I’ve recently been reading a great book (with a not so great title, as I think its value is much broader than just career reflection) called Finding a Job You Can Love, which was written way back in the stone age of 1999. It’s written from a Christian view, which I enjoy, but I would caveat that I think the core exercise of this book would be incredibly powerful for anyone, regardless of their faith.

The book’s core exercise is System for Identifying Motivated Abilities^® (SIMA^®), and it has you identify key achievements in your life, with a focus on events where you both feel you did it well and enjoyed it. After you identify those, you start to analyze each of them to identify commonalities and trends different aspects of those, to identify your nature.

I made this Google spreadsheet as a template for the exercise, called Simplified SIMA Template — I recommend buying the book and using this to analyze your story arc. I found it very valuable.

Here are some other books/systems I’ve found useful when reflecting on who you are and who you want to be:

• Flower Exercise from the book What Color is Your Parachute? (see my blog about this here)
• Donald Miller’s Hero on a Mission book (and his older Creating your Life Plan program)
• Jim Collins, in an amazing interview on Tim Ferris’s podcast, talks about the concept of a bug book, where you’re the bug, and you are studying yourself, reflecting on the day for a few quick minutes on what you enjoyed, what you didn’t, and what makes you come alive
• StrengthsFinder (check out Vide Consulting if you’re looking for some consulting help with this for your company)
• Insights Discovery program, which has some nice alignment with Myers Briggs
• O*NET Interest Profiler can give some interesting insights into career paths to explore
• LifeScore Assessment from Full Focus (Michael Hyatt) is a great, simple spreadsheet where you review how you’d assess your satisfaction with 12 dimensions of your life, which helps you quickly visualize where you’re underwhelmed with your personal state
• The newest on my list: SIMA from Finding a Job You Can Love

“Knowing yourself it the beginning of all wisdom”

Aristotle