Your Career Blueprint Begins With Your Passion and Purpose
Passion and Purpose is The Key To Building A Resume And Career Path
Live by your purpose and you will create an inner drive and passion to culminate a life and career path uniquely yours….One that brings out the best version of yourself.
Over 50 percent of the current American workforce are unsatisfied with their current employment and career choice. Considering how many hours people spend at work, it would be a good idea to be among the other 50 percent who enjoy what they do for a living!
Choosing a career path that ignites your purpose and passion in life does not only lead to a higher level of success and satisfaction but fulfillment at work, research also suggests that it promotes long term happiness, and good health.
But for someone with ADHD this may be a daunting and overwhelming task.
Many find it easy to discover their mistakes and not their strengths, they may lack confidence in what they can and cannot do with all the struggles and challenges throughout their lives. By breaking down the components that go into choosing a career and taking a deep look at how successes and personal struggles could serve as a tool for identifying some hidden talents, interests and skills, you can ignite your career path.
This is achievable when you follow a systematic approach to unearth your unique career that works just right for you. Consider it a blueprint to your personal career path.
Develop a blueprint that is authentically yours
A career blueprint for your life will help to create a strong foundation and structure for career happiness. You can compare it to building your dream house. Would you build a house without a well thought out set of blueprints? You might be able to pull it off but how stable would it be for future additions? You would want to put a lot of thought and time into making sure it was right for you. The structure of the house will determine how well you live your life and the problems you may encounter with it. A well designed set of blueprints takes time, energy and passion. It is key to apply this same process to finding a career meant just for you.
Without a career blueprint plan, it is difficult to think through possibilities of how your life experiences connect to your goals and how your career could adapt and grow with you over time.
Joe is a good example of someone who benefited from this process. He was a college student who lacked a solid career plan. He was taking classes to satisfy general requirements but did not know where to specialize his interests. After going through this process, he found that his true passion and purpose was not in the engineering program he had originally thought was his path. He has able to identify key elements that were important to him in a career and incorporated that into what he naturally was good at in college. The great part was that it stayed within the engineering department, but shifted to a more environmental focus. It took into account his desire for travel, continual learning and humanitarian efforts. He was able to design a career blueprint to best set him up for success in this field with strategic action plans and milestones.
Some people may think it is too late in their career to start the blueprint. They may be burned out of their chosen career but feel they are too old and tired to recreate their life purpose.
It is never too late to start creating a blueprint for your life!
And you don’t need to start from ground zero. Through this process, you can see connections that will propel you into your new career direction with your personal history, experiences and narrative. Mary was able to rediscover her life’s passion and purpose by using this strategic process.
Mary was a marketing professional who loved her chosen career path. She had felt passion and purpose and never questioned her choices until she left the workforce for 20 years to raise her children. Now an empty nester, she was looking to redefine her life purpose and re-enter the workforce without spending years retraining to gain new skill sets. She dug in deep to look at her blueprint she had created and found that her life experiences as a mom brought new skills, interests and passion. She was able to find purpose and passion with her experiences that complimented her original career blueprint path where she was making over six figures. In fact, she ended up feeling MORE marketable as she made connections in her current life situation to her previous career experience that were very insightful.
The key to finding a career that gets your passion and purpose burning is to look at your life’s What, Why and How.
The What of the Blueprint
WHAT you want out of life such as interests, values, and personality factor into this equation. You might even find that some of your desires were written by you at a young age. It may be a childhood dream that was imprinted into your mind when you did not have any distractions or life barriers creating doubts that could serve you in choosing the right career path.
Go through these questions and answer them. Writing them down in a journal will help you see a pattern of your wants.
What brings you joy?
It is very important to take time in finding out who you are, ask yourself some important questions. What makes me unique? There may be a special strength in your uniqueness. What are my values and beliefs? What are my fears? Self-knowledge is a key step in designing a career path that works for you.
What motivates and energizes you most?
Another key factor in determining your career path in life is knowing what gets you motivated. Anything that gets you motivated and keeps you energized is capable of sustaining you through the mundane or tough times in a career.
What are you biggest interests?
Knowing your interest is also very important while developing a career path. Your area of interest would be where your career is focused on. You might even find that some of your yearnings and fears were not written by you and don’t suit you now.
Is there a major challenge you want to tackle in your life or career that is important to you?
For instance, If you knew you only had one year to live, what would you want to do during this time?
You can start to identify a life pattern that will point you in the direction of a career blueprint meant just for you by answering these questions. This will align with your plans and purpose in life as the foundation.
The Why of your blueprint plan deepens your connection of what it is you want. Taking a look at your unique WHY or Inner Narrative is a good place to start. What is the voice inside your head telling you?
Why are you the way you are?
Desires, beliefs, values, and fears don’t materialize out of nowhere. Your values and personality are shaped during our lives in several ways. They’re either developed over time by our internal consciousness or as observations made during our life experiences. The key here is to identify the why and know yourself and how it factors into your career path.
Designing a career blueprint for you by taking proactive steps geared with this self-knowledge of who you are and what your wants are makes your career journey of planning and decision making solid and stream-lined.
The How to pull it together for your career blueprint plan
Now is the time to connect the dots and see the patterns emerge. Identify career paths that fit into this using resources available to you.
Once you have a good understanding of your true authentic self of what you want and why you want it, create the career path. Unpack the box of expectations that you grew up with and make connections between, values, personality, strengths, and start to identify paths that will relate to your personal dreams and goals. Your career blueprint plan will start to take form and give you clarity and a vision that you can follow.
And for the skeptics
Yeah sure, things could change, and you may need to modify the plans over the years, but with a solid blueprint, the changes can be handled and accommodated and add value and character to your original plan as it did for Mary.
Your career path is a path that does not need to be a straight path. This thought can leave people feeling panicked when they want to adapt or change their plan. The career stakes become so high and feel unattainable which can leave people feeling stuck and confused. It does not have to be this way.
Gone are the days of people choosing one career and never veering off from that path.
People are creating more of a portfolio of jobs that lead to a series of careers. This can be exciting for someone that has a developed blueprint career path that takes into consideration all the elements to a passionate and purposeful career. The path can have many elements to it that spur off the main course but contribute to the overall career goal. Now more than ever a career path can have many twists and turns that lead to success, fulfillment and purpose.
Consider these point in designing a career blueprint plan:
- Make meaningful connections in life experiences: self knowledge
- Investigate interests, skills, aptitudes, accomplishments, and challenges
- Identify patterns between, values, personality, strengths, and how it relates to career dreams and goals
- Build a vision board of what you want your career to look like
- Answer some self reflection questions: Is it truly your plan?
- Incorporate opportunities for growth and learning in your career
Take note of all the points listed above. Turn them into a manifesto. When you feel overwhelmed and distracted from your purpose, go back to this statement as a guiding light in your career journey.
Build a career path that ignites your passion and purpose and never second guess your career choice.
This post is from the fall issue of Attention Magazine by Michelle Raz.
