Whether you’re just starting your career, working your way up the corporate ladder, or branching out on your own, chances are you could benefit from some quality career advice.
Except most career advice sounds the same. Hustle harder. Work smarter. Do what you love and you’ll never “work” another day in your life.
And frankly, that advice often falls flat. Because it doesn’t consider you, and your unique needs. You’ve built up your skills and you know what interests you (or you’re actively working on these things), but what you really need to hear is a different idea: stop fighting how you’re naturally wired and start using it.
Our collective lack of understanding about how we operate has led to some common myths. Understanding why those are myths, then embracing your instinctive strengths, can help make that dream career a reality.
Even dream careers require compromise. Every career decision requires tradeoffs. The key is to figure out what trade-offs you might need to make.
Often, we focus on the feeling part of the mind. Maybe you have a set salary that you want. Maybe you’re only comfortable working remote jobs. Maybe it has to be a cause you care about.
Those don’t always come together, which means you’ll have to make tradeoffs. And the key is to make these tradeoffs in a very intentional, conscious way.
The first thing you need to do is figure out what are your true non-negotiables.
The other thing is do not compromise on the conative. You have natural strengths that dictate how you take action, solve problems, and make decisions. And you need to honor the way you naturally operate, or you’ll be stuck doing tasks that drain you more and more as time goes by.
We think that some of these preferences (pay, personality of the people we work with, commute, etc.) are going to be the biggest factors, and they’re certainly important, but really it is your instinctive strengths that need to be your top non-negotiable.
Do you have any students in your life? There’s so much pressure around the college decision. And then pressure to pick the perfect major. Then, when you’re graduating college it becomes what are you going to do now for the rest of your life?
There’s an over-indexing on the cognitive knowledge and skills that you’re getting, yet that is just one piece of the puzzle.
Get a group of professionals together and ask them what they studied in college. Chances are a large portion of them will be in a career that is either only loosely connected to the degree, or completely unrelated.
The reality is you might not need a plan. Sometimes you just have to move forward. Plan for the unexpected; focus on experiences. If you focus on your strengths and what you’re bringing to the table, things will work out. And frankly, having a variety of experiences is one of the best ways that you’re more valuable to other employees.
At Kolbe, we’ve had clients who have absolutely been on a clear upward career trajectory and said, “I’m not taking this promotion. People are telling me it’s career suicide, but I know that’s going to be stressful for me, and I’m just going to have to find a different way.” And then they up having this amazing career because instead of going up, they did a lateral move and then eventually moved where they needed to be. It’s all about gaining experience and leaning into your strengths.
Mentors can be very important. But in looking for mentors, it’s easy to prioritize the wrong things. And it’s easy to rely too heavily on advice from those who are more experienced, when that advice may not actually be helpful for you.
The reality is there’s no one-size-fits-all advice for career success. So, you have to be really critical when you receive “good” advice and analyze it with all parts of you in mind.
You can definitely benefit from finding someone who has the career you want, but the how you’re going to get there might look a little different. So, you want to find someone who shares your values, and who has the same vision or idea for where you’re going, and absolutely learn from them. BUT don’t try and emulate necessarily the way they got things done, unless you know that their Kolbe results are similar to yours. Because if you try to operate the way they do, and they naturally operate differently, that advice is going to fail you.
When in doubt, make sure you understand your strengths and lean into them first and foremost.
This is not the path to a lasting career. You have to own your own career because only you know yourself best. You know the skills, experiences, and strengths that you’re bringing to the table. You really have to figure out your own non-negotiables are.
Most importantly, make sure you get clarity on those strengths. Take the Kolbe A™ Index, then start looking for opportunities where you know that you can shine. And tell other people what you need. Get really good at saying, “here’s how I take action” or “here’s how I do my best work.”
Over time, finding that fit and using your energy to its highest and best use will win out every time.
