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Previous: Help - what do I do?
I know what I want to do
Excellent. Don't underestimate how powerful a position you are in, many people do not know what they want to do.
However, just as with people who don't know what they want to do, consider how you want to work, using the exercises below.
Consider also the deep and meaningful behind your knowledge of what you want to do. You might know what you want to do from the point of view of having a clear idea of your skills and experience and what you enjoy doing. For example I know I am good at general management and I enjoy doing it well - ergo I know what I want to do.
However you might also know WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, as in from the point of view of 'why am I on the planet?', some kind of sense of deeper purpose.
Your statement of what you want to do is most powerful when it is aligned with your deeper purpose. As a result you will be able to draw on your passion to motivate yourself during the job change and speak honestly and convincingly in interviews. People who talk of the job as part of their purpose in job interviews stand out from people who merely have the skills for the job.
Now there are many ways of establishing your mission on the planet, and many of us struggle to articulate it for some time. However the point here is not to know your precise mission, or even to worry that you should have one.
The point is that you should know how what you want to do links in with a deeper purpose, beyond just 'this is what I've always done'...
Exercise:
Try this: take a piece of paper - at the top answer the question 'what do I want to do?' describing it practically (i.e. in terms of job role or title). Then, below, answer the question 'why?' - one or several answers are fine. For each answer, then ask why again. Keep going until you get to something indivisible to you. For example, many people end up with answers to a chain of whys like 'for my children': that may occur as indivisible to you, i.e. if you asked the reason why again the answer is simply 'because that's what matters to me'.
This chain is very powerful - it gives you deep personal knowledge, which will help you appear more confident and purposeful in your job change
Next: Exercise: how do I want to work?
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