How To Analyze Your Career By Using Logical Levels

What do you want in life? And who are you deep down?

If you don’t know what you want, you can’t enjoy the realization that you’ve got it. If you don’t know what you want, you will be stuck in the endless rat race for something undefined at some undefined point in the future, and most likely, you will never be pleased. Only by getting clarity into what is important to you in life can you reach it. Of course, the same also applies to your career.

There are many ways how to discover what is important to you. One of the most likely to provide real answers is to work with a life coach or a friend who is able to ask you the right questions and probe into your inner self.

If you don’t have a coach at your disposal, you can try a technique that many of the coaches would use called the Life Balance Wheel . Alternatively, you can try the one I introduce below, which is called Logical Levels. It will help you to analyze where you are and why and hopefully show you a direction to get you on the right path.

Logical levels is a tool to help you structure your thinking about who you are, where you are in life, and what is important to you. The concept of logical levels of learning and change was initially formulated by anthropologist Gregory Bateson and later adopted by psychologist Robert B. Dilts as a way to think about personal transformation.

I consider logical levels to be a somewhat simplified way to look at such a complex system as human behavior. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it is a useful tool for analysis of where you are.

I follow the Dilts model and add a level of “choices.” Choices are a way we express our values and make them visible to the real world. This level helps to anchor the model in reality and helps with making the model more usable in everyday work.

Environment and Context

The bottom level of the pyramid describes your physical location. This is where you live, work, and spend most of your time.

• Where are you and why?
• Why do you live in this city?
• Why do you work for this company?
• Why do you live in this particular house?
• What about the climate? Does it work for you?
• Why do you live in this country or this neighborhood?
• How the environment influences your life?
• How does the home you live in influence your work?
• How is the commute?
• What kind of environment works for you the best at work?
• What kind of people do you enjoy having around in the workplace?
• Where do you do your best work?
• Where do you gain support from?
• How does your working environment make you feel?

Understanding why you are in this particular environment is essential. It will tell you the constraints related to the careers you can pick. For example, suppose it is important to you to live in a particular city because that is where your parents and friends are, and they won’t move. In that case, you know your job can’t be an ocean liner captain.

The work you do is constrained by the environment that you want to live in. It can also be the other way around. You realize that you have no attachments to the environment. If that is the case, you just significantly expanded the opportunity you may consider. Just be ready to move.

Actions and Behaviors

This level describes what steps you take to respond to your environment. It is what you do day in, day out.

• What do you do?
• What profession have you chosen and why?
• What do you do in your free time and why?
• What made you do a particular thing?
• Do you get up every morning full of energy and ready to go to the office?
• Who are the people you spend your time with, and why?
• Are you able to do the things important to you?
• How much time do you spend doing things you don’t want to do?
• What tasks do you do that make work fun and exciting?
• How does your behavior impact your goals?

The goal is to figure out how you spend your time, whether you do the things important to you with people you want to be with. If not, identify the gaps and devise a plan to address them.

Skills and Capabilities

This level is about your skills and what made you develop them.

• Are you using the skills you have in your life today?
• What would you love to learn and why?

Then look at the actions you want to take and identify the skills you are missing and why.

• How can you develop these skills?
• What do people who know you say you are good at?
• How do you know you are effective?

Consider also your attitude towards life. It is often not the lack of skills that holds you back but the wrong attitude. As long as you are able to show passion and muster the energy, you can learn the skills and get the capabilities you need. If you have the will, you will get the skill.

As with many other tools that require self-assessment, consider asking trusted people around you what they believe you are good at. You may realize that there are some hidden treasures in your blind spot.

Beliefs and Values

These are the things that give direction to your life. Your values and beliefs guide your everyday decisions, whether you know them or not. They work on the unconscious level. Surfacing them is helpful. They are often the answer to your “why” questions.

• Why do you do what you do?
• Why is something important to you?
• Why do you behave or react in a certain way to external stimuli?
• What are your beliefs you have about your job?
• Are they helpful?
• What beliefs might help you get better results?
• What beliefs hold you back?

Once you know your values, consider how they match the company you work for. The beliefs and values are essential aspects of the company culture, and if they are misaligned with your values, you will feel uneasy and won’t really fit in.

Just ensure you understand the real values of how the company operates, not those on the website. They should be the same in the ideal world, but more often, they are not. No one cares about the proclaimed values. It is the real ones you will experience every day that count. If you discover a misalignment, there are two ways to deal with it.

Either you leave the company if the misalignment is so dramatic that you know you can never be satisfied in a place like this.

Or, going the less extreme way, you do your best to narrow the gap. This is the right thing to do when the proclaimed or aspirational values of the company are close to your own, but you see that the company doesn’t live them. Well, guess what. The company is a group of people. If you can lead by example, live the values, and influence those around you, it will spread, and the gap will narrow. More importantly, you will be able to live your values. Even if the rest of the company may not be that diligent, you may still be able to do what you believe is right.

Choices

Choices are the way your beliefs and values manifest in the real world. It might be that your value is “helping others,” but that by itself is not visible to the outside world. That is hidden in your inner self. Only by making choices like giving people a ride to the airport, sacrificing your afternoon to help your friend finish their presentation, and volunteering to help in the local community are you giving your beliefs a material form that others will recognize.

• What choices do you make?
• Why have you decided to do a certain thing and not something else?
• What are you saying “no” to, and why?
• Are you happy with your choices?

The choices you make tell a lot about who you are and what you value. You may say a thousand times that you value being humble, but the fact that you chose to say it a thousand times shows that you are not. Bragging that you are humble? Doesn’t sound right. Go back to the drawing board and think again about what your actual values and beliefs are.

Identity

This level is much more than a collection of the previous ones. Your identity is not the summary of your actions and beliefs. You are much more than that. Your actions are often a reflection of the environment and not necessarily of your identity.

• What kind of person are you?
• What kind of person do you want to be?
• How do the people who know you describe you?
• What labels do you get?
• How do you want to be seen by the world?
• In what situations do you say, “This is just me”?
• What does the way you live say about who you are?
• Are you happy with who you are, or do you want to be someone else?

Very often, dissatisfaction with life is not driven necessarily by the environment or a particular job we hold right now but by our internal feeling of dissatisfaction with who we are. It is often a self-limiting belief that is the problem, and if you can break those, you can get quickly to a much better place even though everything else in your life stays the same.

Purpose

Now you got to a place of life, mission, and your reason for being.

• Why are you here?
• What are the things you can do that will make the world a better place? And don’t try to be too grandiose. You can have a bit of an impact on the world even by helping a single individual.
• What do you contribute to the bigger good of the universe, and how comfortable are you with it?
• Do you feel you need to do more?
• What is the mission of your life or of your professional life?
• Do you think that what you do matters? And if not, why is that? Is it because it genuinely doesn’t matter or because you simply don’t see it?
• What would you like other people to remember you for?

How to work with the model?

A great way to understand the model is to consider some of the statements you are making about yourself. For example, let’s analyze a sentence like this: I can’t drive a car to a ski resort.

• I can’t drive a car to a ski resort. (Deals with identity and means that you consider yourself not being the person for the job.)
• I can’t drive a car to a ski resort. (Deals with beliefs and can mean that you don’t have the self-confidence even though you may have the skill.)
• I can’t drive a car to a ski resort. (Deals with skills as you simply have no idea how to drive a car.)
• I can’t drive a car to a ski resort. (Deals with the environment as you may be very comfortable driving around the city but worry about snowy roads in the mountains.)

The logical levels model helps you analyze the real problem and then find a solution that addresses it. As the sentence above shows, there can be a range of reasons, from a lack of skills that is solved by training to a lack of self-confidence solved by coaching and continuous practice.

The way to work with this model is you start at the bottom with the environment and work your way up, trying to analyze the situation. Once you get to the top, you review where you are, and you have a good understanding of why. You look at all the levels and your life and consider how satisfied you are with it.

If you discover that you are not happy with a particular aspect, let’s say the apartment you live in is in a terrible neighborhood and far from work. You can move up a level on the pyramid and take action to change that. If you realize your action of getting the job of your dream is failing, move up a level and focus on the skills you need to build to get the job. It is often one of the higher levels that can help you solve a problem at a lower level.

Once you get on top of the pyramid, you can use it in the reverse direction and start with your life’s mission and move downwards. You know what you want, and you need to understand who to become, what choices you need to make, what values are behind and what beliefs are holding you back, what skills you need to build, and actions you need to take and in what environment to get where you want to be.

Logical levels provide a robust and structured way of thinking about your life and career. They prevent you from making a rash decision based on an incomplete understanding of the root cause of your dissatisfaction with your job and life.

Do you find logical levels interesting? How would you use this concept? Do you have other ways to figure out who you are and what do you want?

More on the topic of Life and Career:

8 Ways How To Deal With Midlife Crisis

Non-Promotable Tasks And A Successful Career

How To Persuade Others In The Post-Factual World

You Work In The Business Of One

6 Traps Of The First 100 Days In A New Job

How To Negotiate A Fair Salary In 8 Steps

What Are Your Highly Valued Accomplishments?

15 Things You Should Do When Starting In A New Job

Joined A New Company? Onboarding Will Determine Your Long-Term Success

How A Job Change Impacts Your Well-Being

Originally posted on my blog about management, leadership, communication, coaching, introversion, software development, and career The Geeky Leader or follow me on Facebook and Twitter: @GeekyLeader

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