Page 32 - Marky Stein - Fearless Career Change_ The Fast Track to Success in a New Field (2004)

Fearless Career Change

that given the right circumstances, your own calling will come tum-
bling off your tongue and you’ll wonder how it was you didn’t
notice it in the first place. When you are operating from your call-
ing, it will, indeed, seem like you are not working at all but rather
simply and almost magically, flowing. In my 13 years of being a
career coach, I have very rarely had a client who, given the right
prompting (as you’ll have in this book), could not state his or her
special talent within 10 or 20 minutes after talking with me. People
who have done the exercises presented in this book have reported
to me that, even though they were unsure of their career direction,
it became clear to them as a result of gaining enormous self-knowl-
edge from completing these exercises.

If the word calling seems unnatural to you for
any reason, try substituting the words natural
ability or talent.

You probably know your calling now—it may just take a little
coaxing and my assurance to you that it’s there and that you should
get it down on paper. That’s what the process that I call career fin-
gerprinting is about: finding that single thing—a talent, a power, a
special genius—that (like a fingerprint) is unique to you and only
you. That’s what we’ll be doing in the following exercises.

What Is My Authentic Calling?

In this first exercise in the career fingerprinting process, complete
each one of the following phrases using the first thing that pops
into your mind. You may rest at ease even if your answers seem to
make no sense at all because we’re going to spend time together
for the rest of this book making sure that your answers translate
into a real-world career that you can fully enjoy. Right now, we’re
just at the beginning. There’s no right or wrong answer. It doesn’t
matter if your answers are all the same, all different, or some sort
of mixture. Try not to analyze it at all. We’ll have plenty of time for
analysis later. For now, let yourself have some fun.

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