Have you ever written a check or signed a document on your birthday, and instead of writing the current date, wrote your birth year? I just wrote a check “11/15/1974.” It makes sense. Birthdates are part of our core identities, are engrained in our brains, and we rattle them off hundreds of times in life. Like this, a job may be part of a person’s identity. A person thinks they ARE a CPA, teacher, interior decorator (and so on). It would be hard to even consider anything else. While job searching, they don’t think of other possibilities.
2020 is a whacky year. Maybe it’s time for a new direction—a forced change or smart choice. People have many strengths, which are a combination of skills and interests. The Department of Labor and Industry list over 8,800 different jobs. While you’re holed up at home, check out CliftonStrengths by Gallup. This started as Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. CliftonStrengths calls it “Your talent DNA.” You can do everything online, or still buy the hard copy version, which I recommend. This lists 34 strengths, 4 themes, and by taking the test, gives you all of them in order. There are webcasts, reports, explanations, and ideas, potential career and job directions, and gives insight as to feelings and actions.
This can help when a past job title is engrained on a brain. Armed with strengths information, people can start to shed past identities. “Bob the Engineer,” becomes “Bob the man who is Analytical, Consistent, Deliberative, Disciplined, and Focused,” which on a broader scale, centers around “Strategic Thinking” and “Executing.” Suddenly, those 1000s of jobs in lots of different industries start to make sense, and people know they will succeed in lots of roles. Whew!
Good luck job searching,
Beth Husom, GCDF
Job Seeking Adventures 