You have the power to shape your own working life toward something that works for you—a job you truly love. We break down how to find a job you love into three steps you can try right away.
Over the last few months, we’ve been reading up on everything to do with love and careers. The journey has taken us from redefining what success is to redesigning our (work)lives. It turns out, finding a job you love doing isn’t straightforward. There’s no magic wand we can apply. Instead, it’s a career-long journey. But what we have learned is that we do have the power to shape our own working lives towards something that suits us—something that we truly love.
At MeaningSphere, we follow a learning process developed by the psychologist Robert Carkhuff known as EUA: Explore (E) – Understand (U) – Act (A).
Let’s apply the EUA process to finding a job you love.
Step 1: Explore by starting with the big picture.
Avoid narrowing down your search for work you love too early. Focus instead on exploring what the possibilities are. In Designing Your Life (check out our review here), Bill Burnett and Dave Evans advocate embracing “being stuck” and not knowing what to do. They warn against plowing ahead with your first idea, but instead recommend using mindmapping to ideate and explore the possible lives available to you.
👉 Explore big ideas about what makes work great at our free Book Club. Sign up here.
Step 2: Understand by taking time to process and identify insights.
What you love at work will be unique to you. Take time to understand who you are and what makes your heart sing. In Love + Work (read our review here), Marcus Buckingham calls this your “wyrd.” The term is an old Norse word that describes your unique spirit—as Buckingham interprets it, it’s the patterns that make up who you are, your unique gifts, and your personal loves and loathes.
👉 To help you on that first step to understanding more about who you are at work and what you love to do, try our free Self-Awareness Starter, available at our Resources page.
Step 3: Act through experimentation.
At some point, just getting started is important to continue your learning. But taking action doesn’t mean you’re locked into whatever it is you decide to try. In Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans explain the value of prototyping: testing out and trying a range of different types of work to understand what works for you.
👉 Build a deeper understanding of what is or isn’t working for you at work. Get a personal, comprehensive report revealing your Personal Meaning Profile by taking the Meaningful Work Inventory.
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