How Do You Know When It's Time To Go?

With all this talk of values, it's easy to get the wrong idea. Values-driven work doesn't always (or even usually) translate into politics or social change -- you know, the young investment banker who decides to join a Greenpeace flotilla. It's more about the experience of work and whether it meets your personal needs and professional expectations. Are you at a company where team play is the rallying cry -- but you'd rather be sitting alone writing great software? Are you doing work you enjoy, with people you like, in a company where you're anonymous -- but public recognition is vital to your self-esteem?

Values-based career counseling shifts your focus, if only temporarily, away from the external world -- career paths, bonuses, stock options -- to the internal world of what matters to you. "It's not the world `out there' you have to get to know first," stresses Judith Waterman. "It's the world `in here.'" Waterman estimates that one-third of her clients come away genuinely surprised by what they discover. For the other two-thirds, merely making explicit what they've always known, and developing a plan to act on it, can be just as useful.

"What's important," says Waterman, "is that by the time clients walk out they can articulate -- not just know ambiguously -- what they need, what their strengths are, and what their weaknesses are. Then they can make choices based on who they are, not what makes somebody else happy."

What Do Career Counselors Do?

Although every career counselor uses a slightly different approach, most follow a similar template. First they assess your values, skills, personality traits, and goals. Then they compare these attributes with your current job and the broader market. Then they help put together a plan for achieving the best match. The heart of the process is the assessment. This is where you hope for those "a-ha!" moments, insights into your motivations that bring into sharper relief the job choices you face.

So how do you achieve those insights? Without question the methodology of choice is storytelling. Waterman, for example, asks clients to write six paragraphs on jobs or projects they've done particularly well in their lives. She asks that one paragraph be based on a project before junior high school, one between junior high and adulthood, and one from the recent past. Sometimes she asks clients to talk through their stories rather than write them down, so she can videotape them and watch the tape with the client.

Why pay attention to events from childhood? "It's amazing how often the motivational patterns that are important now were important when you were little," she says.

William Pollack takes the narrative idea one step further. Not only does he work with clients on traditional storytelling, but he also interviews subordinates and superiors -- even family members -- to produce a richer portrait of values and motivations. One area he focuses on is how his clients get along with people, especially if they're leaders or managers: "What happens if there are fights or struggles? How do you deal with an employee who has a problem? What happens when a subordinate doesn't listen to what you say? Would you say that the people who work for you trust you? How do you know?"

Pollack then writes a report and reads it to the client. Counseling resumes after a break of a day or two. "Sometimes it can be earth-shattering information," he says, "and if you don't give a person a chance to think about it, they can push it away."

If stories aren't to your liking, you can always play cards -- another popular methodology. Counselors say "card sorts" are effective because they keep the diagnostic process simple and relaxed. They're also fun.

Silicon Valley's Career Action Center has developed a card-based diagnostic it calls Values Driven Work. The game uses four decks of cards that describe different aspects of professional life: intrinsic values, work environment, work content, and work relationships. Clients separate the cards into categories based on how important the attributes are to them. The object is to identify and rank your 10 top values -- and then to allow those values to inform the rest of your counseling sessions.

Some counselors don't play cards, but they do play other games. Judith Gerberg, a career adviser in New York City, uses plenty of conventional techniques, from testing to interviewing. But she also uses visualization, guided imagery, and art therapy. A closet in her office is filled with crayons, markers, modeling clay, and construction paper -- tools to help clients express themselves in terms of career aspirations. Gerberg also asks clients to cull stacks of magazines to make a collage -- a "treasure map" of what holds the most meaning and value to them.