Find your Career Aptitude to find your Goals

You won't reach your goals if they don't work with your career aptitude. If you don't use your talents and strengths in your work, it will be hard to find the necessary desire and enthusiasm to follow through to your goals.

Goals are usually tightly connected to your career. Aptitude refers to what you are good at or have a natural talent for. Using your natural abilities makes achieving your gaols so much easier. So finding your career aptitude is important for goal setting which is important for time management. But your work is not your whole life, so I won't stop there. But I will cover word first.

You can take a career aptitude test to find your strengths or talents. There are several free ones on the Internet, but most, if not all, require you to register first.

You can also find your career aptitude by asking questions of yourself and you can ask questions of others to help you out.

Question and Answer or Life Review

You can look at your past and remember what you were drawn to as a child, before adult reality placed limits on you.

Was/Is there some thing that you have returned to repeatedly. Some times it seems almost against your will. Did you often find yourself talking in front of the class? or investigating quietly on your own? What kind of things did you enjoy? What did people say you had a knack for? Here are some more questions to ask yourself:

• If you had the time, what would you become an expert in? What would you study, practice or research deeply?
• Is there something that, when you do it, you lose all sense of time? Forget to eat or sleep?
• What activities energize you?
• Is there something you want to communicate to the world? Something that you want the world to know and understand?
• What activity would you do if money was not an issue? What are you willing to do for FREE?
• What can you do that you can't explain how you do it?
• What things do you learn faster than others?
• What one thing would you do if you knew you could not fail?
• What do family and friends often ask you to do?
• What dreams or visions are almost impossible to put out of your head?
• What pulls you or calls to you even if it seems impossible or irresponsible?
• What do you want people to remember about you? Your life?
• What subject could you talk all night about?

• What do you think I'm good at?
• What do you think I do better than most people?
• What do you think are my talents?

If you do what you love and it contributes to others in some way, you will be happy and successful. Success isn't having money or prestige. It's being happy.

Use the answers to these questions to come up with your career aptitude. That will enable you to set goals that use your strengths and preferences.

The above questions focus on career, but there is much more to life than career. Aptitude or preferences outside of a career are important too.

Examine your life

Where do you want to live? What kind of family life do you want?

"Getting Out from Under" by Stephanie Winston provides over 90 statements that you are to assign values to. Answering these questions can really help refine the type of life you want to live, not just career.

• "I want to have children"
• "I need to have a variety of entertainment options"
• "I need to be outside a lot"
• "I'd like to live in the country"
• "I need financial security."
• "I like to throw parties."
• "I need to be involved in my religion."
• "I don't need religion."
• "I'd like to live close to my family."

Come up with your own questions to help you refine your life.

'Discover Your Strengths' by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton, along with the online StrengthFinders test, is also useful in finding general areas of talents and strengths. The book describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, Restorer, Analyzer and Maximizer). But the most interesting thing is his recommendation to develop your strengths instead of try to fix your weaknesses. This concept is more fully explained in the book 'First, Break All The Rules' by Marcus Buckingham.

If you haven't read Brainstorming Methods and completed those exercises, do so now. Then go onto Visualization.

All these questions will help you discover your career aptitude and life aptitude, both of which are essential to achieving goals and managing your time.

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