Are You Here To Be A Successful Author? 151What event or series of events lead to your discovery?
Owning an executive recruiting firm, asking and interviewing people,
and really understand where they were coming from. I was a school
teacher and I would watch these little children light up when they got the
“Ah Ha” about their passions or what they wanted to do or be. It was the
same in the office. I would ask an adult what they were best at, or what
their natural abilities were, what would they really want to do if they
didn’t have to earn money? Then I kept remembering what a joy it was
and how pleasurable it was for me to watch them discover their passion.
I’ve always been the queen of asking the right questions, and in the book
I call them purposeful questions.
If you could give advice to someone who is still searching for their
life’s purpose, what would it be?
Well the answer is so obvious to me because it’s what I’ve tried to put
together for twenty years while I’m interviewing people. You have to
understand yourself as well as you possibly can, and know who you are.
The way that you do that is by asking the right kind of questions of
yourself. You can even ask living questions (living with the question
about yourself for a week) and keep on figuring it out. What you need to
do is to find the ingredients to your passion and to the next chapter in
your life.
For me there were about seven different points to my ingredients.
Once I found those ingredients, as I walked into the first position that I
interviewed for, I knew I was at home, and I knew I would be successful
because it had all my ingredients.
In my book, I have about one hundred and twenty questions that
help people to discover what their passions are. For example, one question
is “what was your favorite job that you’ve ever had, and why?”
People will say things like, “Well, when I was sixteen years old I
worked retail, and I didn’t get paid anything, but I loved it.”
I say, “Oh really...why?”
“Well, everybody left me alone. I was on my own.”
You can see that person wants independence. That’s one of their
ingredients. It’s just about asking questions like that, and finding out
what the key ingredients are. I came up with a process of how somebody
can do that. It’s such a good feeling to know that if they ask the right
questions, explore their passions, their obstacles, their desires, and natural
abilities then they’ll find out what is right for them.