When I start with a potential client, one of the first things I tell them is, “I don’t have the faintest clue what’s best for you.” Nobody hires me to give them the answers.
The next thing I tell them is, “What I do have is an unshakeable belief that you have the answers.” That insight is always there. It’s my job to help them find it. Ultimately, my work is about helping people unlock their own self-expertise.
Here are four ideas to help you unlock your own self-expertise to guide you down the path to an energizing, inspiring career and life.
Ask questions
Yes, this is an obvious place to start, but you’d be surprised how many people never really get around to asking themselves the important questions.
It’s not enough to recognize when something feels off (though as we’ll discuss later, that’s important too). In order to consciously, consistently make decisions that will lead you down an energizing path, you need a specific understanding of what makes you tick.
What kinds of questions should you ask? One of my favorites is “What do I love doing,” followed up by, “Why? What is it about that that is so fun, energizing, etc.?” The aim is to identify the underlying characteristics – reasons why you love what you love – that tend to be in place when you’re on fire.
Compile the insights
Asking the questions isn’t enough. You need to be able to put the resulting information to use. It’s all too easy to let those insights stay trapped in your journal, or flying randomly around in your head. And paradoxically, the more the insights pile up, the less clarity there seems to be. The insights start to melt together into one big blob.
To counter this, go through the results of the exploration you do and harvest the key points. Compile them in one place so you have an at-a-glance reference.
Not only will this add clarity to your efforts, it will help you get more value out of all that hard exploration work you did. It will also give you something to refer to down the road, so ten years from now the insights will be just as fresh and crisp as they were the day you first dug into them.
A great example of how this can be useful is the first step in my work helping people create careers they love. As I mentioned above, I help them dig into what they love and why. By compiling the reasons why they love what they love that come up repeatedly, we create a snapshot of the underlying characteristics that tend to be in place when they’re on fire (I call them Passion Factors).
The resulting list of Passion Factors is a tool they can use to both brainstorm potential career directions and evaluate possibilities. It becomes an internal compass that points the way towards work that energizes and inspires.
Stop & check
Life isn’t a one-shot deal. You have to keep paying attention every step of the way. I have worked with many people who once loved their career, but by the time they contacted me were feeling frustrated and stuck. They didn’t get there with one monumentally stupid decision. They got there because, step-by-step, they drifted off course.
Doing the initial exploration is great, but to stay on track, make it a point to stop frequently and check in with yourself. Ask, “How does this feel? What do I love about this? What don’t I like about this?” And of course, following it up with my favorite question – why? – will help you squeeze as much insight as possible out of it.
Think of your life as a big research experiment. The goal of the experiment is to learn as much as you possibly can. Stopping and checking in with yourself lets you mine your everyday experience for the insight that will keep leading you down a rich, fulfilling, juicy path. It also gives you an early alert to both possibilities and problems.
Another spin on stopping and checking is to get out of your head and really listen to how it feels. What is your intuition telling you? What is your body telling you? There’s a valuable source of insight there that goes largely untapped for most people.
Learn from others, but filter it
You can’t know everything there is to know. There is always something more to discover. To that end, learning from others is a vital piece of the puzzle.
Learning from others can be a double-edged sword, though. I hear too many give away their power as they unquestioningly adopt the insights and opinions of someone else rather than stopping to ask, “Does this really fit my life?”
I encourage you to be ravenous about learning from others. Talk to people. Read books. Listen to speakers and go to workshops. Soak up the wealth of knowledge and understanding that is available out there.
But don’t just be a sponge that soaks up everything indiscriminately. Run it all through your own filter first. Don’t just adopt someone else’s picture. Create your own with the pieces that make sense and feel right to you. (And yes, that includes anything I say.)
YOU are your own best expert!
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