Our 31 Days of Goal-Setting continues today with a question that I very deliberately separated out from yesterday’s finance question: How are you doing in terms of your career and purpose?

This is a tricky one because our society tends to conflate “thing we do to make a living/keep ourselves fed and housed” with “our purpose” or even “our value”, which is reductive at best and dangerous at worst. I don’t want to contribute to that.

The way that I approach this question is, “How well am I using and improving the my unique skillset? How much time am I spending doing the things that I enjoy doing and am good at, making the highest possible contribution that I can make?”

For me, ideally, I would be doing those things at work because a) I’m a career-oriented person and b) since I spent a lot of hours at work, doing something purpose-centric for my job kills two birds with one stone. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I’m also lucky that my natural skill set (analyzing and synthesizing information, managing projects, business writing, etc.) is fairly well valued in the business world.

Truthfully, I don’t feel like I’ve been strictly successful in this area in 2015. However, I have a much better handle on how exactly to describe my strengths and where they could be best used in a business setting. So, in 2016 I’d like to use that knowledge.

(If you’re thinking that you’re not even sure what your purpose IS, you’re in luck! That’ll be Part 3.)