First Steps: Unlocking the Courage to Be Yourself

In your career search, how you begin affects where you’ll end up. It’s much easier to make small adjustments than to reroute your entire path (though it can be done). Your foundation and starting point are based on discovering who you are and what you want—your value and values that come from deep inside. You need to fight being defined by what you do and first and foremost discover who you are, what you stand for, and what you believe in. Otherwise you risk being stuck in a career you never really wanted.

Your guide is your passion. It’s what makes you special. I’m surprised by how many MBAs write me that there’s nothing special about them. In Leviticus 19:2, God says, “You shall be holy because I the Lord Your God am holy.” For me, saying we are “holy” is another way of saying that we each are special beings with a special purpose and that we reach that purpose through study, prayer, and deeds of loving-kindness. Whether you are a Bible reader or not, that’s still a powerful way to start off thinking about your career!

Your passion will allow you to get lost in something bigger than yourself, as it is that passion—your will, not your skills—that will define you and make you great. That’s how you find yourself: by getting lost in something you feel has importance beyond yourself. It may be addressing a social challenge, building a company, or collaborating with colleagues to meet a deadline. And when you can meet a business need and a social need, especially if it is personal, the feeling is priceless. As an example, look no further than social entrepreneur Joe Sibilia.

Joe houses a series of businesses called Gasoline Alley in a troubled area of his blue-collar hometown, Springfield, Massachusetts. Buildings and furniture are constructed from discarded materials and recycled products, and the 375 feet of front footage and acres behind have been renovated organically. Prisoners and former drug addicts, people “discarded by society,” populate the businesses. What is Joe doing? “You ask me what the mission of my business is? It’s to give value to that which has been abandoned.”

Compassion comes from being linked to your passion. Joe’s dedication to the “abandoned,” to a neighborhood that he could have left decades ago when his financial success first began, is personal. It comes from his past. “When I was born, my folks split up, Dad moved out, and soon thereafter Mom left. My brother is ten years older, and he left, too. An aunt came to live with me. My real support came from the ‘guys on the Corner.’”

The Corner is where Joe hung out, growing up in Springfield with few resources but big dreams. His buddies went through a life of difficulties. Today many of them work for Joe at Gasoline Alley, finding new life and purpose.

Joe has owned over twenty companies; you too will have many changes in your work. But whereas the form of what you do may change, that core of who you are, often developed in your early adolescent years, doesn’t change. It gets tested and grows.

Finding out who you are and where you belong is often a process of finding out where you fit in by not fitting in. It’s a lonely business, trying to fit in and failing. But that’s what you have to do. It typically starts when you’re a child, around nine to twelve years old.