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Career Test for the Soul

Conclusion

In this web site we have offered you a few exercises based on the "Finding Your Calling" section of our book, Your Soul At Work. Our focus here has been on first looking inside to identify your unique values and how they might evolve through predictable life stages. The book, however, offers much more.

In our experience, people who do this "internal assessment" use it to develop their own very clear personal criteria for success. They identify and negotiate themselves into careers that meet these criteria. This typically makes them more successful because their work energizes them. And they usually experience higher career satisfaction than those who focus too heavily on what they believe others (e.g. organization, society or peers) expect of them.

There are two critical sets of personal success criteria. One is life values. The other is what we call preferred competencies. These are the type of work skills (technical, financial, sales, interpersonal etc.) you'd find most satisfying to develop and exercise on the job. Your Soul at Work outlines a very concrete "Taking Charge Process" with specific self-assessment tools and techniques to help you:

• define your personal criteria for success (both life values and preferred competencies)
• identify and market yourself into a career path that meets these criteria.

Critical success factors

Beyond these relatively subjective fundamentals, the book contains proven competency models and self-assessment tools to help you identify which key success behaviors you've mastered and which you need to develop. These assessments of "core" and leadership competencies are based on research interviews with over 5000 people in large and small organizations worldwide. They offer an invaluable inventory of specific non-technical behaviors that distinguish those who succeed in their work from those who don't in just about any career specialty.

Up till now, these competency models have been available only to employees of corporations such as GE, IBM, AT&T, Citibank, Hewlett Packard, etc. Now, with the purchase of Your Soul at Work, they are presented to you as part of a Career and Life Workbook that walks you systematically through the "Taking Charge Process."

The Bottom Line is that we've discovered people want to bring their souls to work and most people's souls want four things. They want to:

• Love their jobs and find jobs they love
• Succeed in their work
• Navigate successfully through predictable life- stage transitions
• Tie their work to a higher life purpose that has personal meaning for them.

Your Soul at Work presents a systematic process and a workbook with research proven tools and techniques to help you do all four.

We hope you found these sample exercises helpful. If so, there are many more waiting for you in the book. For more information, please visit the Your Soul at Work web site. Alternatively, you can buy it now from Amazon.