Finding Your Calling and Purpose of Work In Your Life with Bryan Dik

At some point in life, we are hindered from seeing what we desire. Perhaps a lack of self-confidence and motivation drives us to be lost in the path. Nevertheless, how can we overcome these barriers through guidance and predictive science? On this week's episode of Actions Antidote, we talk to Bryan Dik, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology. Bryan Dik shares his knowledge and the science behind finding the meaning and purpose of workplace worth for life. Bryan Dik is a vocational psychologist and professor of psychology. He focuses on career pathways and guidance among students and for everyone. He has published four books including Redeeming Work and Make Your Job a Calling. Bryan Dik is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of jobZology which helps people discern their calling and live with purpose. Want help in finding your own calling? Do you want one? Listen to this episode to find more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Your Calling and Purpose of Work In Your Life with Bryan Dik Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that I really wish that I had when I was younger, when I was coming out of college and considering careers, which is a product that really helps us examine who we are, what really is going to make us satisfied and what’s going to make a satisfying day to day life, because, like many people in my general age range, a lot of us went to college and picked something that we’re interested in, picked something that maybe we’re good at in school but didn’t really think about this day to day and what really drives satisfaction with work, which is something that ends up being probably the first or second biggest use of time during adulthood behind sleeping and maybe something else. My guest today, Bryan Dik, is a professor of psychology at Colorado State University as well as the co-founder of a product called jobZology, which is a product that helps a lot of outgoing college students as well as other career change people examine what they really want to do and find a career path that’s going to be way more fulfilling. --- Bryan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me, Stephen. It’s a joy to be with you. I’m always glad when people are happy to be discussing their pursuits with me on this podcast because it’s such a positive community of people in a way just talking about what we’re doing and I say this because at the time of recording, we’re in the middle of Denver Startup Week, which is another area where you see a lot of people just talking about their pursuits, talking about what really drives them and so, Bryan, what drove you to start jobZology? What were you observing that made you decide that this was worth your time, your effort, your sweat, everything else that people say? A little context. I’m a vocational psychologist and one of my roles at the university is training our PhD students in counseling psychology to facilitate career counseling. A lot of magic happens in a career counseling relationship, it’s very powerful. But it’s also not always accessible for lots of people. And so one of the motivations behind starting jobZology was thinking about ways to democratize the career assessment and counseling process so that, in a very efficient way, a much broader array of people can experience the kind of support that they might get in career counseling and have access to the information about what makes them unique and how the ways that they’re unique intersect with opportunities and needs in the world of work so that they can make informed decisions about their lives. And so what prevents people from getting access to the resources they need to really dig deep inside themselves and figure out what’s going to drive them to a satisfying day-to-day life? Yeah, well, I think lots of things. I think for some people, there are internal reasons why we don’t pursue things that would be in our best interests. It maybe we lack confidence or we just lack awareness. There are also external reasons. Some people just lack access to opportunity and many people lack time and resources and access to the support that would be really helpful.Share on X One-on-one individual career development support can be expensive and can also be a little bit tricky to figure out what’s a real high quality experience or service and what isn’t. I think breaking down some of those barriers and walls and granting people access to tools and resources to help them make informed choices just seems really important. And so let’s first talk about these psychological barriers, because I think a lot of people understand pretty well what a monetary barrier is. A career coaching service will cost $1,000 and you just don’t have $1,000. But, psychologically, what prevents a lot of people from looking deeper inside themselves? Because the statistics have shown pretty consistently that more than half of people in America and an even higher percentage of a number of people worldwide are simply just not satisfied with what they do for work. Yeah, I think a lot of people, if you ask them why they do what they do, they fell into it. They didn’t necessarily go through decision-making process that was really well informed. It was they knew somebody who had an opportunity, “My uncle talked to me about a job opportunity and I didn’t have anything else going so I decided to do it, and, suddenly, six, seven years later, here I am doing something I never thought I’d be doing.” That’s one reason. Another is I think people don’t really have just a great sense of the things that really drive job satisfaction. So if you think of it in terms of fit, we can look at how people differ in terms of their interests, what they enjoy, in terms of their personality, their characteristic traits, in terms of their values, what they really need in a work environment in order to be satisfied, all of these things people differ on. It’s not always easy, especially for young people as they’re coming of age, they’re still forming their identities and so forth, they don’t always have insight, and the culture imposes a timeframe for making these decisions as we transition from adolescence into early adulthood and so people feel lots of pressure and you got to do something, sometimes it just becomes overwhelming, and you end up just making choices based on impulse, not being as planful or as well informed as you’d like to be, or a lot of people, I think, make decisions based on what they think they ought to do or based on what their parents or the culture tells them that they should do rather than what really brings them joy and satisfaction and meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, for lots of folks, they’re well into adulthood when they realize how did this happen and how can I like back the truck up a little bit and then reengage in a way that’s more planful and that’s more likely to be satisfying? Yeah, because I think what we’re talking about is, first of all, people are generally 18 years old when they’re going into college and they’re picking a major, picking something to study, and then you’re 22, 23 years old when you’re coming out of college, maybe a little bit older if you’re coming out with the advanced degree, master’s, postgraduate thing, and, at that point, I think the research shows that it takes until the age of 25 for your prefrontal cortex to fully form and then so many people say it takes ’til much later, potentially even into your 40s, to really understand who you are and what really drives you. So what can someone do at that age, the age of 22, say, coming out of college for most people, to really get to something that they really want to do to, I don’t want to say accelerate the process like our culture would dictate, but to work with someone at the age of 22 where they are in life? I keep talking about the US because that’s where I live and operate and where you do. Different cultures and different national contexts have different systems that can stress the timeline a little bit. But I think one of the challenges is, for a traditional college student, like the person that you’re describing, so you start at 18, you have to declare a major at the midpoint, if not earlier, at least by the midpoint. So now you’re 20 and so there’s lots of pressure to then --- I mean, you’ll get letters from the registrar saying, “We’re not gonna let you register for classes until you tell us what your major is,” if you’re undecided. So that’s a requirement. And I think a lot of students just aren’t quite sure what lane to choose, especially folks who have broad interests where they --- and I was one of these students when I was an undergraduate, I liked lots of different things and the thought of choosing one path, if that meant not choosing something else, can create paralysis in terms of decision making for folks, figurative paralysis, obviously. People choose what’s interesting to them without having a clear sense of where that leads and by the time someone is 22, if they’ve got enough credits and they’re looking at graduating, they may be playing catch up a little bit and seeing what’s available that links to the training that they’ve received. And even then, the array of options that are available have decreased quite a bit just based on the decisions they’ve made. For somebody at 22, to answer your question directly, adaptability is key. I just painted a picture where the array of options is narrowed but the reality is that lots of people have career paths that look meandering and they end up in a place that’s pretty far removed from where they started and I think embracing that as an option or possibility, recognizing that, “Hey, my interests may be very stable but the way I can express those,...