Career Choices we make

The speaker introduces themselves as Mehnaz Amjad, a coach in the Career Development Series. They share a story about coaching a senior manager named David, who feels like he doesn't belong in his job. Mehnaz introduces a filter called MMCTE to help David understand the factors that influenced his career choice. The filter includes mindset, consequences, traditional family occupation, and expectations. After going through the filter, David realizes that external factors played a significant role in his career choice. Mehnaz advises using this filter to reflect on career decisions and find insights into job dissatisfaction. Hello everyone, welcome to CDS, Career Development Series. This is your coach, Mehnaz Amjad. In this series, I will bring to you stories from my coaching world. Some of them are best practices which one can follow, while some are lessons learned and best to be avoided. Let's get started. Our today's story is from a coaching assignment I did with David. David is a senior manager with 10 plus years of work experience at a top multinational corporation. But these days, David is bothered by just one question, which is, I do not belong here. At work, David does not find himself engaged at all. He feels he is not really happy with the job that he is in. And besides this dissatisfaction with the job, he constantly, repeatedly asks himself, why is it that I feel I do not belong here? So during a coaching assignment, when David expressed this anguish and his constant need to feel engaged at work, I asked David that let us run a filter. I call this filter MMCTE. Now this filter MMCTE, it's basically an abbreviation wherein I want David to go through a set of key factors that actually influence and basis on which we usually or typically make our career choices. So I said, David, let me walk you through this. And let us first find out what really was the main reason at play that you took a career or that decision to get into a particular profession. And while I ran this filter along with him in our assignment, I asked him some couple of questions while we were doing this activity. So the filter MMCTE, it's very simple, friends. It begins with M stands for mindset, C for consequences, T for the traditional model of family occupation, and E for the expectations placed on us by our family members or the close associates, basis on which these key factors we usually make our career choices. So it was very usual that when I was running the filter along with David, and I explained him each factor in detail and asked him to pick the one which is most closely related to or was the main reason he was into a career that he was in. So the first thing was the mindset part. So this is, friends, basically the kind of thoughts we hold about a particular career or the belief we carry about a particular profession. So this also stems in from our childhood days or our growing years where we consider certain professions to be something we also would like to be part of. Some people usually have this idea of being an engineer or a doctor or a scientist or a teacher, while some prefer government jobs because they come with their own share of security and perks, while some like jobs which can help them travel a lot. So this mindset and beliefs are our own perceptions and beliefs we hold about a particular profession, basis on which most often it happens and it has been seen that we choose our career. So we passed David through this particular filter. Then comes the C part, which is the consequences and the circumstances. So sometimes in life we may not really have a very pleasant experience and sometimes crisis hits us and based on some personal pressure or crisis we are going through, the consequences of that or the circumstances pushes us into a particular profession. So I asked David the same thing and we passed his career choice from this filter as well to understand, was it some kind of consequence which made him take up this particular profession. Finally the T and E, the T is a traditional model of family occupation which is very popular. You may have seen it in the movie stars where you have seen most of the people in the movie industry and having their own children also being part of the same industry or the politicians or the main businessmen or industrialist, where we see that traditionally whatever the family has been doing, the next generation usually kind of get into the same set of business or the same stream of work. Then we passed the filter of expectations where I explained David that sometimes some parents and it's one of the part of parenting techniques where our close associates, let's say our grandparents or the environment we've been brought up or our parents themselves, they have some very high expectation of us, certain things that they couldn't really get into, they may want their children to be fulfilled that dream for them. So sometimes the professions or the careers we are in can also be a result of the expectation of our parents or our grandparents or some kind of a family influence that is at play. So we passed David's career choice through this filter as well. So having passed through all the filters, what really David found was the main reason why he was very unhappy with his job was not really into any of these. The one major benefit he got out of this activity was he was able to decide, he was able to deeply reflect that the choice, the career choice he made, to what extent was his, the external factors, his parents, his close associates were playing a major role in the career choice he had made and to what extent he alone was responsible in it. So when we found the ratio of 60 to 40, which was 60 was more of his family and his close associates and his environment that was at play, the remaining 40 was something of his own. So I asked David at this point, I said, look David, this passage of filter may not really help you find a solution, but this is your first filter that will take you to a level where you will figure out and you will be able to find out that this decision, because you have been into this job for almost 10 years now and we need to really get to the root of it and unless we understand the root of where our decisions are coming in from, we cannot move forward. So in this particular case, through this particular filter, David was able to understand that his decision, his decision of this particular career choice that he was in for the past 10 years or more than a decade was basis on what, what really was that influential factor, what was at play, basis on that, then we took another step to look for those gaps, what really is making him feel completely disengaged at work. So friends, this basic model, this filter may not really give either you or David an absolute or immediate solution, but if you just like David find yourself caught up in a very complex or sensitive situation where having worked for 10 plus years, you are questioning your very decision, your very being in a given profession, one of the best things or the very first filter that you could use is this MMCTE. I will share the model and content in the comment box from where you can copy it and try to run it, because this will take you back to where you started, what really had led to that decision and then you never know, it might open up more insights into your current dissatisfaction at job and that is exactly what happened in the case of David as well. So more on that in our next session. Thank you for being my audience. That is it for today. I will talk to you soon.