Finding work that’s right for you is critical to living your Joyful Genius. When people pay you to do work that suits both your talents and your preferred way of working, it hardly feels like work at all.
This post is for you if you’re doing your own thing, particularly if you’ve recently changed direction. If that’s you, read on! And if what you were looking for is career guidance to work out what your next employed position could be, may I suggest a visit to my friend Dave Cordle’s career coaching website – he shares my passion for people getting properly paid for bring their Genius to the world.
Now let’s look at each of those areas, your talents and how you prefer to work:
Finding work that’s right for your talents.
I’m not going to talk about your functional skills, but about the kind of tasks that naturally put you in flow. One of the best profiling tools for people doing their own thing that I’ve come across is Wealth Dynamics. It starts from it’s better to do what comes naturally, and find other people to help with the stuff you’re not so keen on.
It plots where you are going to add the most value in your team, based on two dimensions:
- How do you prefer to think – intuitive (ideas) or sensory (market information)
- How do you prefer to act – magnify (more impressive) or multiply (easily replicable)
That works out to 8 “profiles”, each with a unique role to play in a team. A good team will cover all 4 aspects of creating a great business:
- A bright idea in the first place (“Dynamo” creation energy)
- Powerful marketing and team to get it out there (“Blaze”, people energy)
- Fantastic customer service to get it delivered as promised (“Tempo”, service energy)
- A great system to make sure the whole thing is actually making the money it should (“Steel”, data energy).
I could go into more detail here, but it’s probably easier if you download and read the Wealth Dynamics eGuide.
If you’d like to know more about Wealth Dynamics and how it might help you home in on your perfect work, feel free to book in for a chat.
Right for your way of working
It’s all very well to understand whether you’re extroverted or introverted, or whether you prefer working with people or information. But you still won’t be in your Genius if the role you play in your team isn’t right for you. There are essentially 3 roles that every good team needs:
- Leader – the one with the big vision, and a way of being that gets people behind it.
- Follower – the person who actually makes things happen, who implements stuff.
- Manager – someone to track how it’s all going, and who can correct course when necessary.
Many people think that if it’s your business, you have to be the leader. That’s not always the case. Sometimes your role is to find the person who will share your passion and unite a team behind you.
There’s also a misperception that leaders have to be ‘people people’. But sometimes it’s the managers who deal with the people issues, while the visionaries are creating the mission that the managers hold the course for. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were real ideas guys, but neither was that great with people. Gates came across as a bit nerdy, and Jobs had a reputation as a very hard man to work with. Both had great CEO’s keeping the team aligned with the vision.
Right for your ambition
Maybe you’re like most people I work with, and you have no real ambition to build a large business. You just want to do your thing that you do so well, and get properly paid for it. If that’s you, then think about your favourite position in previous businesses you’ve worked in. What role did you play there, were you the visionary, the implementer, or the manager? That’s a great clue about how to find work that’s right for you at this point in your working life.
Leader
If you love being the visionary, and yet you don’t want to lead a massive operation, whose business can you bring that dynamism to, and help them to grow the way they’d love to? Maybe in exchange for a share of the pie, when it gets bigger than you want to be actively involved with. Or perhaps you just need to inspire a few collaborators to get behind your vision. And then and give them the freedom to grow something as big as they desire, with you as figurehead.
Follower
If your past success was from implementation, maybe you can apply those skills to a growing business with no real plan. If what you prefer is putting things into operation after someone else creates and promotes them, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re getting ahead of yourself in your own business. Creating great delivery systems for theoretical products to non-existent customers is not genius! (Horder looks to self, been there, done that!)
Manager
And if what you do best is keeping the team and the business on track, you’ve got two realistic choices. You could find a growing business that’s all over the place and bring your favourite way of working to pull them together. And once they’re motoring, you can step back into a chairman role where you don’t have too much day-to-day responsibility. Or alternatively, you can play a coordinating role in a larger collaboration of people who, like you, don’t want to grow too big individually.
And of course, if you DO want to create something massive, then you’ll need to bring in ambitious people who love to do the stuff you hate, so you can all grow together.
Finding work that’s right for your life
It’s important to remember that work is just one aspect of life. It’s an important one, we spend a lot of time doing it, and it’s how we bring our Genius to the world. But it’s not everything.
So make sure that whatever work you choose to take on, it still leaves you plenty of time for loved ones, for nature, for wellbeing, and for growth. As I said in this post back in 2017, making space for non-work activity will enhance your Genius, and make you even more valuable, whatever work you decide is right for you.
In summary, if loving what you do for a living, while making a great living doing what you love is important to you, make sure you know yourself well enough to recognise when the work is right for you.
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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash
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