Blog Talk About Career Ownership | Thinking Rich | Inner Experience

Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Your Passion, Your Practice, Your Purpose, Your Perspective

Whether you call them skills or talents or strengths, it is important for you to be aware of what things you love to do, what things you do well, what things you can do to earn a living and how you can combine those things to create fulfilling work and a fulfilling life.

Your passion is what makes you tick – things you do just because you so thoroughly enjoy them, things you would do whether or not you gain any extrinsic reward, things that energize you. these are things that create value for you.

Your practice is what you are great at – things you naturally do well and easily, things that you can do with little or no apparent effort.

Your purpose, at least with respect to your livelihood, is what people need or want – things you can do to create value for others. Always remember that others may see value where you do not, or they may see more value than you do in particular results.

Your perspective pulls together the common threads of your passion, your practice and your purpose. Your ideal work and your ideal career enables you to create some value that others need or want by doing what you love to do and are great at doing.

You probably have clear insight into the skills, talents and strengths that you love to use and are great at. Your passion and your practice are already well-known to you.

When you explore your purpose and your perspective, you must also consider the skills, talents and strengths that may be relevant and important, but are not part of your passion and practice repertoire. You may need to find work where your passion and practice are the only requirements. Or, you may need to find ways to compensate for any requirements you are not well-suited to meet.

You can explore your passion, practice, purpose and perspective through any number of assessments designed to illuminate and evaluate personal potential.

For example, The Gallup Organization’s StrengthsFinder® assesses your potential for superior performance by looking at thirty-four talent themes divided into four main groupings. Or, Sarah and Paul Edwards, in Secrets of Self-Employment, identify thirty-six activities in six essential functions to assess your ability to perform.