What is the right career for me?
Choosing the right career fit has little to do with how smart you are and more to do with “what” you are. And, what you are has little to do with with making good grades in school, or what school you go to, and a lot do with how your brain is wired.
We are all born with natural talents, abilities and personality traits that remain fairly steady throughout our lifetime. Cognitive psychologists have been saying this for decades, but few of us have been taught to apply this advice in making career choices.
Now, neuroscientists are backing up these assertions with hard biological science. Brain researchers are finding that our personalities and abilities are directly correlated with the shape and size of our physical brain structures.
When it comes to your strengths, size matters. People who are better at 3-D spatial thinking have been gifted with bigger parietal brain lobes. If you have naturally strong empathy, introversion or talents for both traits, it’s because those parts of your brain are more robust.
Many of us are really good at certain things with minimal effort, but we typically ignore these good clues. Instead, we mistakenly pay more attention to the stuff we’re awkward or lousy at and spend our lives pushing that boulder up the hill. Lots of people pick a career to overcome a weakness; they suck at math so they go into finance or engineering for a living. Strong introverts go into teaching or sales with the hopes of becoming more extroverted. Concrete, practical people get PhDs to develop their creative ability. It doesn’t work. Although we can make small improvements to “balance out” our personality, we can’t wholesale rewire a weakness into a strength.
