Dream Job Discovery

Introduction One day when I was 34 years old, my alarm clock went off at 6 a.m. like always. Normally, I’d be looking forward to sipping on a freshly brewed coffee while I planned my day. But on this particular morning, nothing felt normal. There was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d been awake most of the night with a million thoughts racing through my mind. I was having a tough time dragging my butt out of bed. I didn’t want to get up, not if it meant that I had to go to work. Looking at my life at that time, you’d think I was living my dream. I was a vice president in a global corporation, earning a generous salary with excellent benefits, including a company car and an expense account for wining and dining clients in the city’s finest restaurants. Best of all, I had a fantastic boss who was mentoring me to take over his position. Even my team was ideal. They were talented, friendly, and always ready to give 100 percent without complaint. “Ugh,” I thought. If this situation was so ideal, why was I pulling the covers over my head in a state of dread? Why did I want to hit the snooze button and escape from reality for another ten minutes? Why wasn’t I happy? It didn’t make sense. Getting out of bed wasn’t the only issue. I found myself struggling to stay focused at work. Keeping my team inspired and motivated was becoming a challenge. In fact, I was the one who needed inspiration! The bottom line: I hated my job, but I didn’t know why. Even worse, I had no idea what I’d rather be doing. I was afraid that if I changed anything, it would put my financial security at risk and that the years I’d spent climbing the corporate ladder would be all for naught. So, I felt stuck, and I was stupefied. Somehow, my carefully planned career path had led me straight to paycheck purgatory. These uncomfortable feelings are what started me on my journey of dream job discovery. I desperately wanted to find a job that I could feel passionate about doing. A job that would infuse me with life instead of sucking the soul out of me. The problem was that I had no clue what my passions were. I read every book I could find (43 of them!) about discovering your life’s passion and purpose. But none of them connected the dots or offered me a simple process to follow. Instead, I had to spend hours looking for one thing that could be my passion from a universe of thousands of possibilities. For me, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I started to envy the people I knew who had already been lucky enough to know their passion. As the saying goes: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” So, in a desperate attempt to find joy in my job, I decided to leave the corporate world behind and hang up my shingle as a consultant. Maybe starting my own business where I got to be my own boss would finally make me happy. But that wasn’t the solution for lasting happiness either. Some days were good; some days were not. What the heck was making those good days so good compared to those bad days? I still needed to find the answer. Then one day, I finally connected all the dots. I figured out that my passion wasn’t a single thing—it was a workflow process. I discovered that all of the things I had a passion for involved the workflow process of “improving or perfecting.” It didn’t matter whether I was editing a document to make it read better, redesigning a website to make the user experience more enjoyable, changing a process to make it more efficient, rearranging the furniture in a room to make it more livable, or experimenting with my golf swing to improve my distance and accuracy. As long as I was engaged in any activity with the desired outcome of making things better, I could lose myself in the sheer joy of doing it. BINGO! It all suddenly made sense why some days were good, and others were not. Any day I was going through the process of improving a product, or systems, or procedures for my consulting clients, I felt energized and enthused. However, on days where the work was more administrative or required data analysis and numerical calculation, I felt zero passion because those activities did not involve my “passion workflow process” of improving or perfecting. Thinking back to my last corporate job, I realized that less than 20 percent of the tasks fit my passion workflow process of improving or perfecting. No wonder I could never find joy in that job! But imagine the flip side of that. What if I had a job where 80 percent of the role involved a process of improving or perfecting something—a product, a service, or a process—that would undoubtedly be more enjoyable, wouldn’t it? That got me thinking that discovering your passion workflow process—a “job passion type”—would be a vital clue to your dream job. I needed to figure out how many job passion types there were and what jobs related to each. So, for 16 years, I spent countless hours researching, testing, and tweaking a process that ultimately resulted in a revolutionary career assessment called the DreamJob Type Indicator (DJTI). The DreamJob Type Indicator is the only career assessment specifically designed to identify the type of workflow process that you’ll naturally feel passionate about doing—and the specific jobs that would provide you with enjoyment and fulfillment. People who have taken the assessment tell me that it truly is an experience of self-discovery—it reveals options for dream jobs they would never have known about before. That’s why I decided to title this book “Dream Job Discovery.”