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Home of The Giftedness Assessment & Job Fit Experts
Self-assessment #1:
Create Your List of Stories of Satisfaction
Stage 1: Reflect, Find, & Write Your Stories
For this exercise, you’ll need:
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A notepad (physical preferred, but a digital document will work, too)
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A pen
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A quiet(ish) space without much distraction (so long as you can honestly reflect)
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Time: this exercise takes the majority of people between 1-3 hours to complete. Go at your own pace. It can be broken up into sections, no problem.
There’s something interesting at play behind your personal stories of satisfaction.
In this exercise you will recall all sorts of milestones, achievements, adventures, successes, recreational, or even silly stories and see how your design was influencing the way you operated.
Step 1: Get a pen and paper out (digital doc ok)
Step 2: Find a quiet enough space for you to be able to reflect for 30 minutes
Step 3: Reflect & Write
Reflect & write between 15-25 stories throughout your life that brought you a sense of satisfaction, joy, or accomplishment. For now, just give each of these stories a title. You’ll elaborate later.
There are two essential criteria for your stories:
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It must be about an activity, something you did, something that requires some type of effort or action on your part (whether externally like running or internally like learning).
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You received a deep sense of satisfaction, joy, accomplishment, or energy from this experience.
Remember, these stories might be:
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Sophisticated or silly
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Work-related or recreational
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From any area of life (personal, relationships, school, home, sports, hobbies, leisure, volunteering, etc).
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Long-term efforts (6 months, 2 years) or short experiences (an hour, a day, a week)
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Alongside another person, people, or yourself (independent, no one else involved)
Don’t pay attention to whether the world or your culture would validate the story as “cool,” “valuable,” or “worthy.” If it fits the criteria above, include it.
Here are some actual examples that have been used in the past:
Age 5 – I memorized a poem and recited it to my kindergarten class
Age 10 – Went fishing with my Granddaddy and caught my first fish
Age 13 – Made the basketball team and scored a key goal in the final game, which we won
Age 36 – Ran a marathon and finished. My time wasn’t very good, but that didn’t
matter. I’m just glad I did it.
Age 54 – Set up our family’s budget and finances on my computer. I use it to
manage our expenses and stay within budget
Stage 2: Discern Your Goals
Now that you have 15-25 Stories of Satisfaction written down, put them on the side for a moment and answer this question (you should write this down, too, but not necessary):
What in your work, life, or relationships are you missing that you would like to have in one year?
What are your goals with doing a career assessment?
Stage 3: Assess Each Story
Now that you have defined your goal(s), look back through each of your stories and notate how each story speaks into that goal.
For example:
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My goal: to figure out whether I want to be a CEO, manager, or Contributor.
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Assess: am I acting naturally the way a CEO, manager, or Contributor would act in this story?
Another example:
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My goal: to figure out what job I’ll enjoy or to figure out what brings me meaningfulness
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Assess: in each of my stories, what was the satisfying piece of it? What was satisfying about it?
Do not look for any patterns! During this stage, it’s imperative that you look at each story in and of itself.
Go ahead and start assessing your stories! You’ll find that some stories are very similar, so go ahead and group those together into one. Your goal: assess at least 10 of the stories.
Stage 4: Final Step - Find the Patterns
Now that you’ve analyzed your Stories of Satisfaction according to your top-listed goal, answer this question:
What patterns, repeated words, keywords, and themes do you see across the majority of your stories?
You should have somewhere between 3-7 patterns.
These patterns are “innate motivating factors” (IMF) and these are what you need in your life and work to feel motivation, purpose, and direction. IMFs are the building blocks to a career that you will love for a long, long time.
Will these tell you a specific job title that you’re destined for? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. You’ll need to sign up for career coaching with one of our top consultants to grasp on to that step.
Stage 5: Align Your Work w/ Your Patterns
If you’re feeling unengaged at work, get creative on how you might accomplish your job duties by exercising one of your IMF. We promise that this will motivate your days and bring a little life back to your life.
“But what if my job is just COMPLETELY misaligned with my IMF?"
In the rare occasion that this occurs, it’s time to change jobs, get promoted, or look for another job. Because of the specificity of your IMFs and your uniqueness, we’re happy to partner with you in this stage moving forward. Begin by sending us your Stories of Satisfaction and we’ll help you navigate into a life that uses them as much as possible.
Self-assessment #2:
Discovering My Ideal Role In A Company
(5-Day Kickstart Email Course)
Sign up for our free course via email. In just about 30 minutes a day for 5 days, you will be able to figure out what role in life, work, and relationships you thrive in!
This tells you:
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Where in the organizational chart you’ll be most successful
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Who you need around you in order to feel successful
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How to stop wasting your time with people who ultimately cost you energy