I’m not talking about landing your dream job in the world of unicorns and rainbows, but in the real world — the one where you have bills to pay and maybe even mouths to feed. What if you could know what you love to do and get paid to do it? (Click here to tweet this question.)

How would that change things in your life?

If you’re starting to get excited, you’re not alone. Because there’s a powerful tool that will help you to define and land your dream job. It’s called The Reverse Resume.

This will help you approach the search for your dream job from a new perspective. So hold onto your heels. You’re about to be blown away.

The limitations of regular resumes

You are, undoubtedly, familiar with a regular resume.

It’s a method for trying to cram every positive detail about yourself and all your career accomplishments into a single page. The goal is to impress upon those who make hiring decisions that you might be a good fit for a particular job.

The regular resume is meant to sum up your entire range of experience on one sheet of paper. Then that piece of paper is usually shuffled, filed, lost or disregarded. Not a nice way to be treated.

Flipping the status quo with a Reverse Resume

The Reverse Resume, as you might expect, is exactly the opposite.

Instead of summing yourself up neatly on one sheet of paper for review and critique to see if you meet criteria for the job, you sum up criteria of the job to see if it meets your standards.

Instead of hiring managers asking, “Is this candidate worth our time to bring in?” You ask, “Is this job worth my time — perhaps years of my life?”

The Reverse Resume can help you answer that question in a way that’s in sync with your deepest desires — even if you don’t know what those are just yet.

Feelings, not functionality

There’s a reason your job isn’t working for you: You don’t like it.

At first glance, not liking your work comes from the “soft” world of feelings, right brains and other touchy-feely things. But the truth is, humans are emotional beings. Not liking your work is just as valid as any reason you might give for wanting a different job.

It’s hard for many people to accept that feelings prevent their job satisfaction. It may be easier to accept that you’re simply no good at your job, don’t have the right skills or don’t have the right training. Clients have said to me, “I can’t believe I’m going to give up this job that pays so well because I don’t like it. It feels so irresponsible.”

Generally, the less we like something, the worse we are at it, and the less inclined we are to want to engage in it or immerse ourselves in it deeply. There’s no good reason to endure life at a job you don’t like.

There’s so much work out there to be done — so much work that could benefit from the most vibrant and alive version of you. So don’t settle for an un-animated version of yourself.

When you look for your next job using The Reverse Resume, your goal should be to capture what you want your work to feel like. Instead of a description of the function of your job (what you’ll be doing) start with a description of what you’ll be feeling and what happens that makes you feel that way.

• Are you feeling invigorated by the conversation you get to have with brilliant coworkers?
• Are you feeling stimulated by the interesting problems you’re working to solve?
• Are you feeling like a superhero because you touched someone’s life?

Start with what you love to feel, what lights you up, what skills and talents you love to use, and the situations or environments you most love to be in or problems you love to solve. Ask yourself: Where and when do I thrive?

The environment where you thrive

Once you paint that picture of what you want to feel and where you thrive, work backwards from there. You can ask yourself, what kinds of jobs would be most suited to someone who needs to be solving interesting problems and be surrounded by brilliant coworkers? A police officer? A scientist?

Keep brainstorming ideas. When you run out of ideas, it’s time to narrow down your list.

The deeper you dig into your Reverse Resume, the more you’ll know about how your environment should feel. Should your work for a startup or a corporation? Is working a 9-to-5 a better fit for you, or do you want to become an entrepreneur?

Keep asking yourself where you’ll be happiest. This is the criteria that will help you narrow your list (otherwise, you’ll just end up in another job you don’t like.)

Remember though, there are lots of reasons not to like a job. If you’re starving to death because your job doesn’t pay a living wage, you might grow to hate your job. If you never live to work a day because you’re in school too long, you might never know if you like your job.

So you’ll have to balance many factors when you think about your happiness, not just how joyful the actual job might make you — though this does count a great deal. Only you get to decide how much weight to give each thing. It’s up to you and your individual circumstances, and what makes you… well, happy.

Try it yourself

Instead of searching for your dream job the old-fashioned way — looking at specific job titles and roles to see if they might fit — turn the whole process backwards with The Reverse Resume.

1. Think about who you are, how you want to feel and where you thrive.
2. Think about what jobs might feel like a good fit for you and make you happy.
3. Refine your list until you come up with a job that seems like the perfect happiness match.

You don’t have to grope in the dark any longer. Many people don’t know where to start when they try to figure out what their dream job is. But having structure makes the process so much easier. Finding that dream job is possible! I’d love to know if you have success using The Reverse Resume.

Jessica Sweet, LICSW is a career and life coach dedicated to helping 45-55 year olds find or create work they love. You can get a more complete version of The Reverse Resume and her entire suite of free tools in the Passion Portfolio at http://www.wishingwellcoach.com

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The post How to Write a Resume: A Totally New Approach That Will Get You Hired appeared first on Brazen Life.

A woman loves making pottery, so she decides to open a little shop to sell her wares.

A man is passionate about writing, so he quits his job to focus on his first novel.

Then… wait for it…

Nothing happens.

Nothing. No customers, no readers, no clients. Zilch.

They return to the world of the “working dead” with their tails tucked between their legs and their egos bruised. But, worst of all, they’ve lost faith in the kind of world where they can make a living doing something they love.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

The hard truth about “following your passion”

We believe money will follow if we do what we love, but it’s a dangerous recommendation.

It makes sense that you’d make the most money when you do something you’re interested and invested in. When you bring your heart and soul to work, the work should earn you more than when you’re dragging yourself in every day.

Right?

As a career coach, I’ve seen it happen again and again. Clients get excited about their idea for a passion-based business. They start making plans, they mentally decorate their new offices and they wonder how their boss is going to take it when they’ve made enough money to quit. And they do all this without taking into account the biggest myth.

When it comes to earning money doing what you love, you have to remember: Right now, nobody cares about your passions.

It isn’t about you.

It isn’t about your passion.

It’s about your clients and customers: what you give to them, what you do for them and how they benefit from knowing you. You have to make them care about your passion so much they’ll pay you to do it. (Click here to Tweet this thought.)

The Hollywood Principle

Many people blindly follow their passion, believing their love for it will be enough to make them successful. But they fail to factor in what I call The Hollywood Principle.

The Hollywood Principle states that no matter how passionate you are about something, nobody cares about it simply because you do.

If you want clients or customers, you need to be concerned with why they should care about what you’re doing, even when you’re doing what you love.

People fleeing the corporate world — the world of 9-to-5, dictated eating and bathroom schedules — tend to equate a passion-based business with freedom. They want the freedom to be their own boss, the freedom to be in charge of their own time and the freedom to do whatever it is they love.

With this mindset, they throw caution to the wind and do what they love without regard for The Hollywood Principle. They pursue their venture with the love and compulsion characteristic of passions.

But it all goes horribly wrong because they forget to connect what they love to something others will care about.  They’re so engrossed in doing what they love and why it matters to them that they forget to look up and show others why they should care about it, too.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you have to contort your passion-based business into something it isn’t to find potential clients and customers. You’re not out to find any market need and fill it. That’s the old way of doing business, and also how you’ll end back up with something that feels like a “job.”

The real challenge is to persuasively communicate the gift of your passion, your mission and your unique value.

Your unique value

You’ve probably heard about unique value from the worlds of personal branding and job hunting.  But in this case, instead of unique value being about who you are and the value you offer, it’s about what you’re really here to do.

Are you an expert at making pretty, functional pottery, or are you helping people to experience something through your work?

Are you writing a great novel, or are you on a mission to make people think about an issue so profoundly meaningful to you it’s a part of who you are?

Unique value for passion-based workers is very close to the heart. It’s why you do what you do. It’s the heart and soul of who you are.

You can start looking for your unique value by knowing what you love to give so much you can’t help giving it (your mission). Once you’ve found that, it’s your job to make other people care about it, too. Don’t just expect that other people will “get it.” Show them why they should care.

A passion with a mission behind it is a world-changing force.

Your challenge

If you dream of doing work based on your passion, answer these unique value questions in the comments below:

Why do you do your passion?

What do you bring to the table that no one else does?

What would you love to contribute to the world?

Spend your time doing something you absolutely love, and move away from wasting your life on things that don’t matter to you. Now is your chance to define what matters and why others should care about it as much as you do.

Jessica Sweet, LICSW, is a life and career coach who can help you uncover your passions and make money doing work you love.If you hate your current job, but going off the grid and moving to Zimbabwe isn’t your idea of a good time, it’s time to do what you love in a way that fits your real life. Join Jessica at http://wishingwellcoach.com/.

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The post The Hard Truth About Following Your Passion to Do Work You Love appeared first on Brazen Life.