extraordinary results career gentleman come on.
And so I'm excited.
Like there's just something.
I actually caught the tail end of that.
I reached out to my LinkedIn and connected.
We're going to connect on Zoom later tomorrow.
Oh, that's awesome, man.
Two powerhouses getting together.
That'll be great.
So- Yeah, no, he's a,
he sounded like an interesting guy.
So-
Ken, as far as finding your dream job purpose,
where did you begin your career?
Meaning your first job.
How old were you?
What was it?
My first job was like fresh out of university.
Got my business degree.
I started in packaged goods marketing
with a company that no longer exists,
but they were the makers of Listerine
and Hulzmethylithus cough tablets.
And those were the brands that I was the brand manager on.
And after that, I ended up at 7UP
and I was a brand manager on the Softrink 7UP.
And after that, I went into advertising
and then I spent eight years of my life in advertising.
And then after that, I became an entrepreneur.
I've been an entrepreneur now.
Oh God, for more years than I want to go.
Did you guys invent the game heads down?
No, I just got to set 7UP.
So real quick, did you have a job before the university
as a kid or no?
Before university?
Yeah.
I had part-time jobs just like any kid.
I got my very first job at 14 working in a public library.
And my next job was working as a stock boy
in a retail store.
And then I spent four years working in-
I bet that was your dream job.
No, that wasn't the dream job.
And then, yeah, then I spent all the time
I was going to university and everything,
my part-time jobs, they were all working in camera retail.
So I was a camera salesperson.
Okay.
And so when did you get hit with this idea of like,
man, I got to find my dream job?
It's a personal experience that happened to me.
Like, I mean, I, and we'll probably end up talking
about this a little bit later on in the show.
I just woke up one morning and I couldn't get out of bed
because I hated my job so much.
And that's when I realized I had to figure it out.
Were you 14?
No, no, no, I was a lot older than that.
I was 34 by then.
Another 20 years had passed.
34 when you realized that you got to get,
you got to get in a new career.
Yeah, it was, it was, that's when I realized that.
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
With Jackson Callum, I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hi everybody and welcome in to another episode
of Vision Pros Live.
I'm super excited to be here.
My name is Jackson Callum, the founder
of First Class Business as well.
And I am excited to have Ken Stephen on board.
We're going to be talking about finding your dream job.
And that's super relevant for you entrepreneurs
out there as well.
And not just for the ones who are opening vape shops,
just for the sake of opening a vape shop or a laundromat,
just for the sake of cash flow.
I think those people as well, you have an opportunity
to stop, reflect and think, do I really love
what I'm doing with my time?
Do I really love the way that my life is turning out?
And that can be a strong word for those of you
who are maybe trying to figure out how to like
the things that are happening in life.
But bear with me, hang in there.
We're going to have Ken talk about how to revolutionize
your life through this revolutionary way
of finding your job, your dream job and your purpose.
And he's got passion very similar to mine.
So I'm excited to blow the roof off of this one.
With that said, I want to make sure to give some highlights
to our sponsors.
These are tools.
These are people who elevate and uplift my life.
These are actually not sponsors that pay for this position.
I choose to put them there because I know a lot of you
need help with different resources.
So ColdClick is who we go to and utilize
for helping us strategize our LinkedIn automation
and setting that up correctly so that we can meet with
and reach as many as possible who are like-minded for us.
Now, I'm going to give a little tip today about that.
One of the things that I see a lot of people
waste their time doing is that they're not aligned with me.
They take the time to respond and tell me that.
And they take the time to sometimes say,
try to condescend or say something silly
and it doesn't do anything to me.
I'm fine.
I wonder, why do they waste so much of their daily time
dealing with spam?
What are they going to do, put out the spam fire in the world?
I don't think so.
And my messages, they're not.
They're very inviting.
They're very opening.
But my point is, if you take the time
to respond to somebody you're not going to work with,
you're wasting your own time.
Just let it go.
Just let it be.
Don't even bother.
They'll go away.
If they're not going to provide you a great service,
they're not going to be persistent,
they're not going to be consistent,
they're not going to be reliable, they will go away.
But if they are persistent, consistent, reliable,
and ethical, then it might be worth taking a look
at working with them.
So those are some secrets and tricks
for you in terms of creating automation that saves you time
and allows you to spend your time with great people
like Ken Stevens.
Another great person that I want to highlight and recommend
is tapmental.io is David Goodall,
who runs that company, Tap Mental.
I don't really specialize very much
in working with blue collar companies, general contractors,
construction, all that.
I grew up in an oil-filled family,
but I kind of fell far from the tree.
I don't enjoy changing tires that are the same size as I am.
And so Dave, at the same time, he really
does hit it off well with the good old boys in the world.
And he's got extreme understandings
of data analytics, finances, how to grow businesses,
how to build systems, and also how
to get into your head and heart and help you extract
what's really going on and what's really holding back
those processes so that you can unlock growth at greater
levels.
I've just been really impressed with Dave.
So every time I come on here and talk about him
as a sponsor of the show, I think I share something new.
But the more important aspect that I
want you to take advantage of is go look at the case studies.
Just go see who he's working with and how.
And if you want a proposal from him,
test his knowledge to an extreme level of where
he would go with it.
And if you have an experience like me,
he always kind of blows my mind with how deep he's
able to go, how quickly, and how on point
he is about the questions that he asks about operations.
I really enjoy my role play sessions
with him on how to go about helping
businesses with their growth.
So the last one that I'll highlight here,
the one that's the dearest and dearest to my heart,
is the water project.
So if you have the opportunity to help people out that
don't have access to things like podcasts and live streams
and being able to just enjoy their day,
they have to go get water.
They have to go find a source of drinking water.
And it's not always safe.
We have the opportunity to actually help
very specific communities that don't have access
to clean drinking water build what's
called a borehole well or a sand dam.
There's probably other projects that they do.
And I really enjoy the process of learning about not only what
am I giving to and how does it work,
but I get to see the effect that they put on the community
because they share through social media
and through newsletter posts exactly what has happened
and what your contribution has contributed to,
even if you were only able to give a couple of dollars.
So if you aren't in a position to give financially,
but you're hearing this, hear this with your heart
and just share it with people.
And also, if you know of a cause that we should be giving to,
then drop it in the comments.
Because we want to know what other causes we
can be contributing to that help us really
serve the masses.
Everything that we do on Vision Pros Live, first class
business, et cetera, is about helping us put ourselves
in a position where we can help the 8 billion people
on this earth who desperately need help.
There are so many people who have far greater needs than we
do, so we always take the time to make sure to dive
into that in the beginning of the show.
And so without further ado, I'm going
to bring Ken Steven on in just a minute.
Ken's on a mission to help 1 million people get unstuck
from a job that provides no joy or meaning
and discover work that will fuel their passions
and inspire their purpose.
Most of us spend the majority of our time in our work.
It's something that is so important.
I was very impressed, too, with James Hilliard today.
We talked about a very similar subject.
And he said, if you're having a tough time at home
or in your personal life, then it likely transitions with you
to work.
And then your baggage, you're actually bringing problems
to work with you.
I thought that was really interesting.
But what if you could both improve the way you show up
to work and the environment and also go find a job that you
really, really enjoy doing and are passionate about?
If you can combine those two realities,
it's amazing how much it can make a difference on how
you go to bed at night, how you enjoy your health, what type
of experiences you have when you're family,
when you come home because you're not griping or worried
or stressed about what happened at work.
There are so many advantages when you actually
enjoy what you're doing.
And so Ken, thank you for joining me today.
I'm happy to have you on Vision Pros.
And Jackson, thank you for inviting me to be your guest
today.
I'm happy to be here.
I hope I can contribute something that's
valuable to your listeners.
I know you will.
I already know you will.
You've never met with me and not provided value to my life.
So I see that happening right now with the listeners.
By the way, thank you for sending the book.
We'll talk about this.
And I don't want to forget to talk about it
because this is awesome.
You sent me the book.
You sent me a bookmark with it.
You even signed it.
Super gracious of you, man.
So my pleasure.
This is great.
We're going to be talking about this in just a minute.
First off, who should be listening?
And why do you feel they should be listening to you, Ken?
They got millions of options.
Well, no, no, no.
I get it.
Let me put it this way.
If you're someone who's feeling stuck in a job right now
that maybe you don't enjoy all that much
and the work that you're doing isn't very fulfilling
and you certainly don't feel inspired,
you'd really rather be doing work
that you could feel passionate about doing,
but you don't really have any clue
what your true passions are,
then you're my ideal audience.
And why you'd want to listen to me is because,
hey, I know exactly how you feel.
I've been there.
I've done that.
I've been stuck in the same place.
And that was the motivation for me to spend 16 years
researching and tweaking and perfecting
an online assessment called the Dream Job Type Indicator,
which now makes it fast and easy for anyone to figure out
what they're naturally passionate about doing.
And once you know what you're passionate about doing,
it's a lot easier to do a job shift into work
that you know you're going to finally make you happy at work
or create your own business,
your own passion-based business.
I love that.
So if you've ever done an assessment in the past
and you have people in your ear that say like,
oh, another assessment, ignore them.
That's like somebody saying, oh, another workout.
We should constantly be assessing for good
and try to have some fun with it.
But whether it's Strengths Finder, Disc, et cetera,
adding to it Passion Pro,
which is the last one that I created,
it does not replace the value that can come
from the separate paradigm perspective and angle
that somebody like Ken has developed
through his own experience as well.
So I am excited to dive a little bit more
into the assessment today.
But my first question for you is,
what's your vision for those that you serve?
You defined some of the painful realities
that they're in right now.
What do you look forward to seeing them accomplish
two days, two months, two years,
20 years down the road or their legacy?
Well, you know what?
I put this on my website, it's in the book too.
Like I envision a world where everyone eagerly embraces
their job, feeling passionate and purpose-driven
by what they do, right?
And it's like we spend 80,000 hours of our life working.
Half of our waking hours, we are basically at work.
And it makes no sense to me that you should take
the precious time that we have on this planet
and spend it doing stuff that has no joy,
meaning or purpose.
It makes no sense.
So my vision would be to help people
if you're feeling unfulfilled and uninspired,
to help them figure out what makes them passionate
and purpose-driven, to help them figure out
what can they do, like what is the work they can do
that they love that can make a difference somehow, right?
Like to me, it's important.
Like if you wanna feel fulfilled in life,
you need to feel like your work is making a difference,
that you are serving in some way that contributes
in a positive manner, right?
And so it's not just about making a job
where you can make money.
If the job you're doing makes money,
but you don't feel any meaning or purpose to that job,
then you're denying yourself fulfillment.
Mm, yeah, absolutely.
And it's one thing to have somebody else block you,
but it's another to be blocking ourselves in that reality.
So again, let's talk about your vision a little bit.
So what's your vision for you over the next,
again, I don't wanna quantify the time period.
I want you to quantify it for us.
Where does your vision take you to
and what does the fulfillment of that look like?
I've got a huge vision, right?
Like it's just, it's actually,
it's become my life purpose, really.
You know, like I've kind of gone from the corporate world
and I've gone from the entrepreneurial stuff,
spent basically 45 years of my life in marketing
and I retired from that.
This is what I do now and what I'm gonna be doing
for the next 30 years.
And in that 30 year period, what I wanna do,
again, I wanna help at least 1 million people
get unstuck from jobs that provide them with joy,
no joy or meaning or purpose and help them find jobs
that fuel their passion, inspire their purpose.
I wanna do that, but-
You're gonna crush that.
Yeah, no, and it's gonna take a while to do that, right?
It's gonna take a while to do that.
But I'd also like to, I'd like to change the way
that organizations think about structuring teams, okay?
Like right now, I mean, we have job descriptions.
Why do job descriptions have to be written in such a way
that people do 60% of the things on that list
that they don't enjoy doing?
Why don't we change the job descriptions around
so they get to do more of what they feel passionate
about doing and then maybe some of the stuff
that they don't feel passionate about doing,
they can give to somebody else on the team, right?
And people can swap responsibilities
on their job descriptions around
and therefore we create a new idea
of what job description should look like
in order to increase productivity in the workplace.
Because every year, every year Gallup does this study
that shows that 85% of the people worldwide
are not passionately engaged in their job, okay?
In North America, it's the best around the world.
In North America, seven out of 10 people
are not passionately engaged in their job.
Two out of 10 people are negatively engaged in their job.
They're actually disruptive in the workplace
because they hate their job so much.
So what have we-
Was this before COVID or after COVID?
No, this has been going on for like 20 years
they've been doing this.
I bet it's worse now.
I would put money on that, go ahead.
Actually, I think the latest study comes out
that it's the same as it always has been basically.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, it's-
That's fair.
It boggles my mind how this has not changed
year after year after year, right?
Now Gallup's response to this is they're trying
to get people like focus on your strengths, right?
That's what they're trying to do.
They're the ones that created the StrengthsFinder.
I think it's a wonderful assessment.
I love that assessment.
I think it has a definite purpose
and it should be-
It changed my life in a big way.
It really did.
It is a wonderful assessment, right?
And what I'm trying to do with my thing is,
I would love my assessment to be a companion piece to that
to fill in the missing piece.
It's not about just stuff that you're good at doing
and excel at doing that you should also feel passionate
about doing the stuff that you're good at doing.
If you don't feel-
Yeah, I love that.
I wanna circle back a little bit,
make sure people caught what you said
because I think it'd be easy to brush off.
And that was, you talked about rewriting the job descriptions.
And so some of the non-English lit majors
might be like, what?
Just reordering the job description, but the power.
Think of it like a GPS, right?
If you take a GPS and you scramble the directions
and you say, go left here, go right there, go left.
And you change that, it 100% affects the journey
that you have as well.
But when you're more intentional then about,
I wanna get from point A to point B, right?
The GPS takes you there in a direction
that you probably want to go
in order to get there fast and have the experience.
Well, when we take a look at the job descriptions
and pull back the curtains on,
these aren't just items that have to be done,
boxes to be checked, but how do we gamify this?
How do we make this a process of,
that's the process of making sure that we make it fun.
That's what the EMETH talks about,
is make everything a game and an enjoyable process.
And I think that you hit one of the keys in the head is,
we have to go back to that basic route
of what is being done here and how do we share that work too.
That's a little bit, whoa, Ken,
like that's a vision that makes me a little uncomfortable
as an entrepreneur, like that's a big overhaul,
but I also know in my heart,
that's gonna lead to massive results too.
So, well said, keep going with it.
Well, I can say it's a big vision.
It is a big vision, that hit me hard.
I was like, oh, that's a big undertaking.
And bigger undertakings like that
always have tremendous results.
Even if they have to create a little bit of riff
in the process, but part of the reality
of avoiding the risk with that is working with somebody
who's been planning this out in their mind for many years,
who has actually already thought through
or been through the experience of worst case scenarios
that could pop up.
So, with that, I didn't mean to do that,
but I'm gonna jump right into,
what is your worst business or career experience ever?
What did that look like, Ken?
Oh, hey, I'll never forget this one.
It was like one day, I was 34 years old,
was a vice president of a global corporation.
And I had a job that most people would have loved to have.
I had no reason I should hate that job.
I mean, I had a wonderful team that was giving me 110%.
I had this incredible compensation package
that most people would have died for.
And I woke up one morning and I just had so much anxiety.
I couldn't drag myself out of bed to face the day ahead.
Like I hated my job so much, right?
And that took me two days to figure out what was wrong.
And the insight that I had was that I kept getting promoted
for things I was really good at doing, okay?
And by the time I got to that senior level,
80% of my day was doing things I was really good at doing,
but that I actually did not enjoy doing at all,
to the point that it became stressful and created anxiety.
And you think about like you're not feeling fulfilled,
you're not feeling inspired
because you're doing stuff that makes you miserable,
even though you're really, really good at it.
So every time I hear somebody talking about,
all you have to do is keep working on your strengths
and keep leveraging what you're really, really good at.
Sooner or later, you get to a point
where you're making so much money and everything.
You're gonna be so much, you're gonna be happy,
you're gonna be passionate.
No, you're not, I'm proof.
And so that was my worst experience, okay?
And that was the motivation for me
to try to figure out what I was passionate about doing.
The problem is I had no clue what my passion was.
I've got 43 books on my shelf here
on how to discover life, passion and purpose,
and none of them connected the dots for me, right?
It's a very introspective process.
It's almost like you have to sit cross-legged
on the floor of burning incense from time to time,
run up the mountain, talk to the monk,
all that kind of stuff, right?
It's a very kind of spiritual,
introspective kind of process.
And it has you looking for just one thing
out of a universe of thousands of possibilities
that could potentially be your passion.
It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, right?
So let's look at that.
So it sounds like that's the powerful lesson
we should dive into.
So when it comes to, you had 30 plus books
that you had read on finding your passion.
None of the books did the trick.
And so, yeah, what is that lesson
that the visionaries can learn from your experience
and how did you unlock the passion?
It was trial and error, literally.
It was trial and error until, and it took years.
I mean, I was 34 when that happened.
It took almost 20 years of trial and error
to figure stuff out to the point where one day
I had a eureka moment and said,
oh my God, I just figured out what my passion was, right?
And then I started to do a little reverse engineering
and I started saying, well, I did all this
through the deeply introspective process and trial and error,
which everyone tells you to do, just like,
there are guys right now that I really, really respect,
guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and stuff like that
are saying, look, just keep going and trying things
until you figure out what you're passionate about.
Yes, you can do that.
I did that, but it can take years, right?
So that's why I felt there has to be a way where
an assessment can be used so that you don't have to rely
on introspective techniques, but you can actually find
some scientifically based methodology
that can be credible and reliable and repeatable, right?
And it took me 16 years of testing to do that.
It took me 16 years to figure out.
Very good.
And so it sounds like you're gonna save us some time
on that.
We're gonna circle back to that.
I wanna hit the subject of Gary Vaynerchuk real quick
because I have massive, massive respect for what he does.
Yeah, I love the guy.
And so do you, I can see that.
And at the same time, so many people, I think,
don't recognize his audience and who it is
that he serves at his core.
Now, he serves all of us, right?
And everybody has the opportunity to serve anybody.
If grandma's walking across the street and I say,
I can go outside and serve her too.
That does not make her my core audience.
That just means that I'm gonna be a good person
to go do what I need to do.
When it comes to Gary, he comes from the Bronx,
of New York or Harlem or one of those New York,
you know it's dangerous suburbs of New York,
those barrios as you'd say in Spanish.
And that's who he serves.
And I love it.
And I love that he's committed to it.
That's one of the reasons he drops F-bombs
over and over and over because he speaks the dialect
of the people that he's designed to serve.
And he tells them, you gotta grind, you gotta hustle,
you gotta figure out everything that you can do,
everything you can to get out.
And I see a lot of people that have mommy
and daddy's credit card that have everything given to them.
Their education, they've got the opportunity
to go and do anything they want to.
And they're buying this grind culture
because they probably feel attracted
to the idea of being like Gary Vee.
But they're kind of, they're not really paying attention
to who's the audience around them
and what's the language of the people
that they could influence the most.
It's a really interesting concept, but to your point,
we don't have to buy into the grind culture just because,
you know, and if you look at the grind
from a third world perspective,
going and finding clean water,
I mean, imagine everybody was talking about that.
Now everybody's going looking for clean water.
I don't think it would create the right type of balance
for our lives because you who's listening,
you are the visionary for your life.
Ken can't tell you what to do.
I can't tell you what to do.
Gary Vee can't tell you what to do.
We can be guides, but you also have to use your own intuition
to recognize what pattern, what style works for you.
So Ken, you mentioned it was a 20 year journey still,
even after that point.
So what is that powerful lesson that, whoop,
helped you, you know, I know it's kind of a eureka,
but I don't wanna wait 20 years.
What do you got for me?
Well, no, it was, I came to the conclusion
that your passion is not a thing.
Okay, this was the big, this was the big aha moment for me.
Your passion is not one thing, okay?
At the time I called it a theme.
It is a theme, okay,
that holds a bunch of individual things together.
So what I was discovering
through the deeply introspective process over the years
is I come up with something that I thought was my passion.
And then I say, well, no, because no, that was my passion
and that's not even related to that.
And something else would come up saying,
well, that doesn't relate to that.
And it took me, it was that one day
when it was a eureka moment and I figured it out and saying,
ah, this is what relates all these things together.
It's a theme, okay?
So just so you know what my passion theme was
that I discovered is that anytime that I was involved
in any kind of a process of improving or perfecting anything,
didn't matter what it was,
you could give me a document to edit to make it better.
You give me a video to edit to make it better.
You could say, build me a new website, make it better.
I could do that, right?
You could say, go into this room and move the furniture
around so that the room is a much better room
to live in or work in.
Okay, I could do that anytime.
Golf swing, I could spend hours
trying to perfect my golf swing, okay?
Because it was trying to improve and perfect and said, okay,
so that's a theme improving and perfecting.
Okay, what other themes are there?
And after, at one time I was up to 34 or whatever,
I settled on 21 different themes and I tested themes
and people didn't understand themes,
but they do understand types.
So now I call them dream job types
or I call them job passion types when I use my assessment
when I go into corporations, okay?
Because it's the same study, I just have a different report.
Okay, it's the same assessment, just different report.
And so just so you know, ideas,
so people are probably wondering,
what the heck is a dream job type?
Well, improving and perfecting is one of them, okay?
But something like analyzing or calculating,
evaluating or judging, designing, persuading,
storytelling, artistic creation, okay?
Investigating or fact-finding, coaching or mentoring,
these are dream job types, okay?
So they define a workflow process.
So you can imagine that we talked
about job descriptions earlier.
So you could have somebody that really loves to do organizing
and coordinating, well, guess what?
That's great if you're a project manager, okay?
But you have somebody that loves
to do documenting and chronicling.
Well, great, that's an administrative task, okay?
So what you do is you say,
I'm gonna take all of the administrative tasks that I hate
and I'm gonna give it to that person over there
on the other side of the room that loves to do that stuff.
Okay, and then so you end up creating pods, right?
You get, you know, of passion experts, right?
And so that's, it's just where my crazy brain takes me.
That's fun, man, it's awesome.
And I love that you openly refer to the resources
that have influenced the process as well
of creating your own assessment.
I know a lot of people who pretend
to create great assessments and things like that,
and they kind of isolate themselves
and act like the other ones don't matter.
But there's a building block process that exists with this.
And I see your system reflects a lot
of the other great systems that I've relied on out there,
like StrengthsFinder.
So as we get ready to go into a few more lessons,
first I wanna ask you about
what's been your best experience in business,
helping people in terms of finding their passions?
What does that look like for you?
Hey, you know, I'm glad you asked that
because this is near and dear to me
and it's totally aligned with my vision.
Last year I had the honor and privilege
of helping more than 200 people
establish their own business based on their passions
by being either coaches or consultants
or online course creators or trainers.
And it was just so fulfilling for me
to work with them to help them uncover
what their niche should be
and then help them design what their high ticket program
should be to offer their services
in the most valuable way
to the people they wanted to serve.
So that's my best experience so far,
like 200 people last year.
That's awesome.
That's great.
And when you say that high ticket program,
for those who aren't familiar with that term perhaps,
what we're referring to is them getting paid
really a sufficient amount of money
to be able to sustain their business
and continue to build upon it,
providing a very high end service for people
that they can then dramatically help them
transform their lives.
Nothing wrong with selling lollipops
for trick or treaters and socks through the Dollar Tree.
Nothing wrong with that at all.
It's a different style of helping and supporting people
but when you're looking at high ticket,
that's what Ken was helping these entrepreneurs establish.
That's cool.
Let's talk about exploring the opportunities that exist
with if somebody wants this book,
Dream Job Discovery,
or we're in a position where they're looking for a job,
should they start with the book?
Should they start with the assessment?
What would you do today?
If you were back to square one as that 34 year old,
what would your path look like?
Okay, that's great.
I'm great that you brought it back to 34
because as I said, I have all these books on my shelf.
That's where I went.
That was the first thing I did.
I went to a book.
So that's one of the reasons I wrote the book
because I wanted people to finally have a book
that they could go to
because the other ones weren't connecting the dots.
That was smart.
So you designed the book
knowing that that's the path people are likely to take,
even though it sounds like you also know
of a better solution
but you can't get a horse to drink water
if they're not willing to.
No, sorry.
So I started with the book
but the book was written,
again, I'm a big fan of CliftonStrengths.
So if anyone who takes StrengthsFinder,
we'll see if there's a companion book to that assessment.
So I created the assessment first
and then I wrote the book to be a companion piece
to the assessment to help people interpret their results.
And I did that because then it could reach more people with,
I can only work one-on-one with so many people
but with the book,
I can reach those million people.
So everyone, if they buy the book
and they read the first three chapters,
when they get to the third chapter,
it's going to say, go download the assessment,
take the assessment.
So I would encourage them to buy the book first
if they wanted to do something on their own.
The first three chapters gives you all the context
so that you know why you're doing what you're doing,
right?
And it helps you understand too
that the assessment in this whole job,
dream job discovery thing,
this missing piece is the passion.
But all these other assessments,
they are the other pieces that are also needed
to come up with your dream job.
You need to know your personality traits,
you need a Myers-Briggs,
you need to know your behavior traits,
you need a DIS,
you need CliftonStrengths
to figure out what your natural strengths and talents are.
My assessment is the missing pieces,
the stuff that you're naturally going to feel passionate
about doing, right?
And so the book explains that, sets it all up,
helps you figure out how to use all of those.
Later on in the book too,
I give you links to go take those other assessments
and then I show you how to put it all together
to pinpoint the job
that you'd actually feel passionate about doing.
Awesome.
Let's open the can a little bit on this.
So let's dive into,
let's just pretend people don't have the book,
but don't have the ability to buy the book.
But they want to start this process on their own right now.
What would you tell your 34 year old self
to do at that point
if they didn't have access to the resources?
A really simple thing I would encourage everyone to do.
Remember I said that my discovery
was that I kept getting promoted for doing things
that I was really good at doing, right?
And that's what happens.
Like you are probably right now leveraging on your resume
all the things you're really good at doing
to get out of a job that you don't enjoy
to go find one that you hope you will enjoy, right?
So the first thing I would encourage them to do
is get a piece of paper
and on one side of the paper write down
all the things that you know you're really good at doing,
all the tasks at work that you excel doing, right?
Put it aside for a couple of hours, go have a coffee,
come back, then just circle the things on that list
that you really enjoy doing, okay?
That's gonna be the first eye opener to you that,
oh my goodness, the stuff that I'm really good at doing
is stuff that I don't enjoy doing,
but now at least I've got a few clues now
of the things that I do like doing.
And that'll open your eyes to start paying attention
to things that you actually enjoy doing.
And then maybe you will start to see the pattern, right?
Of what might actually be a passion
that you wanna pursue, okay?
The simplest thing obviously
would just be to go take the assessment
because the assessment can tell you in 20 minutes
what it is you'd be passionate about doing.
But if you can't do that, then at least start to take note
of the things that you are passionate about doing.
And you do hear a lot in these other books
and everything that I talk about that you can read.
I mean, there were issues of you can think back
to your childhood of things that you felt passionate
about doing as a child.
I don't know about maybe some people can do that.
I mean, that certainly wasn't anything
that could help me at the time,
but I can tell you that once I figured it out
and I thought back to my childhood,
once I figured it out using my own approach
and I thought back to my childhood, it is correct.
The stuff that I enjoy doing as a child,
yeah, that's what I love doing as a kid.
Like it all fits.
So the whole idea is that, and I'll tell you why this fits.
It's because my whole assessment
is based on your core values.
The assessment is measuring your core values.
Okay. All right.
Now, most people, if you ask people,
what are your core values?
They might come up with four or five, okay?
But the assessment's measuring way more than that.
The master list of core values has over 600 values on it.
Right? So there's no way you'd know them all.
What I did is I took those core values
and I took the ones that would be most appropriate
to the businesses for business use, right?
Yep. Okay.
So I got a good list here.
Let me circle back a little bit on this, Ken.
So one, write that list of things that you're really good at.
I like that.
And then I like that you say the take the break too
and then come back to it.
And when you're coming back to it,
you're gonna circle what it is that you enjoy,
which gives you a little bit of insight
into what your passions might be,
a little bit, at least help you understand
what you can look for in terms of job opportunities.
For instance, if you hate making phone calls
and you work in a call center, you know,
then you might have a really good indicator really quickly
that you should probably look for a job
that doesn't involve a phone for 90% of your day.
And then you said you're gonna start taking note
of what you're passionate about.
Let's redefine the word passion a little bit too.
People get confused, you know, with I do,
with semantics and vernacular,
there's lots of ways to look at that word.
So when you're talking about passions, Ken,
can you describe some elements of passion,
maybe what are you passionate about
or what is common for people to define as their passions?
Yeah, I think that there's a misconception out there
that there's myths about what is a passion,
what's not a passion, right?
So think of it this way.
When you are passionately engaged in something, okay,
you tend to get in a flow state.
In other words, you make a cup of coffee, you put it down,
you start doing something, four hours later, you look up,
you haven't taken a sip of your coffee yet, okay?
It's almost like an athlete being in the zone, okay?
It's something that totally consumes you on a mental
and our physical or an emotional level, okay?
And you just get so engrossed in it that time passes, right?
And that's your first clue.
And the clue that you should definitely look for,
that's this most definitive clue that,
oh my goodness, this is probably a passion.
Because I put my coffee down
and I didn't take a sip of it for like three hours, right?
So what was I doing?
What is it about that?
Write it down, right?
Okay, and then you'll start to see patterns like that.
Every time you get into a flow state, okay?
What is it that you're doing, okay?
And then start to figure out, well,
think of it in terms of the workflow process.
What is it I'm doing?
Am I organizing my coordinating,
am I analyzing my calculating, am I evaluating
and am I judging, am I persuading somebody,
am I storytelling, am I chronicling?
These are the kinds of things
that you start to think of what it is.
Again, they don't have to correspond
to the ones that I have in my survey, okay?
But if you can identify yourself that, yeah,
like every time I try to persuade somebody to do something,
like I get so into it and I enjoy it so much,
you say, well, guess what?
Persuading is probably your passion type.
You should probably look for a job in sales
or you could be a litigation lawyer or a negotiator.
Those are, you start to see the patterns, right?
If you're really, if writing is really your thing,
or investigator fact-finding, okay?
Investigator fact-finding, well, yeah,
maybe police work, forensic work, maybe diagnostic work,
any kind of a job where you have to do diagnostics,
whether it be medical or automotive
or in the tech industry,
any kind of diagnostic work, right?
You start to see patterns, okay?
So that could be one way you could just do it on your own.
The other thing too is that we talked about values, right?
So start to think about values are important.
If you're doing something that,
if you're doing work that doesn't align
with your personal values,
you're gonna feel stress and anxiety, right?
So I think that look for companies to work for
where your values align with their corporate values.
Which means you have to define your values first, right?
In order to, do you help people with the process
of once they find their passion
and their dream job actually landing the job?
I'm just curious about that.
Yeah, actually what I, I can help them pinpoint the process,
the job, like I have a process that,
it's in the book too, the process for how you do
the transition from once you've found your dream job
to actually landing that job.
I'm not, I don't act as a regular criminal,
I'm not, I don't act as a regular career coach though,
in terms of, helping you find the different opportunities
and preparing for the job interview and writing your resume.
I don't do that sort of thing.
Let's bridge the gap on that a little bit then,
in that case.
So if somebody has taken your assessment,
passion assessment, and not just passion,
the dream job assessment, all that,
now they're ready to look for it.
Where do you recommend that they would go
for that next stage?
Where, what are some of the resources you've seen
in the market that are, hey, your destination ends here.
Where does that torch get passed to?
You just simply go on LinkedIn and you find a career coach
that works in your area, right?
A career coach.
Yeah, yeah, you could go to a career coach.
And the beauty of it is, now you can go to the career coach
or even, you can even go to a recruiter.
Let's say you're going to a recruiter
and you're saying, look, okay, you go to a headhunter
or a recruiter and saying, look, I'm looking for a job,
but here's the thing, I've had all these jobs
that I'm really, really good at doing.
I wanna, this is a job where these are my passions.
I'd like my passions also to be part of the process.
And I've taken this assessment
and now I know what my passions are.
So now we're gonna find a job
where I get to use those passions, right?
So you, and I explain all that in the book, right?
But it's...
Yeah, but we're here now.
So that's why I'm pushing you on it,
is we don't want the book yet.
We will want the book, but we've gotta make sure
that the gap you're bridging goes from the point A
to the point B, but we've also got a vision
of not a dead end road.
So that's helpful to know about the career coaches.
I never used a career coach, ever.
I've just had plenty, I've coached some,
but as far as using one, I didn't even know
when to begin that, how, et cetera.
Since you're so close to the subject matter,
that becomes an extremely helpful resource for people
to make sure they got the full vision of like,
okay, he can help me find the passion
and he can help me use that to get to where I wanna go
by then providing the open door of,
hey, I recommend these types of career coaches.
There's good Pat coaches, bad coaches, et cetera.
Who better to ask about the next stage of the process
than Ken Steven?
So do you have anybody in mind that you recommend
or any organization that is not fine?
You're welcome to think about that
and bring that back to us at some point.
I would be very curious when you find it.
You're gonna find that almost any career coach
that you find on LinkedIn or whatever,
they would be able to do that.
I mean, that they, you know, if they're,
and again, it's just like shopping for anything else.
You're gonna take a look at the person,
you're gonna see if it's a good fit,
you're gonna see if there's good chemistry
and that kind of thing.
As long as all that's there,
you're gonna give them a piece of information
they don't normally work with.
Just saying, look, I also want a job
where I get to leverage these passions, right?
And they'll take it from there.
Now for anybody that decides they wanna create
their own business, become a coach or a consultant
or a trainer or an online course creator, okay?
I do work directly with those individuals
to help them transition from the corporate world
to become an entrepreneur, okay?
That's where I spend my coaching time
rather than doing the career coaching side of things.
Awesome.
If you are looking to get help on that process,
both the processes, finding the passion,
trying to figure out, you know,
what can propel you forward knowing that Ken
went through 30 plus books without really finding that.
And you've been in that same situation
then I highly recommend reaching out to him.
Ken, where's the best place to reach out to you at?
The best place really is just my name, kensteven.com.
So just go there, kensteven.com.
And every way to contact me is there.
There's a, Steven, a couple of,
that's a download there too about if you wanna start
through your own business as an entrepreneur
to see whether or not you've got the right stuff.
I encourage you to get that download, it's a good start.
I do too.
Any types of assessments you can find
about entrepreneurship out there, my friends, is huge.
James Hilliard said it today too, so has Ken.
Entrepreneurship is not easy.
Elon Musk said, it's like eating glass.
It takes somebody who's crazy to do it.
Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn said,
it's like pushing a plane off of a cliff
and repairing it while it's going down.
It is not for the faint of heart.
And you may think with all your muster like,
well, I'm ready then.
And that's cool, you can be,
but it doesn't hurt to do some assessments
and make sure that you learn what you don't know
about the process as you get ready to go into it.
So I'm glad you provide assessments like that, Ken.
Not only does it provide clear pathways,
it also provides some security for people,
even whether they care about security
or not in the process.
But Vision Pros, we're excited to have you on.
If anybody that's listening right now
wants to be on the show, don't hesitate to apply.
We would love to hear out your vision
and see if it's something that applies
to those who are tuning in.
Ken, we're grateful to have you here as well.
If you got questions for Ken,
don't hesitate to drop those in the comments.
We will get those back to you.
We might even do some type of special loom video
for you, training video just for your specific question.
Ken's always been very giving to me.
We met at a conference several months ago.
And ever since then, his diligence,
his reliability, his consistency,
and his passion for what he does has 100% struck me.
So Ken, you're a friend for life.
Thanks for being on Vision Pros, man.
This was awesome.
And listen, thank you for helping me with my mission
to make the world a happier place for people to live.
Hey, absolutely.
You guys take care.
Everybody have a wonderful rest of your day.
Bye bye.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving.