600: How to Discover Meaningful Work, with Scott Anthony Barlow

Scott Anthony Barlow: Happen to Your Career

Scott Anthony Barlow wants you to find work you love. He is CEO of Happen To Your Career and host of the Happen to Your Career podcast, which has been listened to over 3 million times across 159 countries and is the largest career change podcast in the world.

As a former HR leader, Scott has interviewed over two thousand people for jobs and completely rejects the way most organizations choose to do work. He’s a nerd for self development, human behavior, and ice hockey. He’s the author of the book Happen to Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work*.

In this conversation, Scott and I discuss the assumptions that many of us bring to finding career happiness — and where those assumptions might lead us astray. We also explore in detail the process that Scott and his team use with clients: career experimenting. In addition, Scott and I share how we’ve used experimenting in our own careers to align with meaning.

Key Points

• People assume that you start with clarity. In actuality, you start with declaring priorities, which is what eventually creates clarity.
• Taking vacation or an extended break from work is important for many reasons, but it’s not often the activity that creates clarity.
• Movement and experimenting is the way you move from declaring your priorities to creating clarity.
• Use career experiments as a way to begin surfacing interests and relationships that will help you to find clarity.
• Leaders should open the door to career experimentation to support employees in developing themselves inside the organization — or potentially moving onto other opportunities.

Resources Mentioned

• Happen to Your Career: An Unconventional Approach to Career Change and Meaningful Work* by Scott Anthony Barlow
• Finding the Career That Fits You (Scott’s FREE 8-Day Video Course)

Interview Notes

Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).

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