How can you leverage your life mission into career success?
I like to say that the greatest strength of a thing is also its greatest weakness. What makes something especially good at doing one thing will often make it especially bad at doing the opposite. Take a fish, for example. A fish is especially good at thriving in an aquatic environment. It can breathe underwater, and it can swim like... well... like a fish. But take it out of its natural environment and plop it unceremoniously on dry land, and it will be about as successful at surviving as... well... as a fish out of water! (Hey, these similes are cliches for a reason.)
Now, a life mission is especially good at allowing you to do just about anything you want to in life without having to compromise that mission in any way. (I would be hard pressed to find a situation in which I could NOT express the principle of inclusion.) Because of this simple fact, life missions are not especially good at telling you exactly what you should do for a living.
Nonetheless, some careers will line up better with your life mission than others. The question isn't whether your career will allow you to express your life mission. (It will. Nothing can stop you from expressing your life mission.) The question is whether or not your career is well aligned with your life mission. This idea of alignment goes beyond mere room to express yourself. It is a matter of choosing a career in which the very act of fulfilling your life mission will by definition bring you tremendous success!
Again, let's say you stand for the principle that everyone has value. You might not achieve much success as an insurance analyst because you would expected to treat people as statistics. Recognizing the individual value in people would still be a wonderful thing to do, but it wouldn't necessarily help you advance your career. (Unless, of course, you went out on your own and found a way to overhaul the entire insurance industry. If that's what you want to do, just tell me how I can help!)
On the other hand, a teacher who recognizes the value in every student will be tremendously successful in that profession, simply by fulfilling that life mission every day. Recognizing the value in people is also an excellent quality for career advancement in management, in any kind of personal agency (sports agents, talent agents, writer's agents), and in life coaching, among many others. In each case, the very act of recognizing the value in others will bring you success.
So while your life mission can't in and of itself tell you what job you should have, it can tell you which jobs will allow you to leverage your life mission into career brilliance! Why spend your life swimming upstream (there we go with the fish again) when you can spend it creating personal and financial success simply by doing what you are meant to do anyway?
(Next up, I'll discuss ways in which your unique set of interests and talents can help you further hone down the list of possible career choices into the very best choice for you.)
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Articles in the Life Mission series:
- Discovering your life's mission - 11/15/05
- The nature of a life mission - Part I - 11/19/05
- The nature of a life mission - Part II - 11/20/05
- The broad scope of a life mission - 11/24/05
- Expressing your life mission in your own way - 11/26/05
- Aligning your life with your life mission - 12/2/05
- Using your talents and interests to find direction - 12/5/05
- Recognizing the value of your life mission - 12/13/05
