Did you know that best-selling crime author John Grisham was once a lawyer?

He wrote The Rainmaker between meetings and court hearings, and then The Firm, A Time to Kill and a whole host of other law-related crime books which became Hollywood blockbusters.

It makes sense that he wrote about what he knew, what fascinated him, what he cared about. And yet, his extreme success did not come from his legal training or even his ability to fight for justice for his clients. It came from his capacity to weave a narrative and to write so articulately - the law simply fuelled his inspiration.

Choosing a career can be tough and terrifying work. The pressure to get it right, to discover your gifts, to judge the jobs-market, to make money, to do what you enjoy; even Grisham would struggle to tie all these plot lines together.

The tools we used to choose careers 30 years ago, before constant technological innovation, offshoring, global dependencies, mass migration, remote working and a whole host of other features of the modern world existed, cannot be applied to today.

As a career coach, I would argue that there is no “safe” job anymore and there is no “perfect” career for anyone. Yet there is a direction that may suit a person more than another, a field that might allow for someone to play to their gifts, to make the best contribution they can make. That direction does not have an end-point, and the journey of career exploration is a constant state of learning, course correcting and acquiring different experiences and skills that allow for a unique offering to the world.

I work together with my clients to help them find this direction, to discern whether Due West would be more compatible with who they are than North, not to help them know whether they’ll hit America or the Spice Islands – the adventure is their own. The tools we use to orient the process are coaching and psychometrics; they tell us about the Strengths, Higher purpose, Interests, Non-negotiables and Environmental needs of a person – about their SHINE.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had studied to become an engineer. He used engineering principles and thought processes to create the Kindle and the Amazon platform. In 2009 he gave a talk to engineering students at Princeton and he told them to try to figure out what they were interested in, not what they thought would make them money. “It’s very difficult to chase after a wave,” he said. "What’s better is to place yourself in the middle of something you genuinely love and wait for the wave to come find you."

If you or someone you know is at school or has recently finished and is trying to navigate their career journey, I am a chartered work and organisational psychologist and have been working with career seekers for over a decade. I’m based locally in Killarney so please reach out for a confidential chat www.careercraft.ie.