As you consider how your experiences dovetail with the values listed here, circle or write down the ones that best describe you. If your list is long, narrow it down to the three to five that feel most resonant.
FROM THERE, REALITY TEST THEM BY ASKING QUESTIONS LIKE:
Would my closest friends, unprompted, say these were the ideals that mean the most to me?
Would I support these ideals even if my choice wasn’t popular and it put me in the minority?
Am I prioritizing my work, and my life, according to these values today?
Another great way of knowing if you’re on the right track is to test them against each other. For example, if you list adventurousness as your top value, consider whether you’d be willing to go on a once-in-a-lifetime three-month trip even if it meant losing out on a fantastic career opportunity. If not, is adventurousness really your top value?
Coming up with your values (and the priorities that naturally flow from them) is heady work. Yet the payoff is huge. Your values and priorities will become much-needed guardrails for governing your work and your life.
Consider: If life flexibility is one of your values, working defined hours in a clinic every Monday through Saturday probably isn’t ideal. If family is a value, then seeing clients between 4 and 9 pm doesn’t mesh. If you value being in nature, maybe you don’t want to be in a windowless massage room for ten hours a day.
Even more than helping you define the career choices to run away from, your values—along with your purpose and unique abilities—can help you choose the work to run toward.
Meet Sara. At the peak of her career (v1.0) she managed complex software projects at Microsoft. It was a prestigious, well-paid position, and she often worked directly with Bill Gates. Yet it was also hard-driving, stressful, and required long hours plus a single-minded focus.
After years of not paying attention to her health, not investing time in her own self-care, Sara found Precision Nutrition and signed up for our online client coaching program. During the next year she lost fifty pounds, dramatically improved her health, and found much-needed balance in her life.
Having fallen in love with health and fitness, she made the tough choice to leave Microsoft and pursue a coaching career. Ever the achiever, she went through the Precision Nutrition Level 1 and Level 2 certification programs, signed up to be one of our first interns, did a host of other education and certification programs, and fixed her sights on becoming a Precision Nutrition coach.
Talented and driven, she applied three separate times to join the Precision Nutrition coaching team . . . but she never got the job. (We have a limited number of full-time coaching spots, over one thousand applicants each time a spot opens, and rigorous criteria for ensuring we hire folks whose true unique abilities are in line with what’s needed to coach the way we coach.)
The experience was disheartening for Sara. Years later, she still tears up telling the story. Yet she’s in a great place now. Instead of working as a coach, Sara v2.0 works at a fantastic women’s health and fitness company as a special project manager for the founder, taking the company’s biggest, most significant initiatives from concept to completion.
Sara’s story illustrates two fundamental mistakes that so many people make in health and fitness.
MISTAKE 1:
Thinking that the most visibly defined pathways are the only possible pathways
MISTAKE 2:
Not considering purpose, values, and unique abilities when choosing a career path*
In Sara’s case, after transforming her life, her purpose evolved. Helping people live healthier, more purposeful lives became vital to her, and she couldn’t do that at Microsoft. After having her first child, Sara realized her values were changing, too, and family came to the forefront. She knew this would be compromised if she continued working long, stressful hours at Microsoft. So Sara made the best decision for herself.
Her only misstep was forgetting to consider her unique abilities when thinking about her next move. Coaching requires a completely different set of skills and talents than project management. That’s why, as frustrating as it was that she never got the coaching job, it’s probably the best thing.
Unknown to her at the time, not getting the job saved her from getting stuck doing work that would have been unfulfilling. Plus it left open the possibility of doing the work she’s ideally suited for, this time in an environment more aligned with her values and purpose.
As I look around the health and fitness industry, I see people (over) simplifying their options like this. In their minds, if you’re going to work in health and fitness, your only options are:
personal trainer
strength coach
nutrition coach
naturopath
functional medicine doctor
yoga or Pilates teacher
rehab specialist
group exercise instructor
These are wonderful options, of course. But only if they match your purpose and unique abilities. Only if the work requirements match your values.
The bad news? Too many people end up in one of the above jobs and, for them, it’s a total dead end. While it’s probably in the right ballpark relative to their purpose, most aren’t uniquely good at the work, and it doesn’t match their values.
The good news? For people new to the field, there are so many career options beyond those above. And, for those already in the field, there’s always time to change.
For example, let’s say you’re passionate about exercise and fitness. Instead of trying to become a personal trainer or strength coach, you could also try:
WRITING
about exercise and fitness in books, magazines, or online publications
SPEAKING
about exercise and fitness at trade shows or conferences
LECTURING
on exercise and fitness at high schools, colleges, or universities
PODCASTING
on exercise and fitness
HOSTING
exercise and fitness programming on TV or on the radio*
Another acceptable option is to keep your hobby a hobby; not everyone who loves health and fitness needs to pursue a career in it. Alternatively, with the right training and unique abilities, you could work in human resources, finance, business development, marketing, tech, design, or leadership in a health and fitness company that shares your purpose and values.
You could also pursue entrepreneurship and start your own business, whether it’s a fitness center, online coaching company, or wearable tech company. Indeed, coaching people directly is only one of many potentially fulfilling options.
Take my colleague Pat. He’s a systems thinker with a mind for data and analysis who started out as a personal trainer and strength coach. Realizing that he enjoyed spreadsheets more than squats, but still wanting to work in the field, he began studying quantitative methods in sport science. He now works for an NFL team evaluating training demands and how they relate to athlete health, injury, and performance.
This is where the fun begins.
Let’s say you’re a natural storyteller, gregarious, and connect better in a one-on-hundreds setting than one-on-one. In this case, it’d make sense for your career to involve speaking engagements and connecting with crowds vs. client-based interactions.
However, let’s say all that travel doesn’t mesh with your values (spending weekends away from your family is a no-no, and all that air travel compromises your self-care). In that case, you’d look for other ways to use your unique abilities.
Could you confine your speaking to local venues?
Could you work in a corporate setting bringing health and fitness to hundreds of employees at a time?
Or could you arrange a way to bring your family with you and take care of yourself too?
Here’s another example. Let’s say you’re awesome at organization and are exceptionally good at keeping the trains running. You never forget a task and are talented at directing and leading people. Plus, one of your values is to have consistency and predictability in your life (which might mean maintaining predictable and traditional work hours so that you can plan your own leisure time, like weekend hikes with friends or having dinner at home every night).
Putting it all together, maybe your unique abilities and values lead you to going into management, supervising a team of health-care professionals, trainers, or nutritionists.
Choosing Your Career
To help you better align your career choice to your purpose, values, and unique abilities, let’s list them again here.
Your purpose:
Your unique abilities:
Your values:
With these in mind, brainstorm some career options that best fit all three:
If your current job is among the career options you brainstormed above, great! You’re on the right path. If you’re thinking you need to make a switch, the following chapters have suggestions for ways to get on a new path from square one.
This game can feel tricky at first. Not only is it challenging to figure out what your purpose, unique abilities, and values are, it also takes a lot of thought to find creative career options that satisfy all three. Yet that’s the secret behind most of the successful people I know.
No one ever said it would be easy. But you’re not reading this book because you want easy. You’re here because you’re ready to do what it takes to build a successful career and live a deliberate life. Discover your purpose, unique abilities, and values—and use them to decide your path—and the chances go way up.*
I recently received an invitation to speak at a one-hundred-person event in Sydney, Australia. I also got a request to be interviewed by the New York Times for a nutrition piece. And both came in during a week in which I’d already committed to creating a new video course for Precision Nutrition.
Knowing what you know about my priorities, unique abilities, and values, if you had to choose between them, what would you do? Would you book the ticket to Sydney, do the interview with the most famous paper in the world, or work on the video course?
My decision-making goes like this:
While I hear Sydney is amazing, I say no to the travel because it takes me away from my family, means less time for self-care, and is a very small audience compared to the 750,000 people I can reach through the Precision Nutrition mailing list.
I say no to the New York Times because I’ve been quoted there before and, unless it’s a feature piece they’re doing on me or on Precision Nutrition, additional mentions provide very little marginal value.
I say yes to the video project because I get to do what I’m best at (using my unique abilities) in a way that will influence the work and lives of health and fitness change makers (using my purpose) and that will grow the business from the comfort of my home office (again, using my values).
Let me be clear: I’m extremely fortunate and grateful to have these opportunities. Earlier in my career I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me I’d one day turn down paid trips around the world and interviews with the New York Times. However, the real lesson isn’t to turn down travel or interviews. It’s to figure out what you need to find purpose, meaning, and enjoyment in your work. And to stay true to those things, rather than getting swept up by every cool invitation that’s not consistent with what you’re here to accomplish.
This is one of the most overlooked benefits of articulating your purpose, unique abilities, and values. Knowing them makes almost everything easier. It becomes super clear what to say yes and no to. It makes your work more fun. It makes your career more meaningful. It gives you the freedom to develop your unique abilities even more. And it’s always evolving—just as you are.*
Making Wise Daily Decisions
While you need to consider your purpose, unique abilities, and values to “zoom out” and make wise, big-picture-perspective career decisions, the same thinking is valuable for zooming in and making daily, seemingly pedestrian, work decisions.
To this end, write down a few of the different opportunities you’ve been asked to choose from lately.
Now evaluate whether those opportunities are in alignment with your purpose, unique abilities, and values. If they all are, rock on! If not, how can you go out and create new opportunities that are in better alignment?
At Precision Nutrition we often use the saying: “Forever, for now.” It means that, yes, we feel confident in the thing we just decided. It’s the final decision for now. However, it’s also subject to revision based on new insights, experiences, learning, and feedback.
Forever for now is a really good way of looking at this six-step career process too. During your first pass through the process, it’ll feel like a linear thing with a beginning, middle, and end. However, it can’t stop there. Circumstances, time, experience, and insight will have you rethinking your purpose, your unique abilities, and your values. That’s normal. Optimal even.
So view this process as a cycle, not a one-and-done thing. The minute you stop cycling back and refining your thinking—in any aspect of your life—is the minute you stop growing.
Likewise, don’t feel pressure to get each step “perfect” or to quickly nail it down. (The idea of career quick fixes is just as unrealistic as nutrition and exercise quick fixes.) So take your time, do the best you can with what you’ve got at each step, and keep doing refinements over time.
In the beginning of your career, this probably means thinking a lot about your purpose, unique abilities, and values. And revisiting whatever you land on every few months. That’s because you don’t yet know what you’re good at, what you’ll find meaning in, or how to articulate that gut feeling forcing you to take action. That’s normal and expected. Seriously. In an industry that inaccurately valorizes youth and overnight success, it’s easy to forget the fact that you can’t possibly be an expert (on any particular subject, or even on yourself) without trial, error, learning, and experience.
Revisiting Your Purpose, Unique Abilities, and Values over Time
To make sure you’re regularly reevaluating, I’d highly recommend opening your calendar and choosing a date three months from now to schedule an hour or two for your next review. Record it below.
Day and time for my three-month review:
Later in your career, after years of trial and error, and after a host of formative experiences, you’ll have more self-awareness, more industry awareness, and will know better what’s important to you, which are your superpowers, and what you should be doing with your life.
This process isn’t just for newbies. Yes, newbies will need to spend more time with it and revisit it more often, asking key questions every few months. However, even folks mid- or late career need to refine their understanding of their work. By reevaluating the process every year or two, you’ll either discover renewed enthusiasm about your purpose, superpowers, and values, or you’ll learn that you’ve changed and have to adjust your career strategy accordingly. One of my colleagues is a great example of this. After her adult children moved out, she became an “empty nester,” which triggered her to reconsider her purpose and values, as well as what she’ll put her energy into going forward.
You probably already use this revisiting process in other areas of your life. If you’re an avid exerciser, you’ve probably adjusted your mode of exercise, or your philosophy on how to exercise, over time, as you’ve gathered more experience, lived in a changing body or daily routine, and learned from new teachers. Your nutrition ideas have probably changed, too, for the same reasons.
If you treat your career with the same sense of adventure, openness, and growth-mindedness, even if you don’t nail the perfect purpose, unique abilities, and values the first time through, you’ll get closer and closer with each iteration.
* These are mistakes that many health and fitness clients make too. They think the most visibly defined pathways (like losing twenty pounds or getting six-pack abs) are the only possible pathways. And they fail to consider their purpose, values, and unique abilities when choosing an action plan (i.e., does a middle-aged teacher who spends his free time doing musical theater, looking for a solution for aching knees and type 2 diabetes, really need to sign up for a Tough Mudder?).
* However, as one of my colleagues pointed out: Seeing people write, speak, or post about health and fitness without much experience or expertise hurts the field as a whole. So, before setting yourself up as an authority, be sure you’ve done the work, and put in the reps, to develop real expertise. Without it, you’ll be doing no one a service, including yourself.
* Remember, though, there’s no substitute for hard work, thousands of hours of practice, and a true dedication to your craft. No matter how much your career brings together your stated purpose, unique abilities, and values, you still have to work at it, often when you don’t even feel like putting in the effort. The good news is that it’ll feel more meaningful if it’s in alignment with your purpose, unique abilities, and values.
* The only caveat here is this: It’s often easy to convince ourselves that opportunity X doesn’t align with our values when, in reality, we’re just scared or uncomfortable trying something new. So make sure to differentiate between saying no because something conflicts with your values and saying no because you’re intimidated by the work involved in something you know is worth doing.