When you are clear, what you want will show up in your life,
and only to the extent you are clear.
–Janet Attwood
Before you undertake your next career adventure, it’s wise to spend a little time clearly defining what you want and need. After all, if you don’t know what it’s supposed to look like, how will you recognize the right opportunity at the right time when it happens?
Ideal Factors Exercise
Whether you’re working toward a promotion, taking on a new project, looking for a new job or new career, or exploring the possibility of business ownership, use the Ideal Factors exercise as a starting point. This simple exercise entails making a list of what’s important to you. In other words, how would you answer the question, “What will make you get up out of bed everyday excited to start your workday?”
When preparing your list, it’s helpful to sort your ideal factors into two categories: the tangibles and the intangibles.
Tangible Factors
Tangible factors are things that we would all easily agree on their definitions. If they’re going to show up at all, then you’ll usually see them in the resources you have on hand, such as in the position description, on the company website, in the bid request or the project scope, etc.
Examples of tangibles are geographical location, schedule, and commute time. You might require a specific compensation amount or particular health and retirement benefits. You might want this career move to involve remote working. You might want to travel or not travel to conduct your work. As you can see, you can usually tell if these factors are going to be there or not when you make your choice.
So, part 1 of the exercise is pretty easy: List the tangible factors along with a brief definition.
Intangible Factors
For part 2 of the exercise, you will list your top 3 intangible factors, and after naming each intangible factor, you will go deeper by defining it and explaining why each one important to you.
Intangible factors are more individually defined. The way you look at these items may be different than the way someone else sees them, and why they’re important to you are unique to you as well. When you determine what makes a factor important to you, you’ll be better able to spot alignment with opportunities, and you’ll be better able to articulate why you want the job if you’re an employee or why you want the business if you’re self-employed.
Examples of intangibles could include things like creative expression, work/life balance, advancement and learning potential, and the kind of challenge that the day-to-day work offers… to name a few. For job seekers, a common important intangible is the comparison of personal work style with the style of management. If you’re looking at self-employment, you would outline the traits of your ideal clients and perhaps how you’d prefer they interact with you. You’ll notice that these factors are more abstract in nature, and it’s usually harder to see if they’re there at first glance.
Quick summary of part 2 of the Ideal Factors exercise:
- Name your top three intangible factors, preferably in order of priority.
- Define each factor you in your own words.
- Write down why each of the three you listed is important to you.
Sorting Example – Work/Life Balance
If you’re still not exactly sure how to sort your tangible and intangible factors into the two categories, here’s an example. NOTE: Not all factors that you may include in your two lists will have correlations to each other like what is shown in this sorting example, but it does help for the sake of the comparison that these two factors are related.
Susan is a consultant who’s been steadily building her reputation and her clientele. She’s putting together a project proposal for a new client that she’s been talking to off and on for the past two years. At first blush, it looks like a fantastic opportunity, but she wants to be careful about outlining the project scope and a realistic delivery time frame. As a mother of two, and with a husband who travels a lot for his work, it’s important to her that she balances her work schedule with the needs of her family.
Because Susan’s work schedule is important to her, it will be on her tangible factors list. She might want to work during typical business weekday hours with some flexibility – so, not strictly 8am-5pm, but generally during those hours on Monday through Friday. Ideally, she wants to work a maximum of 40 hours/week, with an occasional evening being okay, but no weekends. That’s a definition of a work schedule, and it’s pretty straightforward.
Susan would also include work/life balance on her intangible list. A little harder to define than a work schedule, but she knows she has work/life balance when she’s able to take the occasionally Friday afternoon off to go to her children’s basketball tournaments or piano recitals. Her why is because her family is very important to her.
As you can see, the work schedule is only one part of how Susan might define it, and how else she will define it and why it’s important to her will be different than it will be for someone else. Another person might not be motivated by family needs at all but still want work/life balance. Let’s say Susan is single with no kids and wanting work/life balance because she likes to go camping and kayaking on the weekends or take an occasional road trip with friends. Maybe she likes having her evenings free and flexible so she could go to personal development workshops and attend interesting lectures.
Readying Yourself For Your Next Career Adventure
Spend some time defining the tangible and intangible ideal factors that are important to you to create a benchmark for yourself. You’ll find that readying yourself for your next career adventure will get a whole lot easier. Making decisions along the way will be easier too.