After attending college, most of us simply hopped on to career paths without honoring the deepest parts of our human makeup: our personality types, passions, and interests. Decades later, it’s no wonder we feel burnt out, dissatisfied, and out of sync at work! If you’re having a hard time finding a fulfilling career path, perhaps you haven’t taken the time to truly know yourself. This post will help you rectify that so you can start making career moves that align with your soul.
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.“
– Aristotle
3 Things That Happen When Your Personality Type and Career Align
Shouldn’t you just base your career decisions on “real” factors, like earning potential, job security, and prestige? These matter, but if they’re your only focus, you might eventually find yourself merely tolerating rather than loving what you do.
That’s not ideal since you’ll likely spend well over a third of your life working!
The goal is to achieve career satisfaction: a sense of happiness and contentment derived from your work. And when you understand what makes you tick, you’ll have a firm foundation to make fulfilling professional decisions.
Three AMAZING things happen when your personality type gels with your career choices:
1 – You’ll Lean into Your Strengths and Manage Your Weaknesses More Effectively
Among other things, your personality type determines your work, learning, and communication styles.
Are you great with group projects, or is your best work done solo? Do you process written, visual, or verbal information best? Do you make your wisest decisions based on intuition or concrete facts?
Understanding these will help you choose suitable positions and maximize your performance within them!
2 – You’ll Be More Empowered to Achieve Career Contentment
Are you constantly seeking new jobs, hoping you’ll finally find “the one”?
We often mistakenly expect external factors to line up perfectly, but the truth is, creating job satisfaction involves a lot of internal work. Developing self-awareness is the key to setting and living out the right standards for your career.
When you’re in tune with your personality type, strengths, weaknesses, and passions, you’ll be able to understand when and why you feel out of sync and take appropriate steps toward getting back on track.
3 – Your Career Will Naturally Evolve With You Over Time
Picking a career path straight out of college may have been a great way to get started, but as a midlife professional, chances are you’ve changed a LOT since then.
The question is, has your career shifted to reflect those changes?
You’re not the same person you were twenty years ago, and you won’t be the same person ten years from today. When you match your profession to your personality type and passions, your career will naturally shift as you grow and evolve. You’ll remain in alignment without struggling.
3 Tips to Factor Your Personality Type into Your Next Career Move
If you haven’t thought much about your personality until now, it’s not too late! I recommend the following to weave a deeper self-awareness into your future career choices:
Choose to Honor Yourself Going Forward
First, choose to stop settling for whatever comes your way and to start making decisions that align with who you are and what you care about. You may not know how to do that at this point – that’s fine. Just decide that self-honor will be your new basis for all career decisions going forward.
Take an Online Personality Test
Next, choose one or two tools to help you comprehensively assess your temperament, skills, and interests. Many online personality tests are available, but I use the Enneagram and 16 Personalities as starting points for helping my clients understand why they’re out of sync at work.
Use the Results to Assess Your Current Status
Lastly, zero in on the top five to ten results that speak to you, and compare them to your current work situation.
- Are you maximizing your greatest strengths?
- Are you pretending to be extroverted?
- Do you genuinely enjoy being in a leadership position?
- What’s working, and what needs to change?
Let’s Talk About Your Results
Remember that personality tests have limited ability to help you understand yourself fully; they are simply tools to help you articulate why you act, think, and work the way you do. The personality tests I recommended may help reveal part of why you’re feeling dissatisfied at work, but to achieve lasting career transformation, you need to take it one step further and create a thorough, step-by-step plan to step into alignment.
If you’re not sure how to do that, don’t stress. Let’s talk about your results and plan your steps together!