Healthy Career
 Building an Inspired Career

Building a Career from Your Heart
(Part 4 of 5 - Copyright 1998-2007 Carol James)

Market Your Talents

This is one area that can make or break you financially. Most people who in the past have tried and failed to make money doing what they loved, have failed because they haven't spent enough time and attention identifying their market. They didn't fail because there wasn't a need for their talent; they failed because they didn't think like an entrepreneur - they didn't effectively identify the markets that would support them financially and they didn't know how to position themselves effectively within that market. Whether or not you will be working for a company or going into business for yourself (or a combination of both), learn to think like an entrepreneur. Thinking like an entrepreneur means being able to think about both sides of the fence - your need to express your talent and others' needs that your talent will fulfill. A lot of people are good at identifying their needs (what they want to do) but give no thought to the best market for their talents (the people that will want to use their talents). That is why there are so many starving artists out there. Thinking like an entrepreneur is thinking creatively, being able to put yourself in other people's shoes to identify what they want or need and how you can use your talents to meet those desires or needs. Most people are more than willing to pay another to provide them with that which they want or need.

Let me give you an example. I remember watching a television program on creative entrepreneurs who had found unique ways to use their talents in non-conventional ways to support themselves financially. One woman had a talent in painting landscape scenes. In the past she had followed the traditional path that artists used for years - exhibiting her art in galleries, hoping to sell a few pieces here and there, hoping to be "discovered" and make it big one day. She nearly starved in the process. Then she thought to herself, "If I am going to make a living at this, then I need to break outside of conventional thinking and find a creative way to use my talent in a way that people will be willing to pay me for what I do." Here's what she came up with: She started painting attractive and simplified landscape patterns on tile and marketed them to homebuilders and individuals, who wanted unique decorations for their walls, floors or cupboards that would bring a greater sense of nature into their homes. She quickly became successful with her custom tile paintings, made more money than she had ever made before and got to use her full range of talents. Many people even started buying her more expensive and original oil paintings to hang in their homes to match the tile.

Although this woman had the talent all along, she wasn't successful until she had creatively connected with the right market. And once she had done that, she virtually became an overnight success doing what she loved. Part of her success lies in the fact that she didn't limit her thinking to what had been done in the past. If the past doesn't work, why use it, right? In order for you to be successful doing your dream career, it may be necessary to break out of the old, conventional ways of doing things. This is especially true if your talents, desires and ambitions are not pointing you toward a career with a clear cut path and audience; for instance, medicine, dentistry, law, accounting, public education, etc. It may require that you be willing to see beyond what has been done before and to create new ways of reaching those people willing to pay you for what you want to do. Thinking like an entrepreneur is a skill that can be cultivated. It is the skill of seeing new opportunities to use your talents, of asking yourself the right questions about what others want and need and of creatively combining what you want to do with what others need done in new and useful ways.

In earlier sections that covered identifying your talents, we talked about how easy it is to shortchange ourselves in our careers by not focusing on those talents that we are most passionate about. This often happens simply because we don't think that there is a market for those talents or because we can't see how in the world we could support ourselves financially by using those talents. That happens a lot because most people are not encouraged to follow their dreams and to take full responsibility for creating the career of their dreams, let alone think like an entrepreneur. The truth is that it is not that difficult or magical. It just takes being really clear about your talents (you've already done that) and some creative thinking about who could use those talents.

Here's another example to show you what we mean. Joan's (an imaginary person) favorite talent is writing love poetry, and she can't imagine a dream career that did not highlight that talent. If she hadn't taken creative responsibility for her dream career, then she might not have been able to see how she could ever have a career writing love poetry, instead resigning herself to a lifetime of being a secretary. Not that there is anything wrong with being a secretary, but it doesn't ring Joan's chimes. Fortunately for Joan she took creative responsibility, thought like an entrepreneur and asked herself, "Who could use my talents for writing love poetry?" Her initial list of potential markets included:

• Greeting Card companies like Hallmark, who need love poetry for their romantic line of cards.
• Ad agencies, who need people who can write good ad copy for their customers, especially love poetry to attract people to buy romantic products like perfume, bath salts, flowers, etc.
• Young men who could use someone who had a romantic flair for writing love letters to help them make up with or "woo" their female counterparts (this could possibly be a side business).
• Relationship magazines are always looking for love poetry that they can print in their publications.
• Writing a book, which is a collection of love poetry for people that like to read it.
• Teaching poetry to those wanting to learn how to write it or interpret it.
• Musical artists and record companies are always looking for fresh romantic lyrics.

As you can see, there are a number of possibilities that could work for her, or perhaps a combination of a few. And this is just an initial list. No telling how many other possibilities she could come up with if she allowed a little more time to think creatively. Plus, as she continues to think more about who could use her love poetry and begins to research the options already identified, more ideas will come. Some ideas would work best as an employee or contractor of a company, while other ideas would be more in line with a home business. Right now Joan is just allowing herself to be flexible, so that she can explore all the angles before she sets upon any one course of action. When she is ready to make a decision about which option is best for her, then she can examine whether or not she desires the freedom, risk and income potential of a business owner or whether she would rather have the security of a job, working for someone else.

Experiential Activity

Now it's your turn to start brainstorming all the different markets that could use your talents. Think about how you can combine your favorite talents in a way that will serve others' needs. Use the Internet or a library to help you with your search, entering your talents as keywords to find out how others have applied those talents in unique and creative ways. You may be surprised to find out that there is a whole world of career opportunities just waiting for you to discover.

Techniques For Getting Ideas

Career and Business Lists
Another way to help you identify specific markets where your talents can be used is to review published lists of possible careers and businesses, but do not assume that one of those listed careers or businesses will necessarily be an ideal fit with your dream career. Many careers and businesses that are built from the heart are very unique, so you may not find it on any list. But the idea here is to use the lists as a "beginning" place to help you identify where there may be a need in companies and individuals for what you want to do. You can find these lists in a number of places: bookstores, libraries, Internet. One of the best and most thorough (although traditional) government publications of lists of careers is the "Occupational Outlook Handbook." If you have access to the Internet you can find it at http://www.bls.gov/ocohome.htm. Most local libraries also carry a copy.

Ask Others for Suggestions
Sometimes other people may have great ideas that you might not have thought of or come up with by yourself. Everyone's experience in life is unique, so many times getting another perspective can be valuable. Ask people you know, friends, family members, colleagues or people already in the field or profession that you desire if they have any ideas about where or how your favorite talents might be employed. Remember, though, to ask only those people who believe in you. As with all stages of building a career from your heart, only include those people who have faith in your abilities, who desire that you succeed, who can help you and who will support your goals. The last thing you need to hear about or to buy into is advice from a well-meaning friend who is telling you to forget about your dream career because it's not practical, you'll fail, you'll end up in the poor house, it's just a "pipe" dream, etc.

Respect the Creative Process
Realize that you are involved in a highly creative process. Give yourself permission to find inspiration anywhere it may appear, even if out of the blue. How many times have you had an idea come to you while in the shower or while watching TV or on your way to work? Ideas have a way of flying in from nowhere and just when we least expect them, especially when we open ourselves up to receive them. Expect this to happen for this is how the creative process works. Anytime you focus your mind toward a certain end, it goes to work, even when you are not consciously thinking about it. So capture those thoughts as they come to you in odd moments. Don't immediately prejudge them as being good or bad, on track or ridiculous. Don't automatically discard an idea just because initially you can't see it's practicality, for that idea may just be the one that contains within it the seed for an even more brilliant idea. There will come a time for critical thinking and analysis of these ideas, but for now just keep an open mind.

Give Yourself Enough Time with this Process
Be patient with yourself and don't rush this creative process. If you get impatient and rush yourself, then you could be selling yourself short, possibly missing some great ideas. You will know when it's time to move on to the next step, because you will feel ready and complete with the brainstorming process. Allow yourself to come up with a significant list of possibilities. If you only have three or four ideas, then unless you are very, very lucky they may not be enough to give you a broad enough view of your potential market. Liken this process to the process that a professional photographer goes through: In order to get one or two great photos, s/he takes dozens and sometimes even hundreds of shots just to insure that at least one will be the "right" shot. The same applies when you are searching for the one or two great ideas that will turn your dream career into a reality. The more ideas you generate and have to work with, the greater likelihood that one or two of them will work out great for you.

Narrow Down The Options

Before you are ready to begin narrowing down your options, you should have quite a list of possibilities. The next step is to do what the professional photographer does: After developing the film, s/he visually scans each picture looking for the ones that are the most appealing. S/he might choose five, six or more that s/he feels have the highest probability of success to be published somewhere or to be selected by the customer. That is what you will do with your list. This is a fairly subjective process, for only you can determine which potential options resonate with you. Look at each possibility and ask yourself how you feel about it: Does this possibility turn you on? Do you get excited when you think about the possibility of working in that particular market or for that particular industry or applying your talents in that particular way? Can you see yourself in that context doing whatever it is that you most love doing? The most important thing is to go with your feelings, looking for those options about which you feel most excited and with which you resonate the most. Narrow down the list to your top 4 to 7 choices, which is also a subjective number. It is more important that you narrow the list down to a workable number of possibilities that you feel best about. If you feel really, really good about 8 or nine choices, that's fine too. As in all things, whatever works best for you is the right answer.

Research The Possibilities

This next stage is about doing your homework: Spending time researching the options that most appeal to you.

Take the Time to Research
If you will take the time to do your homework up front, then you will save time in the long run. It may take a little time and effort to do the necessary research, but it's well worth it because it will further eliminate those options that are not really viable. There's nothing worse than devoting a lot of time, money and energy toward something, then finding out later that it doesn't work or that you don't like it, especially if you could have found that out before by simply doing a little research.

Build an Option Profile
An Option Profile is just a way to organize the information that you will gather about each option as you conduct your research. We suggest that you keep a separate file for each option. Initially, each profile will contain the questions you want answered about each possibility. Potential questions might be: What talents and skills does this option require? Which of my favorite talents would I be able to employ? What additional education or training would I need? What personality traits would be most beneficial? What would be my work environment? What type of people would I be working with? How much freedom would this option allow me? You want to ask questions that are important to you - the ones that are an intrinsic part of your dream career - questions that can help you determine if an option is a good match to your dream career profile and vision statement.

Research the Answers
After you decide which questions you want answered for each possibility, go find the answers by doing research. As you are doing the actual research, it is highly likely that other questions will arise, so be sure to add those to each respective Option Profile. There are a number of places to find the answers, some of which are:

• Go to the library and research everything you can on each option.
• Use the Internet as a research tool. Chances are there are discussion lists, newsgroups and web pages devoted to the information you seek.
• Go to the bookstore and review the latest books on the subject.
• Interview three people who are already doing what you are considering (or something similar). Make sure that the people who you choose to interview love what they are doing and feel that it is the career of their dreams. Here are some tips:

1. Use the phone book, Chamber of Commerce, Business Associations, Professional Organizations or the Internet to find these people or ask people you know if they know anyone who's successful in that field.
2. Contact them and request an interview. Don't be shy about this. Most people will be complemented by this gesture and will accommodate you as long as you don't impose on them or take up too much of their time. People love being an authority and giving advice, which makes them feel important. You may even want to buy them lunch (not necessary, of course, but could be well worth while, because you are not only getting valuable information from this person, but you are building a relationship that later could prove to be very valuable).
3. Prepare yourself by writing questions you want answered by them. Possible questions might include: How did they come to create the career of their dreams? What are the things that they like the most and least about their career? What are the things that they wish they had known about before starting their career? What are the qualities that they think a person should have to enjoy and to be successful at this career? What is their day like? Organize your questions in sequence of the most important first to the least important last, so in case you run out of time you will have gotten the answers to the questions most desired.
4. Make sure to let them know how grateful you are for their time and advice at the conclusion of the interview. Appreciation goes a long way in building a network of people who could be helpful to you.
5. Depending on how the interview goes, ask them if it would be all right to contact them in the future just in case you think of any other questions. But remember, don't make a pest of yourself.
6. Follow up the interview with a Thank You card, note or letter, telling them how much you appreciated their time and mention specifically a couple of things that you got out of the meeting that were helpful to you. This is not mandatory, but courteous, and a little thoughtful appreciation can go a long way in building relationships. And who knows in what way you may need that person in the future.

Choose the Best Option

After completing your research, you will most likely have abundant information with which to choose the best route for you to express your ideal career. The next steps will walk you through that process.

Compare Each Option to Your Ideal
Using the information uncovered during your research, answer this question: How well does each option stack up to your idea of your dream career? Assess the various aspects of each option against your ideal. For example, maybe one aspect that was important to you in your dream career profile was that you wanted to spend time with stimulating people who share your passion for civil war history. How well does each option stack up to that? Some options may be better matches than others. To help you compare options, you might want to assign a point value or a scale to each aspect so that you have something objective to compare it against. Maybe a 5 means that that particular aspect in your Option Profile perfectly matches that same aspect in your dream career profile, while a 1 means that there is no match whatsoever. The whole idea here is to look at the research you have done on each option and compare it with what you really want to do and see which ones seem like the best matches.

Narrow the Options Down
Notice which option has the most matches and the least mismatches, which will be the option with the most potential. If one option doesn't stand out, then look at the mismatches of each option and ask yourself if you can live with those mismatches. If the mismatches are minor, then it may not matter much to you. Next, ask yourself if you can honestly see yourself flourishing in that chosen career despite any mismatches. If you can, then you may have found a winner and you should proceed with this idea and continue on with the rest of this book.

However, if there is a major mismatch that you can't live with, then see if there is a way around the mismatch or if the job can be changed in some way to eliminate the mismatch. For example, if you don't want to be stuck in an office all day, yet traditionally that type of career requires being stuck in an office all day, then see if there is a work-around. Perhaps you could do some of your work from home or another location or access remote computing. If you can't find a way to work around a mismatch, but that aspect is important to you, then you probably don't want to decide to pursue that option. At least not in the way you envision it being, because the whole idea of a dream career is to get to do what's in your heart in the way that feels best to you. And if an option does not provide that, then why settle for it?

If you haven't been able to find that "perfect" option yet, then you will want to revisit your initial list of options, looking for other possibilities that might allow you to do everything you want to do. Also, play around with the idea of combining some possibilities or perhaps choosing more than one, thereby not depending on just one option to fulfill all of your career desires. Spend more time back in the creative process or in the research mode until you can come up with the right choice for you. Remember that there is nothing necessarily scientific about all of these steps and processes. Mostly they are there to help you gain greater clarity, to give you the opportunity to think about all the important angles, to give you some ideas as to the direction you can take and to help you to fully explore the options that will lead you to the greatest possible career satisfaction. Only you can decide which options are best suited for you and only you can decide what you are willing to do and what you are not willing to do.

Continually Fine-tune Your Career
Remember that no career choice need be permanent unless you want it to be and that the "fine-tuning" process is the way you will naturally build your dream career. Any new career you finally settle upon will include an unknown factor and hence a degree of risk on your part, because you are going to be doing something completely new. As important as research is, sometimes there is no way to anticipate everything that you are likely to encounter as you move forward with your chosen career. Of course, we want to eliminate up front as many dead ends as we can, but in the end, the only way to truly know if a chosen career is right for you is to start taking action toward it.

As you start taking action toward it, you will gain new information along the way, information that you weren't privy to before. Use this information to "fine-tune" your ideal career. If in the event that you move forward with a choice that initially looked really good, but now doesn't, then you always have the option of changing your mind. No choice need ever be permanent if it doesn't feel right to you. If a certain direction doesn't feel absolutely right to you, use that information to get clearer about what you do want and adjust your direction accordingly. At any stage of the game you can choose something else. The days of sticking with a choice until you die are long gone. "You've made your bed, now lie in it" just isn't necessary. Don't ever feel like you have to lock yourself into a particular career just because initially that option looked appealing. In other words, be flexible with yourself. Chances are you may take a few detours before you "get it absolutely right". That's okay and is a natural part of the process. You didn't get to where you are now overnight, and you probably won't wake up tomorrow morning suddenly doing exactly what you want, without having gone through a fine-tuning process to get there.

Just remember that no matter what happens as you pursue your chosen career, it's never wasted energy. Setbacks are not disastrous unless you make them so. Maybe you took a detour because you were missing an important piece of information that would have clearly pointed to your ideal career. Maybe you didn't listen to your heart and instead listened to that little voice that told you to be practical. Maybe you got scared and decided to take the first job that came along. Whatever the reason for the detour, it's okay. Just dust yourself off and get back on track. Plus, if you look at any apparent setback closely enough, you will find out something new and valuable that you didn't know before. And usually that information will help you to get clearer about what you do want and about what you don't want, bringing you one step closer than you ever were before to creating your dream career. Remember Thomas Edison? Do you know how many "failed experiments" it took him before he invented the light bulb? Literally thousands, each of which provided him with one more piece of the puzzle, which eventually enabled him to create his dream of inventing artificial light. In your own life, think about a time when something didn't go as planned and yet, even in that, you were given a gift of something you learned or a new insight you gained that helped you in the future.

The purpose of this discussion is not to set you up to expect hard times, but to remind you to not be discouraged if you encounter them. For you, things may zip right along without a hitch. You may be so clear up front about exactly what you want that you never run into a problem as you move forward transforming your dreams into reality. Or you may have already reached the place of knowing that the only right action is action taken from a point of inspiration - action that you feel so inspired to take that you almost can't not take action. However, if unforeseen complications arise or if obstacles or problems present themselves, foster the attitude that they are your allies, helping you to gain greater clarity about what you are wanting and providing opportunities for greater learning.

(Go back to part 3 of 5)  (Go next to part 5 of 5)

© 1998-2007 Carol A James  All rights reserved.