Discovering Your True Career and Life Path (& Making It a Reality)

This guide will walk you through the process of discovering what you truly want to do with your career and life, and how to make it happen.

When you tune into who you are to unlock your authentic career, everything changes.

You create a career that is an extension of who you are by leveraging your strengths and interests, and what energises you. You become unstoppable.

We all need to identify what makes us come alive, so we can build a career and life that enables us to thrive.

Hey, I'm Sophia
I am an Executive Coach and Organisational Psychologist driven by an unwavering passion for helping people create deeply meaningful careers and lives. Having faced my own brutal battles with feeling lost, trapped and directionless, I channel this experience and my expertise in Psychology and Behavioural Science into transformative coaching programmes. I am dedicated to empowering others to reignite their passion, unlock their potential, and build the fulfilling life they truly desire. 

I have well and truly walked the walk. I have lived with, and worked to overcome, ALL of the self doubt and limiting beliefs presented in Step 5 below!        

Uncovering Your True Desires

Most people silence the truth of what they truly want. We stay stuck in careers that drain us, believing that the current path is the only way to get by, pay the bills, and meet our basic needs.

Fear and doubt creep in and take hold, disconnecting us from our true selves and our deepest desires. We start to believe that creating a better life is impossible, and we resign ourselves to the passenger seat of our own lives, blind to the opportunities around us.

But there is always a way.

The more disconnected we become, the less we understand what we genuinely want in our lives and careers. Some of us may have vague dreams buried deep down, but we never dare to put them in writing, let alone speak them aloud.

We convince ourselves that we're stuck, unable to do any better.

The result? We never uncover our true desires, and we procrastinate on the actions needed to fully live the life we deserve.

When I quit my well paid corporate job last year I went from half living to creating an entrepreneurial life filled with adventure, motivation, and feeling generally energised day to day! I tell you this because I fully understand what it is like to live a career and life that lacks meaning, purpose and fulfilment. I have lived the day to day grind for years, working hard doing tasks that drained my energy, mood and soul. Believe me when I say this, it inevitably leads to burn out. Always.

I want to ask you now.

Where are you robbing yourself from the life you really want?

I am going to show you how to get out of fear, and how to come home to yourself.

I will show you how to find out what you really want from your career and life, and the steps you can start to take to make it happen.

Below is the process I follow with my clients.

Why do this?

Following this process will enable you to find the career or type of work that will allow you to earn money doing what energises you.

How to do it, step by step, is shared in this article below.

If any of the following resonates with you, it might be time to get real with yourself, and take the below steps towards creating a better future.

What does it feel like to feel stuck in your career?

• You lack a sense of direction, or can't see a clear next step.
• You feel drained and demotivated in your current role.
• You know you are meant for something better aligned, but aren’t quite sure yet what that is.
• You feel overwhelmed and overworked, you don’t have the time to figure out what you want.
• Your current role pays the bills, you feel trapped as you fear a shift could result in less pay.
• You keep waiting and waiting, hoping the answers will come to you.

(The answers don’t come by the way, not unless you take action to figure out the answers that lie deep within you and around you!)

Why do you feel like this? What is causing it?

You lack the opportunity to play on your strengths on a daily or weekly basis.

Your work drains you rather than energises you.

You seek more meaning and purpose in your career.

You don’t earn what you want to earn, you feel undervalued.

You notice others taking bold steps to reignite their careers, by securing a new role, or starting up their own entrepreneurial venture, but you are too nervous to take the steps to do this for yourself.

You have started to doubt your ability to find something better.

You feel trapped as your current position feels safe, familiar, and your skills and experiences have not been tested in another industry or area.

How do you save yourself from feeling stuck forever?!

• You start to see that there ARE options and opportunities out there for you.
• You become willing to take the action required to figure this out.
• You see how your skills, strengths, interests, and experiences are extremely valuable in the market, and you can make money from them in a fulfilling way.
• You find incredible purpose in life from using your strengths to serve others.

How to achieve career (and life) clarity:

By following the below steps, you will start to shift from confusion to clarity in terms of what you want from your career and life, and how on earth you can make your ideal career happen.

Need some help with the process?

I offer individual and group coaching programmes designed to provide focused support as you follow this methodology. With my guidance, you’ll gain the clarity, confidence, support, and accountability you need to take meaningful steps towards creating a better life for yourself.

Book a free 30 min discovery call with me today to identify how I can help you. Or give me a quick message titled 'Help!' on LinkedIn. I will get back to you.

Join my 9-week career coaching journey that empowers you to find and ignite your passion, gain crystal-clear clarity, and boldly pursue a life and career that makes you feel alive. Book a call to find out more.

Below are the steps you can take to find a career or type of work that will allow you to earn money doing work that is better aligned with who you are.

Step 1: Who are you really? Do a thorough self audit

This step is critical because we need to reconnect with who we are and our deepest desires in order to find out what to do with our careers.

I want you to figure out the truth to the following questions below.

1,a - Get clear on your signature strengths:

• What are you doing when you are at your best? (Wowzer at how I felt when my own coach asked me this question!)
• When do you feel your most alive?
• What energises you?
• What do you do just for the love of it?
• What makes you say ‘this is the real me’?
• What are you great at?

(Key point - Your 'common knowledge' isn't common! The knowledge, skills, and experience you consider “common knowledge” are actually worth a lot of money to other people and organisations!)

1,b - Understand your top values:

• Review - What have you have spent your time, money, energy and effort on for the past 30 days?

This will help you identify what you value and what is important to you.

(We always make energy and time for what we value - no matter how busy we are!)

• List your values. Add them to the Model of Career and Life Fulfilment (shared below).
• Work through a Values Elicitation exercise with a Coach to expose your true values (FYI this is a super enjoyable experience but is a wee bit tricky to do on your own as you go to a much deeper level).

1,c - What tasks energise vs. drain you?

Audit your time - your happiness is impacted by the day to day and what is in your calendar each day...

• What do you do day to day that energises you?
• What do you do day to day that drains you?
• What do you want to move away from?
• What do you want more of?

Capture your thoughts emerging from Step 1 in my Model of Career and Life Fulfilment

Populate your thinking against the below model which is designed to guide you in aligning your strengths, enjoyable tasks, and values, to create a life enriched with more purpose and satisfaction.

Copy the pillar headlines below in your journal and jot down your thoughts for each pillar. Capturing your strengths, what you enjoy, and your values, in this way might help you spot some themes that stand out - i.e., what you are looking for more of, and what is important for you.

Step 2: Explore your vision for your life

Having a vision of what you want in your life and career is critically important to making it happen. Creating a vision is a key step in priming your brain to identify opportunities and get clear on the most powerful next steps that you can take.

Don't panic if you don't know what you want yet. You will get a clearer picture by trying every step in this guide. Follow Step 1 above and it is likely that you will start to get more of a feel for what you want in your career.

Guided visualisations are really powerful to help you identify what you want as they help you tap into your inner truth, and wisdom, and your deepest desires. Guided visualisations enable you to move beyond your self-doubt and critical thoughts, and tap into your truth that lies within your subconscious. This is an extremely powerful process.

An example of a guided visualisation I use for myself is shared here . Audios like these are useful to identify what you want and help keep your mind focused and motivated towards manifesting the life you really want to live!

Working with a coach is extremely helpful at this point to support you to figure out what on earth you really want to do in your career and life. Typically, when I work with clients - I shift them from feeling lost and overwhelmed, to identifying career and life goals by the 3rd session using powerful visualisation techniques.

2,a - Try it for yourself. Create your vision:

• Think big, put all your current baggage, history, and limiting beliefs to the side - What do you really want?

Reflect on the following:

• What do I want?
• What would my ideal life look like?
• What do I want, truly?
• Visualise the details, be specific. What do I see? Who am I with? Where am I? How do I feel? How much do I earn? What skills do I use? What am I most proud of?
• Be guided by your inner voice.
• Write down your vision or create a vision board.

If you want support with this essential step, I host Visualisation exercises. I work with people to help them to identify what they want, create a vision board, set clear career and life goals, and take action to manifest their goals.

2,c - Visualise regularly

• Keep your thoughts focused on your vision . Stay connected to your vision, visualise your dream life at least twice a week; think about it in the shower, get excited, meditate on it, follow guided visualisations. This will help keep your thoughts positive and your brain primed to spot opportunities that are aligned with what you hope to achieve. If you can keep your thoughts in a positive place, your entire world can open up.

Step 3: Take Action - Identify the careers and roles that align with your strengths, interests & enjoyable tasks

The next stage is all about making your dream career and life happen. Yep, it is possible, even for you!!

Now you have explored what you really want, your strengths, what you value in life, and the tasks/skills you enjoy using - you can start figuring out what your potential career could look like.

3,a - Skill stack:

• First, get your list of the strengths, skills and interests that you have.
• Then consider, what types of work would align with those skills, strengths and interests?

Be creative around this - it could be specific roles, or side hustles, or consulting, or online ventures etc.

Generate potential work/role ideas & make a list. Don't filter anything out!

List potential ideas/roles/types of work:

1.????? Within your current industry

2.????? With a springboard from your current industry or role

3.????? Outside your current industry or role

Here's a wee bit of inspiration for you! As Biron Clark writes about in his article ...

"You can monetize almost any type of knowledge/skill... 1. It's possible to earn a great income online. 2. There are so many potential topics/niches you can make a living from, not just a few. Find the intersection between your knowledge, and what people will pay for, and you may have a winning idea."

The intersection between your…

• 3,b - For those with the more traditional career route - take your best guess as to where your strengths align with the following 3 areas:

1.??? Area (e.g., HR, operations, finance, teaching, research)

2.??? Industry (e.g., energy, travel and tourism, broadcasting)

3.??? Sector (e.g., education, manufacturing, government, non-profit, for cause, etc.)

• Make a list of the opportunities, or companies, or organisations that might fit the profile and priorities you’ve determined.

Step 4 - Leverage your network baby!

Take Action - Take your list of roles, ideas and work types and hit up your network!

• Explore your natural inclinations first - What roles or types of work are your gut telling you to explore? Pick the options from your list which feel the most right first.
• Contact 10-15 people to talk about your selected options to explore what is out there and would could be suitable for you based on your new found insights. (Meet with them for 30 mins each. You don't need more than 30 mins to ask them quality questions and tell them what you are looking to achieve.)
• Find people that are already doing what you want to do, or who are connected to that world.
• Meet with these people, tell them what you are looking to do, and ask the following questions:

How did you get here? What is your job like?

What do you expect to achieve by the end of this year? (Optional question)

Tell them what you are looking for.

What opportunities are you aware of?

Who do you know that might know of opportunities?

Can you connect me with anyone that you think might know of opportunities that are aligned with what I am looking for?

Do NOT stop meeting with people until opportunities start to emerge, which they will. It's a simple process:

1. State what you are looking to achieve - e.g., what is on your list
2. Meet with interesting people
3. Find opportunities
4. Then try things out, try out different roles, courses, shadowing opportunities etc.

Action creates clarity.

What you want from your career will become clear eventually. No question.

Step 5 - Don't hate your self-doubt

For EVERY SINGLE human being on the planet - when you start to think about doing something new or taking action on the above stages - you will experience self doubt about your ability to achieve what you want to achieve.

This is entirely bloody normal.

Why?

Because EVERY SINGLE one of us, is held back by self doubt and core limiting beliefs, which often sit at the subconscious level, and pop up when we are triggered, or if we try to take a teenie weenie step out of our comfort zone.

Limiting beliefs are often formed in childhood and are closely related to our early experiences and relationships, particularly with parents or primary caregivers. We formed these beliefs about the world as protective coping mechanisms to survive as a vulnerable child. In adulthood, these beliefs often no longer serve us.

For most people, even having a thought about trying something new, or the idea of taking a brave step, can trigger negative thoughts about how we aren't capable.

Everyone has a core set of limiting or negative beliefs that they consciously or unconsciously believe to be true about themselves, such as:

• I am not good enough
• Other people can find true love/ build a successful side hustle/ find work they love, but I can't
• I am trapped (this was a big one for me - both in terms of my relationship and career)
• I am not attractive enough (also a big one)
• I am not capable of success
• I don't have enough time

I honestly still have all of these beliefs! Pretty much all of us do. Even the most confident people have these beliefs, sometimes they aren't fully aware of them. These beliefs often sit at the subconscious level but WILL pop up in those critical moments when they get triggered, or need to perform, or are under stress.

How do you get rid of these beliefs?

You can absolutely weaken the hold that self doubt, and these beliefs, have over you. Absolutely.

There are ways to reprogramme your mind to more positive thoughts and beliefs, which will fundamentally, change your entire life for the better. No, I am not exaggerating.

How do you do it?

The first step is awareness, noticing your emotions and thoughts as they come up. Journaling on what comes up for you as the thoughts come in is a very useful practice.

You must create the time and space to feel these emotions and thoughts - running away, or avoiding the negative thoughts and emotions is what many of us do. We fill our lives up with manic busyness so we that don't feel.

To heal, you have to go THROUGH the emotions, not avoid, supress or dismiss.

What you resist persists, remember.

There is a powerful daily practice that you can do to experience, process, and reprogramme your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. During this practice you sit with yourself to notice what is coming up for you, process the tough emotions (by really feeling them for a limited amount of time), and then reframe or swap your negative beliefs for positive, empowering beliefs and evidence. If you do the practice every day (you can do it in 20 mins), you will over time reprogramme your mind for success, rather than to hold you back.

I can talk you through exactly HOW to do this practice in detail, feel free to book a call with me here .

This is the bit I am most passionate about, because this is where the life changing work lies. If you can rewire your brain to have a bias for the positive, for confidence, for empowering beliefs - you will 100% change the trajectory of your entire life.

Living your life with higher self-belief will change your career, your relationships, your confidence, your belief in what you can achieve, and your ability to create results.

Another Key Takeaway:

Surround yourself with people who are already doing what you want to do!

The fastest way to do things that you don’t think can be done – is to surround yourself with people who are already doing them.

Quote by Jim Rohn – "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

There is no better life hack to get from where you are to where you want to be = than who you choose to put in your corner.

Before I go, I leave you with one final question...

What is the work you can’t not do?

Discover the answer to this, not just for you, but for everyone around you - let's shift you from half living, to living a full frickin' life.

Thank you for spending this time with me, I genuinely, really hope it helps you.

Get in touch if you have any questions or feedback.

Whenever you are ready there are 3 ways I can help you...

1. Book a free 1-1 discovery call to understand what help you need or learn more about my group coaching programme
2. Simply message me on Linkedin saying 'Help!'. I will get back to you.
3. Read my other articles:

• How to change your life when you don't know how