The Great Resignation is here.

The resignation rate in April reached 2.7 percent, which is a record-high quit rate. With the pandemic slowly getting behind us and the world opening back up, people are using it as an opportunity to evaluate their career and life.

The Great Resignation is upon us.

Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of organizational management at Texas A&M University, coined the Great Resignation term. He suggests that many people who wanted to leave during the pandemic stayed in their jobs due to uncertainty. But now that it’s almost behind us, troves of individuals feel safe enough to step away from their current employment.

Will you be taking part in this massive shift? If so, how do you navigate the transition from where you are to a new and better career and life?

Use the two ingredients we all inherently have—passions and natural strengths–to find your dream career. The career you will love and excel at is at the intersection of your passions and natural strengths.

But where do you start?

First, define the passions in your life (listen to podcast episode 31 to define your passions). Then, list out the strengths of your natural behavioral style. We all have a unique behavioral style, it is commonly called your DISC or natural behavioral style, that contains strengths that will help you excel in certain careers (listen to podcast episode 32 to learn how to understand, own, and leverage your natural behavioral style).

Once you define and understand those two things, you’re ready to begin brainstorming your career options.

Brainstorming your career options

Let me share an example that will help you begin your brainstorming:

Let’s say sports is a passion of yours. If you were good enough to play that sport professionally, you would already be pursuing that as your optimum career path.

But if you’re not good enough to play that sport at a professional level (like hockey for me), you could still find a career within sports management. That’s where your natural behavioral style comes in.

Let’s say you have a high D, high I behavioral style. Your style’s strengths are your ability to influence people, negotiate, and have a lot of charisma. And when you combine your passion for sports management with your style, a career option could be an agent for pro athletes.

But suppose you have a High S and a High C behavioral style. In that case, your career options will look different because your style leads to being more detail orientated, more methodical in your approach, and very technical. Some career options you could brainstorm would be salary cap management or contract writing.

I hope that example helps you see how you can begin brainstorming career options by combining your life’s passions with your natural strengths. But what do you do after you get a few career options written down?

Find the best career path through experimenting and testing

The next step in the Stop the Vanilla in Your Career and Life process is to taste-test your career options. Taste-testing is where you experiment with and try out your career options until you find the optimal career path.

Some ways to taste-test your career options are:

• Research online, but by no means rely entirely on the internet
• Meet with people who will ask great questions to expand your thinking
• Reach out to different professionals to interview them about their work
• Have lunch with professionals who work in or around the career options you are considering
• Volunteer and do pro-bono work in the area of your passions

Every single person who loves what they do for a living pursued, experimented, and continued to move forward and gain clarity on what the optimum career path was for them.

Whether the path will reveal itself instantly for you or take some time to come together, this process is more of an evolution than a revolution. As I tell my clients, clarity is not beside or behind you but in front of you.

You will know once you’ve found clarity around your optimum career path. It’s what I like to call your “lightbulb moment”—when the whole room gets brighter. It’s when it finally clicks, and you know you’re pursuing the right career.

Select your Mint Chocolate Chip Strategy

The final thing is to decide on your optimum career, your Mint Chocolate Chip Strategy. This decision will result in you allocating all your energy, time, and resources into pursuing it. This will look different for everyone.

Those who have significant financial responsibilities will not be able to make the jump all at once. Instead, you will have to spend time outside of work and use your weekends to get closer to making your dream career a reality. This may sound like a lot of work, but the irony is, you will feel more recharged and energized as you begin pursuing your dream career.

And for some that are earlier in their career, they may be wary of devoting themselves to one career path. They may feel like this self-limiting, putting them in a box. But the reality is, you cannot pursue everything.

You will put yourself in a better position by being intentional and using objective information, your behavioral science assessment results, to pick your optimum career path. It may evolve, but at least you have gained self-knowledge and experience in the process—rather than never pursuing anything.

Regardless of where you are in your journey, the time to love what you do is now. With the Great Resignation here, use this perfect opportunity to find the career you love and fits who you are. Remember—Those Who Plan, PROFIT.