"At your age, you should know what you want -- and you should be well on your way to getting there by now." 

"You should just get your foot in the door and then figure out where you want to go from there."

"Maybe you should talk to someone who can tell you what you should be doing." 

Such is the guidance and counsel offered up by well-intentioned friends and family.  Although they are ready and willing to tell you what you "should" do, few are able to help you achieve what you "want" to do.

Recently, we received a call from a father about his 24-year old son, Brian.  Sounding reasonable and appropriately concerned, he is frustrated and believes his son needs career coaching to help figure out an appropriate career path.  So Mark spoke with Brian (who agreed to talk only because his father insisted on it), and what he found that Brian is actually very clear about his career direction.  What he most needs is some support, encouragement and advice about how to get there.

Meanwhile, Dan has been in a two-year coaching relationship with Caroline, a 45 year-old, accomplished and highly-compensated senior-level manager who is in a career that "feels like a death sentence."  She wants to make a move to a more personally fulfilling career, but she is paralyzed by fear, privately holding to the belief that she should stick it out for practical reasons.  Through their time working together, Dan has enabled Caroline to take small steps to unravel her unhappy career and migrate toward a more meaningful worklife.

Both Brian and Caroline are experiencing a common tension - one that pits "wants" against "shoulds" - between pursuing their dreams while, at the same time, reconciling widely-held expectations about how they should be spending their waking hours.  For Brian, his father's expectations are disconnected from his view of himself and his future.  And Caroline struggles with her desire for a new career identity as she untangles a lifetime of meeting others' expectations of her.  Both simply need support to find their own way.

Though our clients may not always be under such direct parental or societal influence, many seek coaching because they want their worklives to be consistent with their innermost values and desires - but the dissonance between what they want to do  and what they should do usually leads to inaction, a feeling of being stuck, and the often easier "default" position of sticking with the "should."  This rarely leads to meaningful work and, in fact, often leads down a path of frustration, wasted efforts, and even depression.

Finding your way, quite simply, starts with unloading the cargo of "shoulds" you're carrying.  It begins with knowing where you are, pinpointing your destination, and then navigating the best route.  Early seafarers of the South Pacific understood this well.  They navigated open ocean voyages by observing the stars, sun, moon and planets.  Later, the art of celestial navigation became more sophisticated with the creation of navigational tools like sextants, astrolabes, nocturnals and planispheres.  Eventually they could set a course and sail to their destination using only a chart, a compass and a little common sense.

In the same way, we need to navigate our careers by charting our position, setting a direction and planning the best route.  We're not proposing that you scan the heavenly bodies for career insights (although there are many who believe you "should"), but if we reawaken our senses to the primeval philosophies of these early Polynesian voyagers, we can enliven the way we assess and plan our careers today.  

To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, "all who wander are not lost."  Mere movement itself can imbue a sense of adventure and excitement, even if the destination is not yet clear.  Caroline was stuck in place for two years before beginning to wander outside of her safe harbor.  By setting her dreams in motion, the destination began to reveal itself. 

Brian had internalized his father's expectation that he should be a "professional," leaving him feeling inadequate and not fully capable of making his own decisions.  Once he unloaded this baggage, it could no longer weigh him down.  Releasing the burden of others' expectations, freed him to find his own way. 

The "wayfinders" of the Pacific Islands believed that you don't need to go out in search of the island; instead, you point your boat in the right direction, and the island comes to you.  In this spirit, if we are to move toward meaningful work, we have to find ourselves physically, orient ourselves mentally and emotionally, and find a star to steer by spiritually.