What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

The Third Way to Choose/Change
Careers:
USING THE FLOWER EXERCISE
This pathway to choosing or changing your career is not very popular—
compared, say, to the Internet, because it requires a lot more time of you,
and a lot more work. I described it back in chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 (in case
you’re skipping around in this book, and haven’t been there yet). It is a
careful, thorough, step-by-step process, for ensuring that you are choosing
a career that fits you like a glove: a dream career, or dream job, your
mission in life, as it is often called. It is not for the faint-hearted or the
lazy. But if the other ways to change careers don’t turn up any careers that
look interesting to you, you may end up being very grateful that there is
this way. I get letters like this all the time:
I have already benefited greatly from The Flower exercise. I
found hope in having a second alternative after doing the
homework….The series of life-changing activities in this book
has definitely helped me to better understand who I am, to
further appreciate my talents, and to utilize the resources I
have readily available.
So, just in case you haven’t looked at chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 yet, let me
quickly rehearse here the steps involved in this way of choosing a new
career:
1. You do the Flower Exercise (chapter 8), which gives you the basic
building blocks of Who You Are, so you can match a career to You.
2. Then you put together on one piece of paper your five favorite
transferable skills, and your three favorite fields of knowledge, and
start informational interviewing (chapter 9) so as to find the names of
careers that fit those building blocks (or “petals”).
3. Along the way, you see if you can figure out how to combine your
three favorite fields into one career, so as to make yourself unique.