What if, in our struggles to find our most authentic careers, we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong soul-searching question all this time? Instead of always wondering what it is we can possibly do to be helpful to others; should we instead be asking ourselves: how are we already helpful to others?
Because there’s a meaningful difference between these two questions: how can I be helpful to others vs. how am I already helpful to others?
The former requires that we rely on our tiny little brains to come up with an answer – and then hope and pray that turns out to be our best answer; while the latter requires that we just look backwards to uncover the answer that is already there. All we need to do is just look back and pull out that one most simple thread, that one way that we’ve been most helpful to family, friends and colleagues throughout the years…and do so, BTW, without over-thinking it.
And THAT’s the tough part. In our endless pursuit to figure out our careers, my experience is that we almost always tend to overthink these answers; and oftentimes, we overthink these answers because we either don’t like or otherwise refuse to embrace the truth of what’s being presented to us.
So to help shed a bit more light on the challenges of answering this question, I invite you to listen in on a recent conversation I had with Ricki Morris, a fantastic, open-book-of-a-guest on the Our Authentic Careers podcast.
(This post originally appeared on Our Authentic Careers.)
