Design Your Ideal Career 

By Howard Sambol

Breakthrough Coaching

http://www.careercrafting.com

Introduction

Are you unsure about what career to pursue? Do you wish an angel would come down from heaven and tell you what to do with your life? Has your current field turned out to be a dead end or less satisfying than what you had hoped? Or, perhaps, after spending many years of being in a satisfying profession, you are now finding yourself at a crossroads point needing to make some new choices. If any of these are true, this article is for you!

Our purpose here is to get you started with the process of clarifying your ideal career direction. We will be showing you how to design your future. This process requires a "big picture" view and a willingness to put aside previous assumptions in order to create new opportunities. So, take a moment now to "wipe your slate clean" and be willing to approach designing your future with a new and fresh perspective.

Without realizing it, many people seek to satisfy their immediate income needs AND their desire for career fulfillment at the same time. This often causes confusion, frustration and other problems. Therefore, we will operate with the premise that you have some source of immediate income, which we will refer to as your Taxi Job . If this need has not been satisfied, I recommend that you create and implement a plan for satisfying your short term needs while applying the recipe here for designing your ideal future.

Step 1: De-Mystifying the Process of Gaining Clarity

Most programs give you a set of tests that attempt to fit you into some established occupational title or category. Instead, our aim here will be to teach you HOW to uncover your deepest desires and motivations. This is the source of your career success and fulfillment.

When you are clear about your own interests, values, skills and passions, you can craft these into a career path you can fully own as yours. This allows you to know in your heart that you are pursuing what you want and something that will allow you to be successful on your terms, whatever is meaningful to you.

With this orientation, you are not pursuing a path because someone told you it's what you should do or just because there's good money to be made in this field, but because it is the central, strongest motivation inside you. Don't worry. We did not forget about money. This will be factored in later.

Today, clarity is available to anyone who wants it. Some people find it natural and easy to be clear, to know what they want while others struggle continuously with this issue all their lives. Most people agree that clarity is important. The question is how do we go about "getting it" and why is it so difficult for some to achieve?

Lets consider a profile of a person who is naturally clear on what they want to do. From careful observation we see that a clear person has a particular kind of relationship with himself. The relationship is based on acknowledging, validating and speaking the truth when he or she knows it and uncovering the truth when he or she doesn't. This is the underlying key to knowing what you want and being able to pursue it confidently and successfully.

Step 2: Overcoming the Barriers to Gaining Clarity

It is now useful for you to ask yourself the following questions:

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