How to choose your career: Interview with Curt Rosengen
In 2018, I published a book about how to choose your career. In 2024, I moved the content to this site. Below is the interview with Shelley Richard.
Some people think that career happiness is an unrealistic goal and that we should all just take whatever we can find to survive. What is your response to that?
Honestly, I don’t get it. It makes no sense to me. Yes, we live in the real world, and yes, the real world can be challenging, but that advice is such an example of unnecessarily black-and-white thinking. Let’s say that the advice is spot on and you really should be grateful that you have a job. A little more gratitude is never a bad thing. But what does that have to do with being aware of what makes you happy and how to bring more of that into the picture? Hint: Nothing. Jamming the two together just creates a limit on what’s possible that doesn’t need to exist.
When you follow “Just settle for whatever you can get, forever” advice, you stay in this boxed-in condition with an assumption—spoken or unspoken—that “that’s just the way it is.” You don’t try to improve the here-and-now. You don’t try to take steps towards something more fulfilling. It’s a way of looking at the world where you just shrug and say, “Things are hard out there. Suck it up and accept that this is all you get. Stop dreaming. Stop aspiring. Give up and just settle in for the long trudge to the finish line.”
That’s a load of donkey dung.
I am not a fan of the pie-in-the-sky sunshine and daisies “Everything will be OK” mindset. I’m a fan of reality, and sometimes you have to do a job that doesn’t make you bound out of bed on Monday morning. But that doesn’t mean you have to stay there forever. You can still focus on what you want your future to look like, and what you can do today to make progress towards something better.
There is a tendency to conflate what’s happening in the present moment with what’s possible in the future, and the two have nothing to do with each other.
Surveys consistently say that Americans end up in jobs they don’t love or even like. Why do you think so many people have difficulty finding or creating satisfying employment?
It’s not so surprising, really, given the factors that typically influence people’s career choices most. The culture we live in teaches us to give things like money, the appearance of success, and status the top priority as we plan our careers. There’s nothing wrong with those things, of course, but none of them has a thing to do with what makes you come alive. It’s an incomplete picture. “What is going to make you feel energized and engaged” is seldom a part of the decision matrix.
There’s a common impression that we should know what that passion path would look like, or at the very least, we should be able to figure it out. Over the years, I have had many conversations with people on both sides of the experience—those who love their work, and those who loathe it. From what I have seen, most people who have jobs they love haven’t gotten there because they knew the magic algorithm that illuminated the yellow brick road to a career they love. For the most part, they lucked into it (or they’re one of an exceedingly rare breed who has always known what they want to do). I think it helps to normalize that lack of clarity that many others have, because all too often people wind up feeling like everyone but them has it all figured out. Not true.
For those who don’t fall into the passionate minority, going to work can be like heading off for another day of being who they’re not. At best, that’s blah and unfulfilling. But often it’s toxic and unsustainable. It’s also limiting because, as I often say, you can never be anyone else half as well as you can be you.
Another contributing factor to that lack of love is that our schools do a pretty dismal job of giving people the insights they need to include the answer to, “What would light me up?” When was the last time you saw an “Introspection 101” class? Odds are good that the answer is never.
In my work, I have seen about a 10-year period—I think of it as the incubation period—between the time people graduate from school and the earliest time they decide they need to reach out to someone like me for help.
When people get out of school, they typically have these rose-colored glasses on, with a lofty and often unrealistic picture of what they think the work world is all about. As they get real-world experience and climb the ladder, they gradually they realize that the job they thought was so impressive and sexy, or that their parents expected them to pursue, actually leaves them feeling lifeless and flat. They know they want a change, but they don’t know what to do or how to get there. When they conclude that they’re stuck and don’t know how to get unstuck by themselves—often after banging their head against the wall with it for a while—that’s when I hear from them.
Sometimes career evolution just needs to take its course. People hear what they want to hear and take advice that they want to take. People have to be ready for change. I know that was true for me. If I could go back and give new-graduate Curt some passion-based advice on how to plan and pursue my career, I would have smiled and nodded politely, then gone right back to plotting my meteoric rise to being a rich and powerful CEO of a Fortune 500 company (anyone who knows me now could tell you how laughably off target that idea is). And I had some really off-track years early in my career. Sometimes people just have to go through the struggle for a while in order to discover that what they thought they knew wasn’t actually true.
Sometimes you call yourself the “passion catalyst.” How do you help clients find or create more passion in their work lives?
I see everything I do in terms of energy management. How can we feel more energized and less depleted? My approach is super simple. It’s all about maximizing what I call the “Gain-to-Drain Ratio.” Think of it as a fraction, Gain over Drain. Figuratively, you want a big gain number and a tiny drain number. You want as much as possible of what increases your energy in your life and as little as possible of what drains it.
You can apply that to your life in 360 degrees, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s focus on how that applies to feeling more energized at work. Specifically, let’s talk about passion.
My definition of passion is “the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do.” It’s being who you are—doing the kinds of things, in the kinds of ways, towards the kinds of outcomes, etc., that naturally energize you. The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier, this isn’t something that people tend to factor into their career planning. So it’s no wonder so many people feel off track.
Once you have that definition of passion to work with, the next natural question is, how do you apply that to your career? How do you decide and pursue a career direction that “brings more of YOU into what you do?”
It starts with understanding not just what you love, by why. I ask clients to make a list of things they love doing, things that light them up, work or play. The things on the list might be, for example, jobs they have had, specific work projects they have been involved in, classes or particular subject from their school days, hobbies, or trips they have taken.
Once the client has that list, we pick one and start reverse engineering it by asking multiple levels of “why?” So if a client says she loves to travel, I ask why she loves it. Typically, there will be multiple reasons. Let’s say one reason is, “I love exploring.” From there, I peel it back yet another layer and ask why exploring is so much fun. (When people are doing this process on their own, I encourage them to challenge themselves to go down at least four levels of why.) As we do this process of unpacking, what’s there with multiple items from the original list, common themes emerge, common reasons they love what they love. These are the underlying characteristics that are there when they feel energized.
People find it easier to do this inquiry process dialogue with someone else prompting them. If hiring a coach isn’t an option, I encourage people to enlist a friend to keep asking why. It’s easier to stop too soon without someone else there to keep the process going.
As the underlying themes emerge, you can compile them in one place. Now you have a tool you can apply in three ways: improving your current experience at work, brainstorming potential directions that would give you the opportunity to experience more of what energizes you, and evaluating possible career paths.
First, you can look at your current job through the lens of those underlying characteristics and do an “energy audit” of sorts. How is your job in alignment with where the energy comes from? Where is it out of synch?
As you get more clarity on what’s working and what isn’t, you can sculpt your job over time to maximize the gain and minimize the drain. That might entail doing more of those pieces you find energizing. You might even share your energizers with your boss so she can keep them in mind as she steers projects and responsibilities your way. It might also be simply choosing to pay more attention to the experience as you’re engaged with the aspects of your work you enjoy. Savoring it, if you will. Finally, you might see opportunities to change what’s out of alignment. That could be by reducing or eliminating what’s not working, or doing it differently that is less out of alignment, or, if there truly is nothing you can change about it, changing the way you relate to it. A simple example of changing the way you relate is to stop habitual complaining, something that just reinforces and amplifies the negative experience.
This process of sculpting your here-and-now circumstances won’t magically make a job the perfect fit. If you’re an artist at heart trying to be an accountant—or an accountant at heart trying to be an artist, for that matter—it’s still going to be an ill-fitting and uncomfortable suit. But if you can even improve it by just 10%, that’s still 10% better! And the more you can make that incremental positive change, the more inner room to maneuver you create as you work toward more substantial long-term change.
You may even discover that you’re closer to what you’re looking for than you realized. I have had clients who, after going through this process, realized that with a few changes to what wasn’t working, they were actually on the right track.
The second way you can use the inner compass you have created is as a starting point for brainstorming possible career directions. I think of the career direction exploration as a two-step funneling process. The first step is filling the funnel. Use the underlying energizing themes you identified as a point of departure for brainstorming. Ask, “What jobs or careers would give me the opportunity to experience these?” I find it’s more effective to do this with one theme at a time. Looking at the entire inner compass and asking, “OK, what job will let me experience all these things” is a recipe for brain lock.
Filling the funnel is all about brainstorming. Don’t try to find “the right job” at this stage. Like any good brainstorming process, resist the urge to say no. There is a time to evaluate, but doing it here is the kiss of death to idea flow. I always say the goofy ideas are lubrication for the good ones. As soon as you evaluate the ideas, the flow dries up. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the two. Saying yes to even the ideas you know you don’t want to do helps you stay in idea generation mode.
The next funneling-down step of the process takes all those potential career ideas and distills the ones that have the highest density of what energizes you. The first step is to get rid of the things you know you don’t want to do. Now that you have stepped into evaluation mode, they’re just muddying the water.
The second step is to look at the remaining ideas through the lens of what energizes you. My clients will often create a spreadsheet, with the career paths they’re considering on one axis and the underlying energizing themes on the other. Then they go through and evaluate how well each of those energizers shows up in each job.
The last step is to get it down to a shortlist, three to five possibilities that all have a high density of what energizes you. Now you have a manageable number of possibilities for a deeper dive, getting a better picture of each job with research, informational interviews, etc., so you can make a well-informed decision on what option is best for you.
This process removes a lot of the guesswork. I have even seen clients realize that what they thought was their dream job didn’t even make the cut. In fact, I experienced that myself. When I first developed this process years ago, I went through it myself and evaluated several career options, including my long-time dream job: travel photography. Much to my surprise, travel photography never even made it to the short list. It includes a lot of things that are key energizers for me, like exploration and discovery, but it doesn’t offer the opportunity to make a difference in a way that is compelling to me. I want to help people. That’s a big part of where I get my energy. As I evaluated travel photography, I realized that pursuing it as a career would have been fun and energizing and engaging for a while because of those areas where it was in alignment with what energizes me, but then a sense of dissatisfaction would have inevitably set in as I started wondering, “Is this all there is?”
You help many people change their careers. In your experience, how long does the average career change take?
It usually takes a couple of years. Some people do it more quickly and for some people, it takes 10 years. It depends on competing obligations, obstacles, experiences you can build on, your support system, and how you respond to the process.
Typically, when I wrap up an exploration process with a client, they’re at the point where they have a short list of choices or a specific focus and they are moving into it. In the exploration process, they saw progress, but as they venture into “how do I turn this into reality in the real world,” the process inevitably slows down. Unless people go into it prepared for that slowdown, it can frustrate them and sap the energy out of the progress.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you will hit obstacles along the way. How you react when you do—whether you throw your hands up and stop dead in your tracks, or whether you get curious and say, “Ha! Here’s one of those obstacles I was expecting. Now, how do I move past it?”—will affect how long it all takes.
If it takes a bit of time to facilitate a career change, what can people do to be happier in their current jobs while they are in a time of transition?
There’s an enormous amount we can do to improve our here-and-now. You can think of it in two broad categories. The first is taking a granular approach to making positive external changes, and the second is recognizing how much potential there is to change our experience for the better with the inner game. It’s not just about making positive changes externally.
When you take a more granular view of change, it opens the door to more opportunities to improve things. Here’s what I mean by taking a granular view. Often when people are dissatisfied with their work—or anything in life, for that matter—they paint the source of that dissatisfaction with one big broad brush. They might say, “I hate my job.” But in reality, their experience is really the total of many smaller things, some positive, some negative.
They might dislike one aspect of their work that is a core part of what they do every day, but really enjoy another smaller aspect of the work they do. They might feel frustrated with a micromanaging boss, but energized and inspired whenever they get the chance to work on a team with a particular co-worker. Their overall experience is the total of all of those things taken together. If the overall negatives outweigh the positives, the broad brush experience is negative. And if the opposite is true, their broad brush experience is a more positive one.
When you break it down into those smaller parts, you have much more potential to make changes. When you identify the dissatisfaction with a broad brush (e.g., “My job sucks.”), the only option is a broad brush solution that might feel out of reach (e.g., “I need a career change.”). But if you break it down to a more granular level, you’ll find many smaller changes that are entirely doable.
One way to get that more granular view is to do a personal energy audit for your job, identifying what about your work gives you energy, and what sucks you dry. When you know that, you can start making small modifications that can cumulatively add up to a noticeable change. Even if you can’t totally overhaul your career, you can improve the situation.
Now let’s look at the inner game. This is something that is really inspiring me right now, because I have been seeing more and more just how much potential there is to change things for the better, even if nothing changes externally.
When people are unhappy with the circumstances they find themselves in, it’s natural to say, “How can I change my life?” But I would suggest that is a limiting question. I say that for two reasons. First, it makes our happiness dependent on what’s happening in the world. And much as we would like to imagine otherwise, we have precious little control over the world “out there.” So an externally based happiness is a shaky house of cards at best.
A better question to ask is, “How can I change my experience of life?” That question includes positive external changes you can make, but those changes are just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg happens at the inner level.
Broadly speaking, there are three factors influencing how we experience life. Our story, our focus, and our inner state.
I’ll take those one at a time. Story first. This is because there is no objective “out there” out there. There’s nothing that you and I are going to experience the same way. Our experience depends on the story we tell about what happens, the meaning we give it. That’s not some wacky concept. It’s just the way our brains work. We make sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves about it.
The good news with that is that when you change your story, you change your experience. Here’s a simple example from one of my clients of how shifting his story shifted his experience. His boss had unexpectedly told him he needed to talk with him later that day. His pessimistic default mode was to go to a story of the worst-case scenario, and at first, he was sure he had done something wrong. Historically, he would have let that story cause him to worry and stew the rest of the day. But since we had been focusing on how he often created turmoil for himself by the stories he told, he caught the story quickly. He questioned it, realized that he did not know what his boss actually wanted, and let the negative story go, replacing it with a story of, “I don’t know what it’s about. I’ll find out when I get there.” When he talked to him, his boss wanted to discuss a cool opportunity. Through the simple act of recognizing and changing his story, he avoided an entire day of needless anxiety.
Any time you feel constricted with negative emotion, whether stress, or fear, or anger, it’s like a signal flag calling attention to an unhelpful story. You can ask yourself, “What’s my story here? Is it helpful? What might a more helpful story be?”
The next area is focus. What we focus on dictates, to a large degree, what we see and what we experience. If our focus is on what’s wrong, or what’s bad, or what we don’t like, those are the colors we’re going to paint the picture of life with. If our focus is habitually on what’s right, what we can appreciate, and what’s good in our world, that will occupy a greater percentage of our awareness. It’s just simple logic.
Make a habit of finding the positive. When you look for what’s good, you break the negative loop. Ultimately, you get to choose how much real estate both the positive and the negative take up in your mental landscape.
Another powerful way to use your focus to shape your experience of life is to practice gratitude. Every day, reflect on the things you’re grateful for. Write a gratitude journal or meet weekly with a friend for a gratitude lunch, sharing what there is in your life to appreciate that week. This isn’t just a fluffy feel-good idea. More and more research is shining a light on the positive impact of gratitude on both emotional and physical health.
Finally, let’s talk about the role our inner state plays in how we experience life. Our inner state is actually four distinct and often-interrelated states—our emotional state, our mental state, our physical state, and our energy state. When any of these are off—when our emotional state is in turmoil, for example, or when we’re feeling ill and low energy—it affects how we see and experience the world negatively. We’re more likely to interpret someone’s comment in meeting negatively, or we are more intensely affected when a project at work goes sideways.
By the same token, when we improve and fine tune our inner state, we are happier. We have more of a buffer when things go wrong, and we have more energy to put into whatever we do. We’re more resilient and less reactive.
With that in mind, it’s vitally important to practice the basics of good self-care, the things we all know we should do, but so often don’t. Things like nutrition, drinking enough fluids, exercise, and getting enough sleep. It’s not sexy, inspiring advice, but if I could pick just one thing to implement, that would have a massive impact on your experience of life, it would be to incorporate each of these things into your day. That’s how important they are.
One last suggestion is to reach out for help when you need it. We humans evolved to be social creatures, and that means we need support to be at our best. That might be emotional support, or knowledge support, or logistical support. Relying on help isn’t a crutch, nor does it mean you’re weak. It’s simply a key part of the vast web of resources that can contribute to helping you create a vibrant, meaningful, impactful career (and life).
As you dive into sculpting and shifting your here-and-now for the better, keep taking steps toward incremental change. Remember to acknowledge the progress you make. Give your mind a reward for progress along the way. Reinforce it regularly with a habit of frequent mini-celebrations, because even incremental progress, properly acknowledged, can be an energizing and empowering force.
In your work with people seeking more career satisfaction, what is the number one thing people could do right?
Take an approach that integrates both your dreams and a pragmatic perspective. “Do what you love” gets a bad rap, and in some ways that bad rap is justified. We live in the real world. Focusing only on doing what you love and not considering the obstacles and limitations you are likely to encounter as you pursue it—especially if it’s off the paint-by-numbers path—is a great way for that dream to fall flat. Take a both/and approach, navigating the real world while keeping your eye on the dream.
Avoid the extremes of fuzzy bunnies and rainbows on one side and the beaten down and resigned “Just accept your lot in life” on the other. Dream, but recognize that to take steps towards that dream, you need your feet planted firmly on the ground.
One of my favorite quotes about this is from Thoreau. He wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
What is the number one mistake that you’ve seen people make when choosing career paths?
It sounds strange, but I think the biggest mistake people make is forgetting that they are the ones who are going to have to be experiencing that career, day in and day out. People factor in all kinds of things into their career decision equation, but so often they leave out the one piece that will always be there—themselves. They don’t ask, “How will it feel to go into this job every day? How will it feel after a year? How will it feel after five years? Ten? Can I be my best doing this work, or will I have to twist myself into a role that doesn’t really fit?”
What do you wish that more people knew about career happiness?
It is not a magical, mystical thing that only a privileged few can have. And it’s way more within reach than people realize. If you can understand what makes you tick, if you can identify those underlying themes of what energizes you, you can start taking action right here, right now to take a step towards greater alignment with “the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do.”
And I wish people realized how malleable most jobs are, especially when you look at them over time. When you understand what energizes you, you can keep taking steps in that direction, gradually sculpting it to reflect more of what feels energizing and engaging. Too many people just shrug and say, “I guess work is a four-letter word for a reason,” when they could put their hands on the steering wheel and steer more proactively towards work they love.
Finally, I would say to be realistic. There is no perfect job. Career happiness doesn’t come in a neat, tidy package that is all fun, all the time. I can’t imagine a career that fits more hand in glove with who I am and what energizes me, and there are still aspects of it I just need to grit my teeth and deal with. Too many people experience something that doesn’t fit their picture of passion and decide they must be on the wrong path. If you can hit 80% happiness, that’s good.
Anything else you’d like to share with readers?
I’d like to encourage people to think of passion differently. Most people think that finding career passion means finding The One Thing (said in a booming announcer’s voice) you were born to do. Maybe that was true for people like Mozart or Einstein. But for the rest of us, that’s a limiting way to see things. I would love to see people shift away from looking for that one career they’re “meant to do,” and start seeing jobs as vehicles for experiencing what energizes us. There might be half a dozen different career paths that allow you to experience those underlying energizers I talked about earlier. It’s a much more flexible way of looking at things, with much more opportunity.
I would also like to plant a seed for another energizing source I haven’t talked about yet. I think of it as making a personally meaningful difference.
Here’s the basic idea. All work is inherently about making a difference. Something is different when we’re done than when we started. That’s why we get paid for it. But not all ways of making a difference are created equal. Some of those outcomes will feel more compelling to you than others.
Figure out what type of outcome has a charge for you. Is it about empowering people to do something? Is it about having tangible results you can look at and evaluate? Is it about creating change that can be leveraged to get big results? Is it about knowing that something is easier for someone, or less painful, as the result of your work?
This differs from “What feels important?” The focus here is solely on understanding what has a natural charge for you so you can plug into that as you make career decisions. If I ask, “What feels most important,” I would have to say that the environment and climate change are at the top of the list of urgent things to address. And I’ll support that in whatever way I can. But it’s not where the juice comes from for me. For me, it’s about helping people, and more specifically, helping people step more fully into their potential so they can live more fully and have the impact they’re here to make. And when I’m plugged into that, I can have an infinitely greater impact than I could working towards a change because I “should.”
Curt Rosengren is a coach, writer, workshop facilitator, and podcast host. He described his mission as “changing the world from the inside out, helping people feel less stressed, more resilient, more energized, and better able to step into their potential.”
