You cannot think your way to what you want next. You can, though, look at the evidence of what has already lit you up. This workshop turns your working past into a map.
Most people, asked what they want to do next, reach for a job title and stall. The better move is quieter, and it looks backwards before it looks forwards. You have thirty or forty years of evidence. Let's read it properly.
Four steps, about fifteen minutes.
The wrong question
You are about to be asked what you want to do next. It is a terrible question, and you may politely refuse to answer it. Almost nobody knows, and the people who sound certain have usually just picked something plausible and stopped looking.
The more useful question is quieter. What did you actually like? Not what you were good at. Not what you were promoted for. Not what is on your CV. What you enjoyed. Most people have never written that second list at all.
Name one moment from your working life you'd happily live again tomorrow — not an achievement, a moment. Hold on to it; the rest of this workshop needs it.
Why we work backwards
There is a reason looking back beats looking forward. We are surprisingly poor at predicting what will make us happy — psychologists call it affective forecasting — and reasonably good at remembering what already did. So do not sit and imagine your future. Go and read your past.
Those stand-out moments are almost always flow — the state the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described, where a real skill meets a real challenge and time disappears. Too easy and you drift into boredom; too hard and you tip into anxiety. Flow lives in the narrow band between the two, which is exactly why it is such good data.
Where time disappears
Skill meets challenge. Flow lives in the narrow band between boredom and anxiety.
The four columns
Take your whole working life, not just the last job, and sort it into four columns. Most people fill the first three easily and stall on the fourth. Do not skip it — that column is not a list of regrets, it is a list of untested hypotheses, and you finally have the time to test them.
The four columns
Flow moments
The ones you'd do again tomorrow. Not the achievements — the moments.
Liked
Steady, reliable enjoyment. Not thrilling, but you were glad it was in the week.
Tolerated
You did it well, you may be known for it — and you felt nothing.
Never had time for
The things you kept meaning to get to. Untested hypotheses, not regrets.
Chase the verb
Once you have your flow moments, the instinct is to hunt for the job that contains them. Do not. Look for the verb. What were you actually doing in those moments? Explaining. Untangling. Building. Deciding under pressure. Persuading a room that did not want to be persuaded. The sector changes and the seniority changes; the verb almost never does.
Not the title — the verb
A title describes a position you no longer hold. A verb describes something you'll still be doing at eighty.
One engineer had four stand-out moments across four decades, with no obvious thread between them — until we ignored the industries and found the verb underneath all of them: he rescues the things everyone else has given up on.
He now does turnaround advisory two days a week — and not one word of that mentions bridges.
Don't hunt for the job that holds your best moments. Find the verb underneath them — and build from that.The through-line of this workshop
Don't try to predict what you'll enjoy — look at what you already enjoyed.
Flow moments, where real skill met real challenge, are your best data.
Sort your past into four columns — and don't skip “never had time for.”
Chase the verb, not the job title.
Do the Career Inventory.
Twenty minutes, done properly rather than quickly. Fill the four columns, pull out your flow moments, and name the verbs underneath.
The Career Inventory
You've completed “Finding Your Flow.” Want to go deeper? Read the deeper dive →