SIWIKE Guides: Self-service coaching with the FI-A approach

For those interested in working with me, one of the questions often comes up of what sort of approach I take to achieve career success?

After scouring many personal and professional development resources, I came up with a very simple approach called the FI-A (pronounced like fire without the -r. Cheesy? Well you’ll probably remember it so it achieved its purpose ?)

After getting to know each other to get some context, The FI-A approach is a simple 3 step process:

WHAT do you want?
WHY do you want it?
HOW do you get it?

While the approach is very simple, there’s a lot of complexity within each of the steps. Feel free to go through it yourself for a self-service approach to career success.

What

What do you want? A question that isn’t asked as often as it should be. For those transitioning in their career, it can be a great concern. For students trying to find out where to go after their education, it can be a question that causes a lot of anxiety.

Some people have a very clear goal of what they want. Others only have a general direction. And others are lost.

If you have clear goals then you can pretty much skip to the WHY section.

If you have a general direction and what you want to do is explore. Allocate time throughout your day, week to explore certain facets of the direction. Consider the model week to prioritize your time.

Spending time will allow you to get more experiences and skills to see what resonates with you. Leveraging some activities such as reflective writing can be of help to start narrowing down your options. The goal here is to explore what you’re curious about, interested in and are excited about. And if you realize that you never end up truly finding what your clear goal is, at least she spent her life exploring things you were curious about, interested in, and we’re excited about. That type of life doesn’t sound half bad.

For those that are lost, it’s normally either a case of being overwhelmed or having too many options or not knowing where to start.

If you’re overwhelmed then spending a bit of time to curb your anxiety could be helpful. The quote “ worrying is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but doesn’t get you anywhere” comes to mind. Often times some sort of action will help you. Whether that action is the “right one” is subjective. The anxiety is often rooted in FOMO the fear of missing out which is a flavour of not wanting to make the wrong decision and wasting time. One perspective that could help is that there’s no such thing as the wrong-decision, or the right-decision for that matter. As you don’t have a time machine and can’t go back and change it anyway then every decision becomes the right decision. So it becomes a matter of making the best out of the circumstances that you currently have. So if you have 100 different options, pick one, see how that works for you. If it works, awesome. If it doesn’t, on the next.

If it’s not knowing where to start then a few exercises that would help as follows:

Pick a direction and take some action. The goal is to start being specific with your asks. Create SMART goals. Allocate time to move in that direction and explore. Then also using reflective writing and other exercises to validate your current assumptions. Just because it was a wand that came up in the exercise, doesn’t mean you have to commit to it for the rest of your career. You also don’t necessarily want to flip-flop too often so you can use the “flavour of the month” concept to commit to something for a period of time. Then evaluating and seeing if you want to continue.

There are a few other WHATs that also need to be addressed:

What skills and resources do you need?
What sort of person do you need to become?
What is holding you back?

Why

Once you start getting a clear idea of what you want to achieve in your career in life and one important aspect to help with motivation and achievement is to understand why. WHY is your purpose. WHY provides motivation and drive. It takes it from a push to something that is compelling that is pulling you.

You can use the five WHYs exercise. Ask yourself “why is that important to me”. Then again for each answer.

If the WHAT was difficult for you, then the WHY might be even more difficult. Allow yourself to push through.

Ideally, you can take your WHAT and make it into a compelling future which includes your WHY. The more compelling your WHAT and WHY are, The more you will be drawn into it and the easier it will be for you.

How

When you have the WHAT and WHY clearly defined then the house has become easier. There are all sorts of tips and tricks to help make the HOW easier. From time management and productivity. To personal development and learning how to build meaningful connections. To learning to be more effective in your communication. To simple things like personal finance and saving. To foundational stuff like health for your body, mind and spirit.

I’ll be releasing the CGS (Career Guidance System) which will help you identify all the different areas that you might wanna look to develop in yourself to achieve your success

That’s FI-A in a nutshell. I’ll expand on it in future posts to help you with your self-service career coaching.

In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me luki@focusinspired.com if I could be of help.