How can you help clients define their career vision and mission through self-reflection?

Identifying your core values is key to help you determine your priorities and live in alignment with who you really are and what matters to you. As you reflect, a good way to start is to look back on your life- to identify when you felt good, and really confident that you were making good choices in your life. 1. Identify the times you were happiest. 2. Identify the times when you were most proud. 3. Identify the times when you were most fulfilled and satisfied. Determine your top values based on your experiences of happiness, pride & fulfillment. Prioritize your top values and reaffirm that they fit with your life and vision for “your”self, and use them like a compass to make value based choices that are right for you.

When looking at your core values, go back as far as your school days. What was important to you when you were young. Look at the highs and lows over the course of your life. You will start to see a trend of your core values and skills. We are most satisfied and excited in our roles if we are aligned to our true values.

Keep a journal of what excites you. What are the tasks you get lost in and could easily do for hours without tiring. Make a list of all the things that keeps your energy high and focus on doing more of it.

There are many skills tests and assessments you could do. A lot of companies offer these tests as part of their career development tools. I find it useful to look at these skills and see how it applies to your current role and your goal. Have you chosen a goal that uses your natural skills because this will make it easier for you to achieve this goal.

Super important to know what you are working towards. You need to be so clear on your vision that every step you take should be in the direction of your goal. You will be amazed how quickly things fall in place once you have identified what you want.

Self-reflection alone won't help you define your career goals, you need to take it from different angles: 1) People around you: Why are people coming to you for advice? What do people around you say about you and your strengths? Ask them for feedback. 2) Experience you've had: What is one job/project you particularly enjoyed? Why? One that you didn't like? And why? 3) Explore: Try personality tests to get some career ideas, get experience with new projects, and volunteer in new areas that sound appealing to you. And ask yourself: Do I see myself working in this field? What part of this experience do I like the most? 4) Reflect on all of the above: what did you discover? It's a steady process so don't forget to enjoy the journey!

I find journaling to be an effective method with my clients to help them process their journey thus far, and then clarify their path(s) forward.

Along with deep self-discovery process, including rewiring fears to empowering beliefs, it is important to know what you don't know. I encourage my clients to learn, research, talk to people, seek information from the get go. It helps them bridge the knowledge and network gap, broadens their horizon, allows them to see parallel possibilities and consequently craft a mission and career vision that is well informed, addresses a pain point, is pragmatic and achievable.

Language is a powerful mechanism that affects how we perceive the world around us... so let's consider a language nugget on how to conceptualize our careers. The word career comes from the Latin ‘carrus’ - a wheeled vehicle. This is echoed in other Latin languages; for example, "courir" means to run in French; "carro" means car in Portuguese. The same for "course" in English (like running by foot or using other transportation to go around a course). So let's think about our careers not just as how we earn our income, but as all of our goals. It’s the Life More Abundant. It’s the intersection of what we want for ourselves, and what we want to contribute to society.