BookYol

Concept

Flower Exercise

The Flower Exercise is Richard Bolles's career-design tool that describes your ideal work as seven petals (favourite skills, fields of knowledge, people, working conditions, values, salary and level, and place) instead of starting from a job title.

Job titles are too blunt to choose by. "Marketing" covers a lone analyst staring at dashboards and a manager on the phone all day. The label tells you almost nothing about whether a working day will suit you. In What Color Is Your Parachute?, Bolles reverses the order: describe yourself in parts first, then look for work that holds those parts together. Each petal is one dimension. You fill it from evidence, not wishes, using stories of moments when you did something well and enjoyed it. You then rank the items inside each petal, because the top few matter far more than the long tail. The flower doesn't have to be finished in one sitting. It is a draft that sharpens as you collect more stories. The finished flower is less a destination than a filter. It helps you recognise a fitting role when you meet it, and spot a poor fit even when the title sounds right.

A real-life example

Dana, a high-school chemistry teacher, assumes her only options are "teacher" or "not teacher." Her flower says otherwise. Her top skills are explaining complex things simply and designing experiments. Her favourite field is food. She wants a small team and a mix of desk and lab. Searching by petals instead of titles, she finds product-development roles at food manufacturers that train staff on new recipes. She had never heard that job named before.

How to use it

  1. 1Write seven short stories about times you did something you enjoyed and were proud of. List the skills each story shows. The skills that repeat become your skills petal.
  2. 2Fill the other petals the same way: fields, people, conditions, values, pay and level, place. Rank the top three to five items in each.
  3. 3Put the top items on one page and ask people in the field, "Which jobs combine these?" Then judge every offer against the flower, not the title.