By Ianne Sherry
At the end of April we had an important full day seminar/workshop with Larry Braman, a career consultant based in Los Angeles who was flown in to work with us. Larry Braman started the day by asking us all assess and categorize our personal values. While this may sound like a basic task, it was really the beginning of an important process of considering our career paths and our professional goals. We were given a worksheet that listed 90 personal and professional values and were told to circle all of the values that were important to us. This was the easy part. Next, we had to narrow down these values to our top ten and rank them. In my fantasy world, my job would have everything that I could ever want; but in the real world we have to make tough decisions. I ultimately decided that my top ten values were making a difference, pride in my work, family, community, challenge, meaningful work, growth, joy, advancement, and problem solving. These values are ones that I do not think I could live without and are a top priority for me professionally. The more difficult part was ruling things out because it forced me to acknowledge that I can’t have it all. To decide that while helping people, self-reliance, teamwork, creativity, and balance are all incredibly important but not in my top ten was especially challenging.
After we paired up to discuss out top ten choices with a partner, I realized that not everyone had interpreted the question in the same way that I did. I tried to think about values that were important to me in general and then see if they fit into my desired career, while my partner thought about what he could realistically get out of his desired career path and then ranked them based on the importance of those values for himself. When comparing lists, our values were pretty similar even though we came at the question from completely different perspectives. He had to make compromises based on the reality of his future career. I, on the other hand, had to make compromises based on my personal priorities.
Throughout the course of the semester I have been thinking a lot about my career path and my goals, but thinking about it through the lens of values helped me to reframe my thinking. I know that I want to be a teacher, but I had never really considered what I would get out of it. All of my earlier thinking and discussions had been centered on what I would do and the impact I would have on others, rather than the impact that this career path would have on me. Larry Braman made me reassess what is most important in my life and helped me to establish more clear career goals. This exercise was also a nice reminder of why I want to do what I do. I got to see on paper that making a difference and doing meaningful work could be a part of my career if I make those my priorities.
