Are you doing the work you want to do? Is it challenging and interesting, at least some of the time? Does it line up with the priorities you’ve set for your life? In a word, is your job fulfilling?

For those who feel like they’re not on a fulfilling path right now, we’ve got advice today from Carter Cast, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship and author of The Right—and Wrong—Stuff: How Brilliant Careers are Made and Unmade.

Cast started his career in marketing at PepsiCo and later went on to become CEO of Walmart.com. He’s now a venture partner for Pritzker Group Venture Capital in addition to his work at Kellogg. So he knows a thing or two about career transitions. To start, he says, you need to do some soul-searching.

“Check in with yourself on a regular basis about what motivates you and what you consider to be most important in your life,” he says. “If you do that, you’ll be less likely to find yourself in a job that no longer aligns with your values.”

How to Take the Next Step toward a Fulfilling Career

The pandemic has prompted a lot of this soul-searching. Many people have shifted their priorities in terms of where work fits into their life. Or they want their work to line up better with their values. So if you find yourself wondering if you’re doing the work you want to be doing, you’re not alone.

And Cast has been there, too.

“For a number of years, I was not very self-reflective,” Cast says. “I just put my head down and worked. But in my early forties, I realized that I had an empty personal life. I was lonely and realized that progressing in my career wasn’t enough. I needed to recalibrate and create the context for a richer, more balanced life.”

For those who are working through these same big questions, Cast offers some tips:

Conduct a self-audit: This should be done regularly, Cast says, with the goal of figuring out which activities motivate you and which drain your energy. He suggests color-coding activities in your calendar: green for energizing, yellow for neutral, red for draining. Then color-code your activities for a month and look for trends. Are you generally motivated during the work day? Are you more often drained? If so, how can you shift the balance?

When Cast did his own audit several years ago, he saw that many of the tasks that motivated and inspired him were not part of his job at the time. He took that as a sign and left within a couple months. “I realized that it wasn’t just about progressing in my career,” Cast says. “It was about finding ‘good work’ that was a heartfelt expression of myself, work that energized me and had meaning both to me and to those with whom I interacted.”

Do a skill-gap analysis: If your audit reveals that you’re not in the job you want to be in, the next step is to figure out which skills you need to move on in a meaningful way. To do this analysis, list all the skills you need for your dream job and then grade yourself on each. That lets you see where you need to grow and allows you to be targeted about developing those new skills. For Cast, this meant job-shadowing others to grow his knowledge of marketing in areas where he’d given himself an “F.” “It didn’t happen overnight, but the approach worked,” Cast says. “Within eight years, I worked my way up the marketing ladder until I became a CMO.”

Make little bets: Maybe you have a few ideas for what you want to be doing next on your road to a more fulfilling career. Cast says you should then make “little bets” on these options and see what works out. For instance, if you’re interested in being an adjunct professor, maybe start out by delivering a guest lecture. If you find that energizing, then maybe you can move on to co-teaching a course with a more experienced professor. And onwards from there as you hone your plan.

“I’ve rarely seen people know what they’re going to do in five years and then just do it,” Case says. “Instead, we learn and we adjust. I had no idea I was going to end up being a venture capitalist and a teacher. I thought I was going to take another CEO gig. But I stayed open-minded and curious and continued to adjust and test out ideas whenever and however I could, which led me down a very different path.”

You can read the full article with Cast here.

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP TIP

“The biggest issue in the ESG area is that there is a discrepancy between ESG performance and ESG disclosure. … First we have to understand what is ESG? It can mean very different things to different people.”

—Assistant professor Aaron Yoon in a Financial Times Global Boardroom webinar.