
  5. Have the highest ethical character
In the end it is very important to draft a plan for your business to be profitable or satisfying in a sense you want it to – sustainability of a project is always in question when you put in lot of effort and the return is not as conducive. Keep that in mind too!
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Filed Under: Entrepreneurship, Job Search Tagged With: , , , , ,

Most Satisfying Careers – What is yours?

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How would you define a satisfying career?

Of course, it depends on individual to individual. I may enjoy doing some work which you may never even dream of doing.
These are a few answers that I got from my friends on what their main factors were that determined satisfaction at work:

  • Good salary and benefits
  • Fulfilling and inspiring work
  • Lets my creativity bloom
  • Great team to work with
  • Flexibility at work
  • Less work pressure
  • No micro management
  • I love sports and that is what I get to do at my job

The underlying crucial word that defines a satisfying career is “satisfy”, the dictionary defines this word as “to fulfill the desires, expectations, needs, or demands of (a person, the mind, etc.); give full contentment”.

If you are looking for a satisfying career don’t think Googling alone can provide you the solution. Of course, searching and asking around gives options but not solutions. The solution lies within you. What satisfies you and what are your values, what is your life purpose? When you question yourself the reason and cause that gives you true satisfaction, the answer of finding a corresponding career will come. Most of the times we are looking for the right answer before asking ourselves what we really want. The essence of it all is to ask the right questions and the right answers will come. And they lie within us not somewhere outside.

Of the range of answers listed above in bullet points, which one did you like best?
I loved the last one “I love to do this and that is what I do”? Isn’t that satisfying?

How would you define your satisfying career?

Careerbright – Career Article and Information for Professionals and Working Women
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Filed Under: Career Self-Help Tagged With: , ,