Job or Career: Do You Even Know What You Want?

If you're looking for advice or direction on finding a job, you won't find that here. Over the years, I've come to realize (sometimes personally and painfully) that the answer to our career dilemmas, frequently, if not always, has very little to do with the state of the economy, our education, or personal circumstances. Consider that as long as we're alive, we are always going to have personal circumstances, the economy will always boom and wane, and, quite frankly, we could always use more education. No, these are generally not the impediments to our landing that dream career opportunity. The problem is in the way we look at work, in general.

I don't know about you, but from an early age, work and earning my way was mandatory. Of course, at an early age, when you have little to offer except enthusiasm and the willingness to do a job a lot of people didn't want and for only a little money, the goal then was simply to get a job; it's only requirement is that it netted a paycheck. Thus, we began the cycle of looking for a job.

In some instances, the job we found turned into a career of sorts. A retail clerk advances into management, the guy in the mail room at the ad agency becomes an account executive, the front desk clerk becomes general manager of a hotel. Careers are born. In the absence of intent, however, are these careers just a matter of happenstance? This is not to say that employees who rose through the ranks did not work hard or strategize their way to the top but merely asks if the person who started out bagging groceries and later became store manager couldn't have just as easily been emptying wastebaskets at ABC Corporation and became the CEO. Where is the intent?

This is what this blog is all about. It is about discovering our personal intent and mindfully mapping a course to find the right career.

Let's begin the journey!