About the Career Clarity Method
Hey there! I'm Lisa Lewis Miller, CEO of Career Clarity and founder of the Career Clarity method.
Because you’re here, I’m guessing you’re the kind of person who believes you could have more happiness in your career and life. (Hopefully a lot more!)
If so, you are in the right place.
If you've been feeling frustrated, you're not alone. The pathways to find more career happiness aren't easy or clear, and definitely aren't taught in school. (Although they should be!)
From working with more than 500 career transitioners just like you, I’ve done a ton of research to learn what works (and doesn’t work) for finding more joy, fulfillment, and aliveness in your work.
I’d love to share the big picture view of the methodology I developed in my book, Career Clarity.
Spoiler Alert! The secret of success in all of life's endeavors is this:
information is only as powerful as its application.
So don’t just read this and go back to surfing the internet... do something with this information!
Now, let’s talk about the key elements of Career Clarity Method as a framework for navigating career change.
From reading hundreds of books on personal growth and professional development, I discovered that most thought leaders out there are trying to answer the same question -- “How do we find work that makes us happier?” -- through their own viewpoint.
Some writers focus on the tactical pieces of getting job offers or professional rebranding. Others focused on learning how to hear your heart (and follow it). But while most people presented their strategies to solve a particular issue along the career journey, few people were effectively looking at the start-to-finish adventure.
So after collecting the data points and anecdotal experiences from the more than 500 individuals I’ve coached through career change, I synthesized the work from hundreds of other thinkers into the Career Clarity framework.
At its core, anyone using the Career Clarity Method to navigate a career shift will go through these 3 phases on the way to finding a career that feels like it fits you:
Phase 1: Finding an idea of what exactly it is that you want next,
Phase 2: Testing to confirm that your dream is dreamy in reality, and,
Phase 3: Executing on your strategy to go make it happen.
Imagine this journey was like scaling a giant, gorgeous, terrifying mountain -- and you don’t have a ton of mountain climbing experience (yet). Your first step would be packing your knapsack with all the right gear for your journey -- you need a map and a well-calibrated GPS, water, a flashlight, snacks….all that good stuff to help you know how to find the top of the mountain and do it in a healthy, safe way.
You’ll never scale the mountain if you don’t get up off your couch, so the next phase has to be testing out your route. If you planned a route on paper that isn’t doable in real life (Like: Ack, there’s a giant ravine! Or, maybe there’s too much rapid elevation gain and you get winded and sick!), you’ll turn back and give up at the first challenge that looks insurmountable. So we have to approach the adventure with curiosity and the ability to be nimble and adapt to changing terrain.
And then, of course, the last phase is actually scaling the mountain to the summit. You’ve got the right tools, you’ve learned the best strategy, and now all you have to do is execute.
Phase 1 is figuring out what you actually want, and defining success on your own terms. (Remember that knapsack?)
There are several basic career needs that are almost universal: learning and growth opportunities, problem solving, helping people, and having autonomy. But what these look like and feel like for you is different from what they will be for other people, and important to pin down.
From the 500+ people I’ve coached, I’ve identified that there are 4 Pillars of Career Fulfillment that, once you define them and prioritize them, clearly lead to way more joyful work.
The first pillar of career fulfillment is your Strengths, which I define as where your potential and capabilities intersect with your enjoyment. If you are not working in a role where you get to use your unique gifts to make a difference for your organization or for your stakeholders, the likelihood is high that you won’t be feeling completely fulfilled. The Strengths pillar is one where looking at the difference between what you believe a job will be (based on the job description or the title) versus the actual outline of responsibilities and tasks can make a giant difference in how the role feels like it fits you.
The second pillar of fulfillment is your Magnetic Interests. Your interests are the kinds of topics, problems, people that you are magnetically attracted towards, and would often times choose to spend your free time helping people better understand. For some people, this is the most important part of a job — and for others, the goal here is simply to work on something you’re curious about, not necessarily putting all your passion eggs into one work basket.
The third pillar driving career satisfaction is your Personality, or the innate way you are wired to look at the world, think, make decisions, and organize your time. Each of us is blessed with a slightly different personality, and your personality is one of the biggest factors that determines whether or not an organization is going to be a good cultural fit for you. If you’re an introvert who has worked in an extraverted environment, or a planner who has worked in a workplace designed for spontaneity and flexibility, you’ve felt this tension between who you are and who the job is asking you to be.
The final pillar of career fulfillment is Lifestyle. The purpose of work in your life is not just to make that time that you spend earning money more joyful and valuable to you, but it’s also to give you the resources and the energy to create the life that you love outside of work, too. If your organization or your job gets in the way of the things that are important to the rest of your life like relationships, your health, your hobbies, or your downtime, the job is likely not a good fit for you. This is where things like a long commute, a requirement to be present in the office 5 days a week, or bosses who judge your contributions by the number of hours they see you in your desk chair can bite you.
These 4 Pillars of Career Fulfillment are the reason why you can be in a job that looks like a good fit on the outside, but doesn’t quite feel like it fits you.
And, this is why a job that looks like a “dream job” on the surface may not feel like a dream on the inside.
The overlap point between your strengths, interests, personality, and lifestyle is as unique to you as your fingerprint. So, identifying each of these factors and using them like a rubric to grade future opportunities allows you to stop falling for roles that seem “sexy” on the outside, and actually find the roles that are juicy, life-giving, and a strong fit for who you are.
For those of you who are personal development junkies like me, I have bad news...: knowing all these datapoints about who you are is not enough.
We have to figure out where the Venn diagram overlap is between these different parts of you (based on how you value them) to come up with different ideas for ways to pivot within your career.
For some people, during this part of the process they discover that their current job is actually a pretty good fit, but changing a couple of key pieces would make it an outstanding one.
For others, they realize why their current job has felt so crappy for so long, because they see the sort of work that their soul’s naturally meant to be doing. And for others, there’s a moment of realization that the road towards entrepreneurship is the ideal fit. No matter which of these different paths best matches what your heart and soul are needing, I have lots of tools in my toolbox to help get you there.
Now, before you start to make a big transition into something new, I believe it’s important to gather more datapoints to help you to feel as safe and comfortable — and risk-managed — as possible. (It must be the internal economist inside of me from back in my undergrad years!) No matter which path might be right for you, the most risk-managed path forward for you will likely include a series of small-scale experiments that you can run to gather more information, answer looming questions, and get a taste of what the work is like before you take a bigger leap.
This part of the process can be intimidating because it requires you to take action, bringing you face-to-face with all your fears about discomfort, failure, change, success, economic uncertainty, external judgments, and more. What it’s critically important to remember is: research shows that fulfillment and meaning are inherently tied to growth, change and stretching yourself. (And in fact, comfort can often be where our soul will languish and atrophy.) I know I don’t want that for you, and I’m guessing you don’t either.
This part of the process requires you to cultivate a beginner mindset, be open to growth and change, and courageously put yourself out there. (But don’t worry — I’ve got lots of tools to help you take those baby steps forward even when it feels like fear is paralyzing. Working with closet perfectionists and people pleasers is my specialty!
From teaching you how to build strategic relationships, to teaching you new frameworks for how to tell your professional story so that your professional brand is on fire, to talking about interview and negotiation strategy, we will set you up with all the tools you need in your toolbox to make your transition as easily and quickly and successfully as possible.
In the Career Clarity book, we walk through exercises and worksheets and resources to guide you step-by-step from “I don’t know what I want, but it’s not this!” to signing your next offer letter on the dotted line.