People are always on the hunt, it seems, to find their “dream job”, a “perfect fit” or the "life they always wanted.”
I’d like to share a finding from my recent MA in Career & Coaching Studies that speaks to an unexpected discovery on this point, one that challenges the idea that we don’t know what we want.
For my MA, I was testing whether my specific career methodology-3D Careers-could help people who felt confused, lost, uncertain and down about their career journeys figure out something more authentic, more aligned and a better fit.
What I was expecting was that every participant was confused about their ideal career. One would expect this because this is what they told me and why they agreed to partake of the research.
What I found was that each participant told me exactly what they wanted to do within the first five minutes of the first session.
There was no hesitation, confusion, bewilderment. They all, without exception, expressed their ideal job, word for word, in the first five minutes.
But not one noticed.
We had to go though three whole sessions, with summary report, for me to then re-quote their very own words back to them before they could believe their dreams were possible.
This was above all discoveries the most haunting of my research: we already know what we need, we just don’t hear ourselves.
More significantly, it is the voice that holds these answers even if we are not conscious of them.
There is a difference between the conscious world of our cultivated voice, and the unconscious world also expressed by that same voice. But the unifying principle between the two is the very same voice.
Of course this raises some important questions about the the role of the unconscious in career coaching work more broadly.
It also raises interesting questions about the specific role of the voice in careers work.
If nothing else, the voice knows.
It is this that has spurred in me the need of discovering why.
