You Already Know More Than You Think
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, maybe because becoming a mother has me more attuned than ever to the question of what makes a life feel like yours.
Every once in a while a client will ask me for the full toolkit. The assessments, the databases, the list of job titles they’d be good at. That desire for something concrete, something that just tells you the answer, is so human.
More often than not, people aren’t looking for a revelation. They’re looking for a permission slip. Confirmation that the direction they’re already leaning is the right one. And that’s worth paying attention to, because self trust is built through experience, not results pages. No assessment, however good, can do that part for you.
Where Clarity Comes From
Over time I’ve noticed that career clarity tends to come from three things.
The first is knowing your criteria, what actually matters to you. Fixed expenses. Location. Values. Flexibility. Creative ownership. Working with your hands or your mind. Being part of something or being autonomous. Criteria is the filter you run everything through.
The second is intuition, that gut instinct that sounds simple until you try to access it. It’s quieter than your anxiety and easier to talk yourself out of. It’s the thing you keep coming back to. The conversation that lit you up. The project you stayed late for without noticing. Your body often knows before your brain caught up.
The third is exposure, and this is where most people get stuck. You can’t think your way to knowing whether you’d love being a product manager or a nonprofit director or a solopreneur. You have to touch it. I like to think of this less as networking and more as asking for directions. Reach out to people whose work expands you, who make you feel more alive just by hearing about what they do. Shadow them. Try a small version of it. Test before you overhaul.
Iterating Your Career Like a Designer
My dear friend and roommate of seven years worked at IDEO, the design firm that helped pioneer design thinking alongside the Stanford d.school. At some point she brought me in to co-lead a big workshop (so honored), and that’s where it really locked in for me. It’s a human-centered approach to solving complex problems, originally built for product design, and it maps surprisingly well onto careers. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, both Stanford design professors, made that connection explicit in Designing Your Life.
The core idea: designers don’t build the whole product before testing it. They make a small, scrappy version first. They put it in front of real people. They learn something. They iterate.
Career exploration works the same way. Maybe that’s a single informational interview with someone doing the work you’re curious about. Maybe it’s a volunteer project, a freelance experiment, a class. Maybe it’s just spending a week noticing what energizes you and what depletes you and writing it down.
The goal isn’t to get it right the first time. The goal is to generate real information, the kind that lives in your body, not on a results page.
What Only You Can Answer
A career assessment can tell you that you score high on Social and Artistic interests. It can point you toward a list of jobs that statistically align with your profile. And that’s genuinely useful, as far as it goes. But it can’t tell you whether the career you’re imagining will actually feel like yours. It can’t tell you what you’re willing to sacrifice, or what you need to be well, or what kind of work makes you feel like yourself at the end of the day.
People ask me all the time: but what jobs should I be looking at? And my honest answer is that clarity isn’t out there somewhere waiting to be found. You’re not searching for a needle in a haystack. The answer is already in your hands. The criteria, the intuition, the exposure, those aren’t tools for finding something foreign. They’re tools for recognizing something you already know.
