Part 1 of the CareerLogic Series on Goal Clarity
Goal Clarity -The Key to the Kingdom
Having clarity about your goals is the essential first step when it comes to thinking about applying to courses for higher education, whether it’s a Bachelors, Masters, MBA or PHD you’re thinking about pursuing. Being able to clearly and unambiguously articulate and explain your goals through the medium of the application essays or statement of purpose is exactly how you help the selection or admission committees decide whether you’re a good fit for the program. In other words, having goal clarity is the key to the kingdom.
In the series on goal clarity, I’ll walk you through my understanding of the various moving parts involved in figuring out how you can identify – and then communicate – your vision for your future, whether from a job, money, career, or ‘whole life’ point of view.
I really can’t emphasize enough how helpful this exercise can be for ‘downstream’ uses: figuring out your filters during the school short-listing process, getting a clearer sense of your strengths and limitations, knowing what your ‘elevator pitch’ will be. It is my hope that by gaining better goal clarity you’ll be able to navigate your application journey to your best abilities.
A Working Definition of Goal Clarity, and How to Get There
So, at this point you might be wondering, what does it mean to have clarity about one’s goals? How does one begin breaking down such a multi-dimensional and ineffable sentiment, much less learning how to express it?
We begin the journey by committing to an honest process of self-reflection and introspection. During this time, you have to ask yourself a series of questions designed to get you thinking about some very specific statements:
What do I presently have in my skills-toolbox?
What are my career aspirations and milestones?
Where do I need to end up to feel meaningfully engaged and even – do I dare be so bold – excited by my work?
There’s a bunch of tools and techniques at your disposal if you’re serious about this stage. Thanks to the work of brilliant psychologists, neurobiologists, technologists and educators, accessing credible and effective strategies and assessments for gaining insight into our inner workings is as easy as an informed Google search.
Psychometric tools and assessments: How to ‘know yourself’
One layer of assistance you can tap into is the number of free psychometric assessments that are available at the links shared in the reference section after this article. Psychometrics is just the fancy way of saying ‘Psychology with Statistics’, and these tools offer us a way of quantitatively (or numerically) assessing our abilities and traits across various dimensions of personality and behavior.
You’ve definitely heard of atleast one type of psychometric assessment – the ubiquitous IQ test, and whether it’s in the form of a MENSA test, or variations like the SAT or LSAT, the Indian CAT/IITJEE/MCAT, the GRE/GMAT, or simply your annual high school examinations, we’ve all got some familiarity with these.
The family of IQ tests can tell us about core competencies along the various dimensions of human intelligence – verbal, numeric, kinesthetic, spatial, logical (there may be upto 13 of these intelligences). Your high school, undergraduate or graduate GPA are all essentially examples of this type of psychometric assessment, and, limited as these are, play heavily into the application process.
What an IQ test can’t tell you is all the stuff about feeling and doing – the emotional and behavioral aspects of your personality. How well do you work with others, and what’s your preferred role when you’re working as part of a team? When you problem solve, do you lead with your heart, or your head? Will your extraverted nature help you network and excel at people-facing roles, or does your inquisitive, circumspect personality feel more at home in a research lab or server room? Are you detail-oriented or would you rather work on ‘big-picture’ strategy and leave the execution to minions?
Assessments like the Strong Interest Inventory and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI – a full-length version meant for academic use can be accessed for free here) are the gold standard for understanding one’s personality across dimensions such as agreeableness, openness to experience, and resilience to external stress.
Other options include the Holland Codes-based RIASEC+ models, Cattel’s 16PF, Big-5 or O.C.E.A.N. assessment, as well as the ever popular – if inaccurate – Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a free and very enjoyable version of which can be accessed here.
Armed with this quantitative (self) knowledge, you can then consider more qualitative approaches designed to help you discover what you might do to find greater meaning or purpose in your career going forward. A few useful approaches are the Ikigai model, which derives from the work of ABC; or Abraham Maslow’s ideas about individuation and the hierarchy of needs, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of psychological ‘Flow’ states.
Goals and Milestones: Making a Commitment to your Future Self
The next step in the goal clarity process involves an articulation of your career+life goals, informed by the insights you’ve gained into your inner workings via the psychometric assessment process. During this time, you’ll start breaking down your future goals into buckets, for the sake of convenience:
- Academic goals and priorities (learning a new software language, mastering database management, exploring applications of holography for medical imaging)
- Professional and career goals (becoming a certified project manager in three years, getting a promotion or pay raise, pivoting into a new industry)
- Larger subsuming life goals (starting a family, moving to a new country or city, gaining more personal autonomy and so on)
Remember that it’s imperative to try to be as specific and to-the-point when you sit and write your goals down. It’s rarely enough to say, “I’d like to learn the mathematics of fuzzy logic” or “I want to work at Netflix”. Instead, it’s far more powerful and impactful to argue: “I’d like to explore applications of fuzzy logic for automated facial recognition / weather forecasting / risk management” or “I’d like to work at Netflix as a Product Manager in the Human-Computer Interaction team”.
It’s also important, as I’ve mentioned earlier in this article, to write down and commit to short-term (3 to 5-year) and long-term (7-10 years+) milestones, clearly articulating at each stage the target organization, industry, role, functional area and geography/city you see yourself in. Think deeply about the kind of impact you hope to have in your company, and in your field of specialization.
Make a commitment to your future self that you’ll achieve certain goals – and then give yourself a realistic but challenging timeframe within which to achieve these goals. I always suggest all my clients build what I call a career blueprint, which is, in a sense, acts as a decision tree or roadmap to help them chart the next years or phases in their career and life. It’s a natural framework to capture and collate the insights you’ll gain through the various stages of the goal clarity process, and I hope you’ll find these suggestions to be useful to you in your own journey to gain goal clarity!