Career Choice- "Every man is best known to himself."

Him- “You know, you’d be good at …..”
Me -“You really think so? Well, OK!”

Thus I started each of my professional career(
s) in retail management, life insurance sales, professional development, executive development, sales training, management training, organizational development, Human Resources management and finally, a partner in a talent management-consulting firm.
This last one, honestly, was the first one I’ve gone into with a clear understanding of what I do well and who I can do it for. But still, I had to trust somebody else to give me the feedback or the affirmation that I could be successful. (Note- key word- “affirmation”.)

The common theme throughout all of my professional careers has been that I looked to others to “affirm” me and what I was doing or who I was doing it with or for. (Note to my earlier bosses and managers: “Thanks for the memories. Sorry for the heartburn.”)

I know you can’t imagine that, but it’s true! Ask a "Boomer" about how they chose their career and odds are many will say their story is similar, if not the same.
In fact, I have learned that there are two types of people. 1) those who knew at a very young age what they were going to be when they grew up, mapped out their plan and executed it and 2) those who are still trying to figure out where their professional "passion" lies even at age 50 plus.

This, I have determined by talking to hundreds of professionals in our firm's recruiting services and scores of others as a "mature" corporate Human Resources manager over the last 30+ years previous to starting our firm in 1999.

Recently, I have come to fully appreciate a "normative" (note: unlike DiSC™, Meyers Briggs™, Predictive Index™ or Strengths Finder™) career assessment that can compare, statistically, the fit of a "taker" to a number of careers compared to corporate incumbents, in those same careers, who were profiled and results validated relative to organizational empirical performance data (performance evaluations). Thus, we know the comparative "profiles" of successful and average performers from over 2500 corporate validation studies and hundreds of "jobs".


I’ve now got statistical science from this career assessment that has calculated what careers (from Hospitality to Manufacturing and from Government to Entrepreneurial) my profile is closest to compared to almost 20 million profiles (the data base).

How different would my life be if I had had this data 40 years ago when I was starting out?

How many hundreds of thousands of dollars would my former employers have saved by not assuming I knew what I really wanted to be when they hired me?
How much happier would I have been in all of my work effort if I had discovered my passion 40 years earlier and worked doing what I am inherently "wired" to do?
Granted, you cannot go back, but I have often thought about those hundreds of mornings looking in the mirror as I shaved, thinking to myself "I really don't want to face (those people) today."

What about you? Do you ever have mornings like that? How often?
What's the value of identifying what your top careers could be before wasting any mornings preparing for the worst?

Or, what's the value of affirming that you are already in one of your top careers?
It's easy to do and very reasonably priced.
In fact, the people at "LandingmyCareer" have a special deal for career seekers validating their best options before investing time, money or even aggravation in building their resume.