1. How to Find a Life
2. Making Your Life Matter: Interests
3. Locating Your Life: Abilities
4. Fitting In with Gods Work: Spiritual Gifts
5. Choosing Your Path: Values
6. Finding the Places You Fit: Personality Type
7. How Not to Spin in Your Socks
Intro
Make Your Parents Read This!
To the Parents of Find Your Fit Readers
I n addition to Jane and Kevins experience coaching adults in career transition and Kevins background as a pastor to large crowds of students, were both parents. And Karen has counseled with countless families as their children finish high school. Weve navigated the give them roots and give them wings process of choosing colleges, discerning majors, and diving into the job market.
Were convinced that all parents want the best for their children. As you walk alongside your teenager, helping them discern the best choices, please keep one thing in mind:
There is an ongoing, unresolvable tension between finding meaningful work and the realities of the marketplace.
Perhaps youve heard teens say something like, I cant handle a desk jobI need to be part of something fulfilling, something that Im passionate about. And theyre right. Research bears out that workers who use their inborn skills in service to a purpose they believe in are the most productive workers in America. However, weve heard parents panic when those inborn skills are associated with lower-paying jobs or uncertain career paths. Here are some real-life examples weve encountered:
- Our daughter wants to join her friends at an out-of-state college when the one nearest us has a nationally acclaimed business school. Shouldnt she do the practical thing?
- Our sons such a dreamerhe wants to be the next J. J. Abrams. How do we get him to be realistic?
- For three generations everyone in our family has gone to collegeand now this child just wants to build houses. Shouldnt we at least make him get a business degree?
The parental warning to concentrate on marketplace realities may sound loud and clear. Perhaps youre even contemplating tying college funding to guaranteed choices such as accountancy, information technology, or medicine.
Thats fine, if your childs natural design makes those careers suitable. If not, know that many of those who attend LifeKeys workshops, the adult version of Find Your Fit , are adults who are dissatisfied with their first careers. They overfocused on marketplace realities and wound up miserable, working in environments that dont suit them and that dont match how God gifted them.
Your Teen through Gods Eyes
Find Your Fit is designed to help teens see themselves through Gods eyes, maybe for the first time in their lives.
Not how they look through the eyes of a media-crazed world that tells them, Its how you look and shoot hoops that determines what youre worth.
Not how they look through the eyes of school systems that tell them, Its how you do on standardized tests that determines what youre worth.
Not how they look through the eyes of peers who tell them, Its whether youre in the right crowd that determines what youre worth.
What teens and young adults discover in Find Your Fit about their value and giftedness applies both to what they might do as workers for Gods kingdom and to their own career planswhich for many people are one and the same! Through the five lenses we present, teens can explore their God-given design and understand that they are valuable to God. Theyll identify their
- interestsand begin to pattern a life of motivation and significance;
- abilitiesand realize that they have many , even if theirs arent the ones the world celebrates;
- spiritual giftsand recognize that God gifts people to work together for purposes bigger than themselves;
- personality typeand understand their natural preferences for working and communicating;
- valuesand build a structure for making good, godly decisions.
Why so many lenses? Because so many people find it difficult to believe that theyre custom designed for a life of meaning and purpose. Weve taken people from age fifteen to ninety through LifeKeys . At various points in the process, people arrive at self-acceptance. If someone says, Even if God did give me these abilities, they arent worth much, perhaps as she discovers her personality type shell exclaim, So thats why Im differentand Im still normal! Only with this kind of self-acceptance are people free to carry out the purposes God intends for them.
Entwined with the process of using our gifts for Gods purposes is making career choicesand Find Your Fit applies to both. You can use Find Your Fit with your teen to help explore schooling options or the world of work.
There are no guarantees for job success these days. Even more important, we all have different definitions of success. If you truly want to help your teenagers get on the right career roadas well as a lifetime of fulfilling service to Godyou can help them discover their giftedness by giving them three of the most generous, loving presents youve ever provided.
Your First GiftFind Your Own Fit
Go through these exercises yourself (or use the adult version, LifeKeys ). Even if you love your job or volunteer activities, finding your own fit will let you and your teen talk through many issues using the same vocabulary. Look at each others abilities. In these last years together before your teen leaves home, make the most of your similarities and use your differences to talk through life choices. Odds are good that you have different personality types. Use that information to discover how differently you approach making decisions or using your strengths.