Flame of Hope

My basic assumption about Careers – before you invest in career insurance it is necessary that you understand where I am coming from and what I believe.  I believe that everyone has a career path they were intended to pursue – one where they have the gifts, talents, personality, interest and natural strengths needed to be totally successful and fulfilled .  Your job (and your teen’s) is to find, discover or create it and live it.  How does one find this ideal career?  Can you do it alone?  The answer is yes and most people do so, but it may take a lifetime (at least it did for me). Many spend years working in jobs and careers where they do not enjoy the work, feel unfulfilled, underappreciated and know there is more but do not know what to do.  You see this lack of direction in college graduates, those who have worked in a job for five to ten years and those who are in the second half of life.  It appears that the longer one goes down the wrong path, the more invested they become in that path and hence difficulty in making a change. So there must be a better way.  There is and therefore the need for Informed Choice at as early as possible – that is why I am working with Teens.  I learned the basic process when obtaining my coaching certificate – the process is called “Living Your Vision” and was created by a wonderful woman (Fran Fisher) who created the Academy for Coach Training.  I have taken this process and tailored it to teens and added a Careers focus.  So what is this Teen Career Process, how does it work?

Hopefully after reading and thinking about the Intro session, you are now convinced that you need and want Teen Career Insurance.  But first let me tell you a little bit about my story and why Teen Career Insurance makes sense (not that you are not already convinced).  When I was in High School, I thought I knew what I wanted to be, how much I would make and how to become successful – little did I know what path I was headed down or where it would lead. I decided along with my best High School friend that we would go to college.  This was not a popular decision at my house since my father considered it a waste of time and money – he was a tool and die maker and he felt that learning a trade was the only way to go – well you know I was determined to show him.  Anyway my best friends’ father was a degreed engineer and making a staggering $10,000 a year – way more money than anyone I knew.  My best friend and I were taking advanced math and were pretty good at science so this only made sense that we follow in his father’s footsteps.  That was my decision process – it did not consider what engineers do, whether or not we had the personality or that we were really good at – our strengths.  Yes we were good at math, but we did not love math.   As it turns out neither of us were cut out to Be engineers, we both turned to Business and did become successful – well at least by the world’s standards.  So deliberate choice of a career without knowing who we really are and what we are intended to Become turned out to be a poor choice.  How many of you can at least in some way relate to this type of decision process?  So what is a better way???  What Teen Career Insurance could we have invested in?  Oh, one other thing – I had to earn my college education and this uninformed method of choice was turning out to be expensive – at least it was at the time.

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