For analyzing yourself better, you must flip the coin and do exercises to determine the skills that you consider to be your weakest and/or that you least enjoy performing. Again, ask at least three of your friends to write lists for you and merge the results into the ten most-often-listed weaknesses.
This exercise is helpful in clarifying your personal assets and perhaps will begin to prepare your ego for the battering that is to follow during the job hunt. Do not take the information as personal criticism, but do take all of the listed weaknesses as valuable data and as job requirements to avoid or personal attributes to improve upon.
Exercise 2
The next task requires careful and deep reflection. List the ten most enjoyable job-related events you have had to date. These are specific instances that occurred in any given job, or volunteer or club activity, that may have lasted anywhere from a couple of minutes to several months. These experiences are the kind where you remember looking forward to getting out of bed in the morning to go to work or being tempted to skip lunch to continue efforts on the project or wanting to work late to finish a task out of enjoyment and not necessity.
These experiences would also include the proudest moments or major accomplishments in your career; moments for which you may or may not have received recognition or an award, or events which simply gave you a very warm feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment.
Sample events might include receiving an award at a gathering of your peers; private praise of a job well done from a boss who isn't often happy with anything or anybody; or the excitement of a new task in a new area or a bigger task in an old area of experience.
Do not confuse this exercise with determining your most enjoyable job. Here you are isolating specific portions or periods of a job – even though that job may or may not have been your favorite – in an effort to determine the specific job tasks that you enjoy. In the first exercise you were trying to identify the general type of job and job environment that you most enjoy.
After listing each event, try to determine the specific task that you were doing and what precise skills you were using that led to that enjoyment. If, for example, you remember enjoying your work on a certain project so thoroughly that you arrived early several mornings to get a head start on it, ask yourself the following questions:
- What was the subject area of the project or task? (E.g. marketing, engineering, administration, history, etc.)
- What was your role in the project or task? (E.g. supervisor, staff, coordinator, etc.)
- What were your prime contributions to the project?
- Which of your strengths did this project or task utilize?
Exercise 3
What are your hobbies? What do you do to find enjoyment when you are not working for a living? Have you examined all the vocational alternatives related to your hobby? For example, if your hobby is skiing, have you considered becoming a ski instructor or joining the professional ski patrol or selling ski equipment or learning to repair ski equipment or designing ski clothing or writing free-lance articles for ski magazines or working for a ski resort management company?
More than one person has discovered that an interesting hobby can be a profitable career choice. For example, I read of a man who for years avidly studied the stock market. He invested whatever excess cash he had whenever he could. The amounts of money involved were small, but he found the whole process of investigating the various companies, deciding among the alternative stocks, and monitoring the results to be so thoroughly engrossing and psycho logically rewarding that he finally decided to become a stockbroker.
However, it was his stockbroker who first suggested that step to him. Up until that suggestion, the man had considered investment as a hobby only and not a career because it was too much fun. At last report, he was doing quite well and enjoying every day as if it were a vacation.
When doing this exercise, keep in mind that most people have too many diversified interests to have them all satisfied on the job, which is why people develop hobbies in the first place, and not all hobbies are viable as potential careers. In any event, if you get more enjoyment from your hobby than you do from your job, you are in the wrong job.
DETERMINING YOUR SPECIAL INGREDIENT
The capstone of these exercises is the determination of a quality I call your Special Ingredient. This quality is the foremost skill or strength that you possess or the primary source of job satisfaction for you. Your Special Ingredient should suggest itself as a result of the previous exercises. It should appear as a common thread in your responses to all the exercise questions as the most frequently mentioned skill, strength, or source of job enjoyment. While you may have several common threads of varying strengths, you want to limit yourself to the strongest thread for this determination.
For example, your exercise responses might contain the consistent reference to statistical marketing analysis or to clerical workflow management or to scientific research project design. Whatever quality repeats itself most often is the quality on which you must now focus and subsequently emphasize in all future job-hunting efforts. This is the quality that you will highlight in job interviews to differentiate yourself from the competition. This is the quality that will enable you to maximize your job satisfaction.
Determining your Special Ingredient is a time-consuming process, but the time will be well spent, and the outcome is the same, a job that makes you look forward to getting out of bed in the morning. That job should also take you one step closer to your Grand Goal.
