Here’s How You Know When You’ve Chosen The Wrong Career

When I graduated from college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life.

Somehow I got a job at a university as an academic advisor — helping students figure out their paths forward while I tried to figure out mine.

Some of the students I worked with weren’t sure what they wanted to do yet, but that was ok—they were freshmen or sophomores who still had time to explore their options. Often the students in the most trouble were the ones who knew exactly what they wanted to do but had been kicked out of their chosen major because of poor grades.

That’s what landed them in my office.

Basically, I worked with would-be engineers who couldn’t pass Physics and would-be doctors who couldn’t pass Anatomy & Physiology. There were aspiring nurses, accountants, forensic scientists, attorneys, and teachers.

And they were all stuck.

Although those students harbored different goals and faced different challenges, in general they shared something in common: they’d chosen a career path based on something other than where their actual gifts and talents could take them.

They were caught in an undertow of misplaced dreams and inevitable failure.

It sounds harsh, I know, but if you’ve chosen a vocation that doesn’t align with who you are, what you enjoy, and what you’re good at, you’ve chosen the wrong career for you.

If you or someone you know is caught in that toxic loop,

you know how draining it is to work against—rather than work with—your natural giftedness and passions. That unsettling feeling, like you’re out of place in your chosen career path, is a function of not really knowing who we are.

As Peter Drucker said, “We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.”

To deny our weaknesses is to deny ourselves a true opportunity to belong.

So what does it look like to discover your strengths?

There are dozens of personality tests, gifts assessments, and aptitude inventories you can take. You can even hire a career counselor or a life coach to guide you through their process.

But I’m simple and rather cheap, so here’s where I think you should start: pay attention.

Pay attention to whatever success you’ve achieved in school, at work, in relationships, through hobbies, or while volunteering. Listen to feedback and encouragement from others when they comment on your strengths, talents, gifts, abilities, and passions.

Watch to see what projects and pursuits engage and excite you, what situations bring you alive and bring out the best in you.

As you gather this evidence, you’re hopefully illuminating the kind of role in which you might take hold of the belonging Drucker was talking about.

What you find in this journey might surprise you.

What you find might delight you and relieve you. But what you find might also disappoint you at first.

You might find that you’re not meant to be the attorney your father wants you to be, the physician your mother wants you to be, or the stock broker your car payment wants you to be. You might find that you’re not meant to follow in the footsteps of the author, astronaut, or athlete you look up to.

But that’s ok. At least, it will be ok in the long run.

The process of scraping away the strengths and ambitions of others — however painful — is an important first step.

It means finding the freedom to let go of who others expect you to be and who you wish you were so that you can just be who are: created, gifted, and equipped to offer the world a lifetime of meaningful work.

Here’s How You Know When You’ve Chosen The Wrong Career is a post from: Storyline Blog