Career decisions are based on all kinds of things, such as gut feelings, research, experience and perceptions about the value of the job opportunity.
Often it is difficult to know which feelings and perceptions to trust!
My free career decision making worksheet helps you gain control of your career decisions.
I explain here how evaluating the rules you use to make decisions, are the best way to guide them:
Transcript coming soon!
Because there are so many factors influencing how to decide on a career, I saw the importance of building a tool so you can view everything through one lens.
Your Free Career Decision Making Tool is available to download below.
This will make your career decisions so much easier and reduce your research.
But first let me explain why the “one lens” approach is so beneficial.
Because if you have been researching solutions, you know most career decision approaches are confusing.
You may have seen sophisticated approaches to career decision making process that are confusing rather than helpful with all the steps and moving parts.
Going through this kind of career decision making research can have you agonizing over each little job detail, like pay, commute, hours, boss, emotions you are feeling, which location to choose etc.
It’s understandable that you can get you stressed about making the wrong job choice decision. You are worried that you might miss out on the better career opportunity if you choose wrong.
If you are right in the middle of considering a career change, try this quick career change quiz. It will help you rate any career against the 5 factors of your career destiny.
It’s 5 quick questions that you can apply to any career change decision:
Included in this article is my free career decision tool that solves this career choice dilemma. It is a Fillable PDF ebook with instructions and examples, so you can fill your answers in right in the PDF.
Please take
Now you can step back and look at the big picture of your career decision process, so you don’t get bogged down in the quagmire of too many details.
The concept of this career decision making tool is pretty simple. By deciding on the bigger picture of your career decisions, you gain a new perspective so all the little detailed decisions to fall into place.
In my experience working with jobseekers, I’ve found that you can overcome your career decision making difficulties in 2023 and beyond by assessing your patterns. By looking at the bigger picture that frames your decisions.
How? All you have to do is look at the rules you have used in the past to make choices about a job.
Will those same rules work for the now? Will they work for this opportunity you are considering?
As a Career Discovery Coach, I brought my experience and research to bear to design a handy Career Decision Making Worksheet to solve this problem.
It is a helpful process to assist you in your career decision making assessment.
Rather than a decision checklist of each of a job’s features, you can look at the rules you want to use to make your career decisions.
You do this by looking at what rules you used in the past. Then double check if they apply to your career choices now.
This free guide intends to help you to make better decisions now and in the future.
Click on blue button below to download Fillable PDF career decision making worksheet:
Let’s explore how to best use this guide:
This career decision making tool helps you looks back at the decisions and choices that guided your last 10 years to identify rules you use.
This can give you tremendous insight into your motivation about how you made your past choices, so you can make better ones this time around.
Approach this in a neutral way. You are not looking to assess “blame” here. Not at all. You are simply trying to understand the job decision making rules you use.
You want to identify, what set of rules do you use to make decisions?
Did you make career, money and relationship decisions based on what you really want for your life, or did you just react to the situation at hand?
Have your rules led you to sell yourself short? Are your rules stymied by limiting beliefs you hold about work and about yourself?
You can use the results from this tool to make better career decisions from here on out.
You will be able to answer, “What set of rules can I adopt to guide better new career choices?”
Your values are the set of rules you live by. They are your standards. Values are like a mental filter that manages how you process and make sense of the world.
Career, family, money, media you consume, life events etc. are all processed by your rules (values), to create mindset beliefs that control your career decisions.
For example, an extrovert’s rules might lead them to believe “Hey, outside sales job talking to business owners all day is a great career!”
However a career for an introvert with anxiety might operate by a different set of rules. You might have a limited belief that working from home in a clerical capacity is a safe choice.
It’s all determined by what beliefs you generate from your rules filter.
This meme gives you a clear visual explanation of the process:
You should notice in this meme that a large set of beliefs that you generate through your rules are limiting beliefs.
They are quietly working in the background of your subconscious. Limiting beliefs are the number one impediment to your career decisions.
It is why in my capacities as a Career Change coach, Mindset Coach and Career Development Coach, limiting beliefs are one of the first things I focus on.
Where are these limiting beliefs from? From limiting rules you have developed.
If you are carrying emotional scars from life events or childhood (as we all do in some form or another) those scars have spawned self-limiting rules that you are not even aware of.
Those rules create limiting beliefs that affect your career decisions.
For example if you think you are an introvert, you might believe you must make certain ‘safe’ career decisions based on that. So you look for working from home jobs, instead of going for a professional position out in the field like you really want.
If you examine the limiting rules behind your decision making process, you can eliminate those limiting beliefs.
Then you can make better decisions about what you really want.
Note: If you think you have limiting beliefs that interfere with solid career decisions, or have stalled your career change, now you have a way to eliminate them.
You can identify your values and beliefs in my One Week Career Discovery and Self assessment Home Study Course, called Define Your Career Destiny.
To find out if this innovative course is right for you, I offer a Free Career Discovery guide that explains how it works. Get it now.
Your career decisions intertwine with all aspects of your life, not just employment.
So to give you the big picture of your career decision making process, I include not only career, but money and relationship rules in the Career Decision Worksheet.
This can show you patterns across the board.
Because what is a career but a network of relationships? What is wealth but your relationship with earning, spending, saving and managing money?
Career, money, relationships – they are all connected.
For example, do you sometimes feel that things just “happened” to you that you couldn’t control? You lost a good job, you got behind on bills, or you broke with a loved one?
There are rules affecting the underlying dynamics of these events, that you can take control of as you will see.
Setting up better rules, is how you make better career decisions. And it reduces your research time and energy.
Rules are like a GPS: they guide you through the now and into your future.
What does a GPS do? It keeps you on the right path & the shortest route. It helps you automatically adjust for traffic, construction, weather events etc.
In this way rules are a GPS that pilot you to make better choices in your career, money and relationships – based on a set of rules that YOU set up.
So you don’t have to agonize over every fork in the road or detail of your career decision. If you have clear rules you play by, the details fall into place.
Look at how you programmed your previous path
To help you think about how you set up your rules in the past, I use 10 years as a lookback point. Then we look ahead 10 years.
I use 10 years as the timeline, because that is a long enough time horizon for anyone to turn around their entire career, money and relationships situation – if they want to.
As you go through these decision making rules, you have one goal: to discard those rules that don’t work for you and to adopt new ones that have meaning to you.
Then, after going through the process, to bring it all into focus, you summarize it all into a few rules that will bring your career breakthrough.
You will be able to answer: What one set of rules can I adopt that will make a big breakthrough for me in my career, money and relationships?”
Then you can re-evaluate the BIG opportunities you’ve been missing!
What career breakthrough can you make with the new rules you adopt?
Thoughtful answers to these kind of questions will make for your breakthrough career, money and relationship decisions.
Don’t worry if you can’t answer all your future choices and rules questions right now.
Once you begin to focus on them daily, these career, business, money and relationship rules will become clear over time.
This DefineYourCareer.com retirement lifestyle quiz can give you some additional perspective on career decisions as well.
Larry LaFata is the founder of defineyourcareer.com and the world’s only Career Destiny Coach. He is dedicated to helping you discover your Career Destiny, regardless of your background, education, or experience.
Larry’s innovative courses include Define Your Career Destiny one week home study course and a two-hour Career Destiny Workshop for Friends where best friends can discover their career or business destiny together.
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