Map Your Motivations To Clarify Career Goals

Reprinted by permission from CareerJournal.com © Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.

By Douglas B. Richardson

Each of us wrestles with the question: "What should I do with my life?" For those who define themselves by their work, the partial answer is "to find a career I enjoy and which motivates and temperamentally suits me."

To find this answer, though, you must be self-aware, and this may require rigorous self-assessment. One way to do this is to draw yourself a "motivational map" -- a practical and realistic template that you can use to determine if a job opportunity or career direction is a "good fit" for you.

Easier said than done. This whole notion of motivation may seem fuzzy and hard to translate into real-life choices and behaviors. "My whole career feels like I've been running around randomly kissing frog after frog, hoping one will turn into a prince," says one woman still seeking direction at mid-career.

Another executive attempting rigorous self-examination says he struggles with where and how to focus. And another reports difficulty dealing rationally with "touchy-feely jargon. What's the connection between values and motivations and temperament and goals and objectives? Isn't there a flow-chart that will help me wade through this stuff?"

Take a Values Inventory

Obviously, self-assessment isn't easy, but given its powerful rewards, it's worth the effort. First you must take an inventory of your deepest, most fundamental values. Don't let the emotional charge of the word "values" throw you. Some people find that replacing values with the word "satisfiers" helps them with the concept.

Essentially, these values are our basic emotional food groups -- the kinds of psychological and/or intellectual nourishment we want from work and life. These differ from person to person. In everyday discussion, values often are called "orientations." We describe someone as security-oriented, stability-oriented or relationship-oriented, to name a few.

A core value can reflect a belief, priority, satisfaction, aversion or predisposition. These are usually stated as nouns depicting desired outcomes and endpoints. For instance, they may include power, affiliation, acceptance, self-development, knowledge, spirituality, or variety.

Our most powerful and persistent satisfiers take root at an early age. They grow stronger according to our natural aptitude and genetic predispositions (nature) and the influences of our environment, role models and life experience (nurture). Timothy Butler and James Waldroo, authors of "Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns That Keep You from Getting Ahead" (Doubleday, 2000), describe them as "deeply embedded life interests (DELIs)…long-held, emotionally driven passions." Their "big eight" DELIs are quantitative analysis, application of technology, theory development and conceptual thinking, creative production, counseling and mentoring, managing people and relationships, enterprise control, and influence through language and ideas.

Your DELIs might be mixed and/or paired, but however you experience them, it's important to distinguish long-held values from transitory priorities that surface at different stages of our lives and careers. This is because transitory priorities are just that -- important, but passing, interests. Once you address them successfully, they tend to disappear. Transitional needs are genuine, so you can't just ignore them. The key is aligning them with your fundamental values; they should be the tail on the dog -- not the dog.

The other key to motivational self-assessment is prioritizing your values. Ask yourself: Of all the things I want in life, what do I want most? Many instruments, books and counselors can help you to identify your values. The best advice warns against creating an undifferentiated laundry list. Assign weights to each value so you know which are primary or secondary, fundamental or incidental.

Look for Your 'Drivers'

The next step in motivational mapping is to identify your "drivers." These are your "primal verbs" – what you do to express and achieve your values. For example, achievement-oriented people are driven to seek new challenges. Affiliation-oriented people have a need to build relationships. Security-oriented people feel compelled to avoid risk. Gene Kelly had to dance.

Drivers are expressed in behaviors and action. They're the visible evidence of your most important values. So review your past actions and see what patterns recur. Analyze what needs and urges drove your behavior and decisions. All of us naturally try to re-experience activities and emotions we find most gratifying, so by listing, prioritizing and deconstructing your 10 to 15 most satisfying accomplishments, you'll likely see your most powerful drivers surfacing repeatedly.

Seeing those drivers will allow you to infer the underlying values they support. If, for example, eight of your personal "top 10" accomplishments were anchored to verbs like designed, planned, envisioned or developed, creativity is likely one of your most powerful underlying values.

Here's the punch line: each of your fundamental values must be expressed powerfully and repeatedly in your work or personal life – or else you'll find yourself motivationally malnourished. Some people confuse what they're capable of doing with what they're temperamentally suited to do. We substitute competency for motivation and then wonder why life is uninspiring. Or we do what others tell us to, regardless of whether it nourishes our unique values and drivers.

Making Connections

Your final mapping step is to look for patterns and connections among your values and drivers. Values don't express themselves singly or in a vacuum. They tend to cluster and support each other. We don't reinvent our personalities every day; the growing-up process teaches us how to satisfy our motivational needs. During our formative years, we may "try on" a certain attitude or behavior and find it helps get us something we want. Naturally, we employ it again, and with re-use and refinement, this driver becomes sharper and more sophisticated.

By our early 20s, our values and drivers have turned into a stable, consistent orientation toward people, activities, roles and settings. They become a style that helps us "operate" comfortably in daily life. There are scores of assessment tools that can draw an accurate picture of your operative style: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Birkman, 16PF or Life Styles Inventory. These instruments profile preferences and behaviors that tend to remain stable over time.

In fact, it's possible to reverse this whole analytical process and "work your operative style backward" as part of your self-assessment. Your preferences and scores on various measures can help you understand the major driving forces they reflect. From examining these drivers, you can infer the values each driver feeds.

By rigorously pursuing either path, top-down or bottom-up, you'll end up with a prioritized list of values. It should feel right, stable and consistent to you because it's been built up over years of personal development. Identifying abstract motivators and translating them into real-life incentives -- behaviors, roles, settings and rewards -- you can use to make practical career choices will give you a real sense of control.

You'll also find that after you complete this navel-gazing and apply your findings to your work and relationships, you'll naturally "take" to some people more than others. People with similar values recognize each other quickly. They experience the warm glow of "value congruence." Because they value the same things, they tend to like each other.