As a psychotherapist, what I know personally and professionally is that this question – “What do I want to be when I grow up?” – is one of the biggest that we ALL wrestle with at one time or another.

The story of how and why I became a therapist is a blog post for another time, but I share this – my own decades-long struggle to answer the question – in case you feel like you’re the only one who hasn’t answered The Question yet. Believe me, you’re not. Not in the least.

And while I don’t know what the answer to this question will be for you, in today’s post I want to share three tools and three resources that I found particularly valuable in my own journey toward answering the question, in the hope that they’ll support you in arriving at your own answers.

Three Tools To Help You Answer The Question What Kind of Career You Want.

1. Do You Want a Handmade Quilt or a Pottery Barn Duvet?

There’s something I really want you to hear:

Careers aren’t formulaic anymore, and a job that may be absolutely perfect for you might not even exist yet. And, when it comes to quality and fulfillment versus instant gratification in our career paths, we’ve basically all got the choice between a homemade quilt career or a Pottery Barn duvet career.

A Pottery Barn duvet is pre-made and you know when you walk into any Pottery Barn store you can grab one off the shelf, the quality will be good, and you’ll likely be warm and comfy when you take it home that night. A handmade quilt on the other hand, may take years to craft, may be riddled with imperfections and missed stitches, and yet, when it’s complete, it’s a deep expression of your truest self and a real creative original.

I think career paths are a lot like this, too.

And, not that there is anything at all wrong with a Pottery Barn-duvet-career-path, if what you’re longing for is a career path that’s going to be a true extension of yourself, it may take more time and effort to craft this kind of path than the paths of your peers who chose something different.

And sometimes, quite frankly, your choice to go after a handmade quilt path might feel lonely, frustrating, and overwhelming (it sure has been for me at times!). The trade-off though, is when you put the time into deeply reflecting on what it is you want to craft of your life’s work, and then the effort into creating this, the pay-off is that you end up with a career that’s a lot like a gorgeous, heirloom quilt. The message here? Quality and fulfillment in a career path take time and there’s not a formula when it comes to figuring out what you want to be when you grow up.