Welcome and introductions

Rob: G'day, welcome to the National Virtual Expo. I'm your host for the session, Rob Malicki. I'm coming to you today from Gadigal land in Sydney to pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work. Welcome to this session on getting clear about your career. I'm joined today by Kelly Wade of Luna Co Coaching. Kelly, thanks for joining me at the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: Hi, Rob. Very excited to be here.

Rob: This is such an important session because, obviously, people who are in high school haven't had to go through the whole career-hunting thing yet. And maybe some of the other folks watching along today, we've got some parents joining us as well, who have been through a first career but not necessarily the mainstream challenge of trying to decide what they want to do next. That's a challenging area, isn't it, deciding what we're actually going to do with our time and our lives?

Guest: It is a challenging thing to do, but once you know how to do it, it actually makes it really easy. And so that's what I hope to share today: some tips, tricks, and models on how you really can get clear about your career.

Rob: Love it. For those people who are joining us live, thank you so much for being here. Any questions you have for me or for Kelly as we go, you can ask them in the chat wherever that is for you. If you're on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, just drop it in the chat in your interface and it will come through. If you're on the Session Hub, you can drop your questions in the chat there too. We'll do our best to get to them by the end of this session, and if not, we'll be answering every question in the chat using our Discord. You'll find the details in the description down below. For parents, we have a Facebook group just for you as well. Details down below. But with that, Kelly, over to you.

Why your career "why" matters: purpose, meaning, and ikigai

Guest: Fantastic. Thanks, Rob. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining this information session on how to get clear about your career. We're going to cover some big topics in our short 20 minutes together, so feel free to take notes, but I will make the slides available afterwards. We'll finish off with some Q&A with Rob, but if you still have questions or would like a complimentary check-in, please feel free to find me on LinkedIn or email me directly.

Guest: My name is Kelly Wade and I'm the owner of Luna Co Coaching, where I spend my time combining career and leadership coaching and consulting on employee growth in large organisations so that everyone has the opportunity to grow. Today, I have a stack of useful information to share, and I want you to walk away with practical tips and actions you can take on how to get clear about your career.

Guest: Whether you're looking at choosing a new career, expanding a current one, or setting out on one for the first time, reinventing yourself starts with your why. Viktor Frankl wrote a very impactful book about his time in concentration camps during the Holocaust, and his lessons culminate in this quote: "Those who have a why can bear almost any how." That is to say, no matter the work you pursue, there will be parts you may not like, but connecting to your why or your purpose makes it all worthwhile.

Guest: Another author, Malcolm Gladwell, writes in his book Outliers of meaningful work as a critical factor in taking on unpleasant roles with the utmost satisfaction. He defines the requirements for meaningful work as having autonomy, the freedom to choose some of your work or tasks; complex work that occupies the mind so you're not too bored and it's not too hard, the flow state you may have heard of; and finally, a connection between effort and reward, where you can clearly see where your impact makes a difference. Keep these in mind when you're thinking about your future career.

Guest: Adam Leipzig, in his viral TEDx talk, says you can find your life's purpose using five questions: Who are you? What do you do? Who do you do it for? What do these people want or need? And how do they change as a result? Now, this helps you think about your current career, something that you may already be doing, but it doesn't consider a new vision, your dream job, or even a stepping-stone role to get there. So think about these questions as well: What is my dream job? Who would I do it for? What would they gain? And does my current path need future-proofing? Is it going to help me get there?

Guest: You may have seen this concept of ikigai. It's a Japanese term representing the sweet spot of your reason for being, the very essence of your career. There are four concentric circles representing the factors required for a successful career: what you love, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you're good at. There's no point in following your passion if you can't earn a living, and there's no point in mastery if the world doesn't need those skills. The World Economic Forum publishes a report on the future of jobs every couple of years, and reading it and paying particular attention to the skills the world will need can help you navigate towards a balance of your ikigai.

Four components to career clarity: self-awareness, planning, branding, and action

Guest: We've talked about the why. Now let's look at the how. There are four key components to get you clear about your career. The first is to deepen your self-awareness. Nobody should know you better than yourself, but the perspective of others is important, so seek feedback. Next, create a career management plan. The mind was not made to store things, so write it down and use it as a tool. Then develop a career brand, because how you're perceived in the market is essential. And the important one: practical steps to move your career forward.

Guest: As Tim Ferriss, the podcaster and author of The 4-Hour Work Week, said: "It's lonely at the top. 99% of people in the world are convinced they can't do great things, so they aim for mediocre." In my view, both fear of change and a lack of action are the two most significant reasons why this is true. Remember when your mother said you can do anything you put your mind to? Remembering your ikigai and conquering your fear will be essential to unlocking your full potential.

Becoming an expert in yourself

Guest: So where do you get started? Ultimately, you want to design a career by choice and find the work you love. There are three elements here, and I'll credit the late Scott Dinsmore: become an expert in yourself, do the impossible, and surround yourself with passionate people.

Guest: Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Some of the areas involved in self-discovery are not so easy to work through, and there are different professions and therapies to explore. But through simple exercises and assessments, you can become more self-aware and know your strengths, talents, skills, and traits that could be a factor in finding a match with the work you love. Try a simple reflection exercise on what you've done, how far you've come, and what you would look forward to. What would you say at age 80, reflecting on your life's work? Mindfulness, journaling, or walking in nature are good practices towards getting to know yourself. And at a basic level, try an ally conversation. It can be surprisingly helpful.

Guest: Each of us has a unique combination of elements in how we show up at work, perform, and interact with each other. Combined with our experiences, this is what makes us unique, how we can stand out in our careers, and what we'll use in our personal branding. To get started, I would try the VIA Strengths Assessment. You can Google it or find it on my website. Another exercise you might like to try is to spend a week observing, noticing, and recording the activities you love and the activities you dislike. Whether you're in the workforce or currently studying, likes and dislikes are your personal compass. They drive motivation, satisfaction, and performance.

Guest: When you're doing things you enjoy, you're more likely to hit a state of flow where your best work happens. You might be surprised to know a strength isn't necessarily something you're good at. It's something that energises you and makes time fly, and when that happens, you're more likely to get good at it. So take a moment. Reflect. Where have you been most absorbed, committed, or excited by your work or study? These moments are real clues.

Doing the impossible and surrounding yourself with passionate people

Guest: The second thing you can do to find the work you love is to do the impossible. This is where you need to aim high, push and stretch your goals. It's where you feel uncomfortable, but that's how you're growing. Try new things. It's hard because we haven't wired our brain yet, but after repetition, we create smoother neural pathways where growth happens. This blue-sky thinking requires time and space, so try to set a rhythm in your calendar to allow for it. Look up and out over your life, consider each domain, and set some lofty goals. Aim high. Goals are supposed to be updated as you learn, so don't be afraid to just plot something for now.

Guest: I also want to emphasise AI in this area. AI is an everyday tool organisations are using now, and foundational skills in it are non-negotiable, like the internet, mobile phones, or email. With good prompting and an understanding of agentic AI, which is an AI feature that can help do a sequence of tasks or access specific knowledge, knowing how to use these tools is essential.

Guest: And lastly, surround yourself with passionate people. These are not necessarily your family and friends, but rather those closer to the type of work you want: people who know the job you're in, or someone who has a vested interest in seeing you succeed. They might be colleagues, industry peers, conference attendees, recruiters, a career coach, or a former boss. These are people who can give you advice, open doors, and empathise with knowledge about you or your environment.

Guest: One other person you should definitely have in your cheer squad is a mentor: someone who has walked the path you think you may want. They can advise on the tips, tricks, and approaches they took to finding the work they love. You can find and ask someone you've had a handful of conversations with over a year, who will be generous enough to open up about their trials and tribulations and what worked. There is a difference between a mentor, a coach, an advisor, and a sponsor, and knowing about each and how they might help you is important so that you can set up the right expectations. Coaching can overlap them all. A coach will use powerful questions to facilitate your growth, helping you reflect on your values and your purpose. Coaching is the big tool in your kitbag and it will help you along your journey.

Your career as a durable asset worth investing in

Guest: I work with leaders and learners of all types and help them focus on what matters most to them. I help them distil great ideas for action. So instead of plodding along, facing a redundancy, or being bored in a job you've outgrown, you take the time and space in coaching sessions that motivate and inspire you towards the job of your dreams.

Guest: Just think for a moment. What are your biggest assets in a lifetime? The most common investments are a house, superannuation, a property or stock portfolio. But what about your career? The average Australian middle-class earner will earn $3.6 million in their lifetime. Your career is a durable asset, your very own human capital. But you need to look after it for it to grow. And apart from this fantastic careers expo, how often do you take time out to really look at your career pathway?

Building your career management plan and personal brand

Guest: So how do we bring it all together? This is your career management plan: preferably a written document where you can keep your career vision front and centre. When you're writing it, be as specific as possible. Here's an exercise you can do: take what you've learned about yourself, put it into an AI chatbot like Claude, and prompt it to give you ideas to capture for these areas: your professional objectives, your career options, companies to target, people to get to know, and courses to study.

Guest: The Luna Co Coaching model is your career planning process, with clear steps and tools for you to follow. You'll learn through coaching and self-discovery. You'll understand how to apply your strengths within your current reality. You'll write your own stories of success where you envisage a future that you want. You'll ignite your passions and the work you love through a success roadmap. You'll communicate inwardly and outwardly for your brand and support network, and continually optimise as the world evolves.

Guest: Describing yourself and what you do for the job market, or what you want to do, is key to ensuring you're well positioned to land the job you want. Doing this in a congruent, authentic, and consistent way across the key branding modes is easy once you know how. The challenge is defining who you are in the first place, by starting to define what success looks like for you and the elements of self-discovery: your traits, your strengths, your values. It's the combination of these that makes you unique.

Guest: These descriptions of who you are can be used to promote your career brand consistently in various ways. There are four key places to start. Your resume: the professional summary and top profile section is a showcase of your value. LinkedIn: the About section, written in first person, is a hook for readers to want to know more about you. Your elevator pitch: your quick verbal spiel. Try the "so that" format: "I notice people need to work on their careers, so I offer career coaching sessions so they get clear about their career." And lastly, the interview question, "Tell me about yourself." Describe yourself intentionally so it's relevant and engaging. Think about what your story is, and position your future story as who you are right now.

Guest: 80% of jobs are filled through your network. So it's worthwhile getting clear on who you are, for others to know, remember, and share. Now, some of you may feel uncomfortable showcasing who you are and offering your talents and strengths. But this is of mutual benefit: employers will gain from your services and expertise that are yours alone to give. Author C.S. Lewis said, "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less." So try to flip your thinking and know that the value you offer will help people, teams, and organisations. They need to know who you are to get you into the right role and set you up for success.

Practical steps: journaling, mind mapping, AI tools, and building good habits

Guest: We're on the homestretch. What are the practical steps to move your career forward? Here are some exercises on the process of getting clear about your career. Journaling: collect your thoughts in a notebook, write in it every day to make sense of your thoughts. Mind mapping: use a whiteboard, an A3 sheet of paper, or a mirrorboard, draw big circles for each domain of work, things like jobs, learning, mentoring, connections, income, side hustles, and actions to take for each.

Guest: Think about reviewing job descriptions, finding recruiters to talk to, reading industry reports, listening to podcasts, and making connections. What about using AI to self-coach using the voice feature? Try the app Pi, which is essentially made for this. You can also prompt an AI career booklet to help you find the perfect job, with sections like skills, industries, ease of entry, salaries, and a learning map. Input your data from a love-or-loathe exercise or your personality assessments, and plot timelines for your goals. Don't worry too much about fixating on the dates. Do take time to reflect regularly on how far you've come.

Guest: And lastly, a routine with habits. Your routine is key. Work backwards from an annual calendar entry for career management planning and chunk it down every quarter, every month, and into everyday habits. When developing your habits, James Clear in his book Atomic Habits has two useful points among many. The first is to stack your habits: find moments already established in your day to stack a small action on top of. It might be after dinner, spend 20 minutes on your career plan before switching on Netflix. That gives you over 120 hours a year getting closer to your dream job.

Guest: Another point James makes is the difference between motion and action. Motion contains planning, researching, and preparing, but it's a trap when you endlessly refine your resume or research companies without speaking to anyone, or continually complete courses to feel ready. Action, on the other hand, is behaviour that delivers a result: a coffee meeting, connecting with an industry peer on LinkedIn, or asking for a mentoring conversation. These connections are where you find a red thread to pull on and unravel opportunities you did not know existed. You tap into the hidden job market and get closer to finding the work you love.

Guest: Thank you for taking the time and investing in your career journey. Feel free to link through the QR code, visit my website, or email me directly. Thanks to Rob and the Choosing Your Uni team for having me here today, and I wish you all the best for your career.

Q&A: getting started, AI tools, and the power of LinkedIn outreach

Rob: Thanks very much, Kelly. I've got a couple of questions I'd love to get to. For people who do want to work with you, where do they find you? I've got a link in the description on the Session Hub page, but what does that actually look like if people want to work with you?

Guest: Great question. I generally start with a chemistry check-in: about a 15-minute call where we figure out what your goals are, what you're thinking about, and how you experience coaching. You can either email me or find me on LinkedIn and we can set that up. I find that's the best way to get to know people really quickly, and I'd love the opportunity to help anyone on the call today.

Rob: And I'm a big advocate for people taking this stuff seriously. It's a bit like you said: this is an investment in your future. We invest in our education, we invest in assets and things that we buy, but your career is a big part of your identity. And yet, not a lot of people proportionately actually make the investment of taking time to get expert guidance on how to make this happen. So if you're in a position where you're able to do that, I think it is a fantastic investment. Kelly, I really appreciate you taking the time to present. There are other careers coaches out there, and what you said is really important: you've got to find someone that you can work with really well. It's a close relationship, so start with a conversation and also look within your network to see if you can find somebody there that you can work with on an ongoing basis. You'll see the dividends of that over time for sure.

Guest: Absolutely.

Rob: A couple of questions then. I'll just note that Man's Search for Meaning, which you mentioned right at the top, is literally sitting on my shelf over here. It's a really good place to start if you want to open up your mind and feel grateful for living in the world that you've got. But can we hone in on some super actionable starting steps? Everybody is at a different point. If you could get people to do one exercise, what would that be?

Guest: For me it would definitely be getting to know yourself. And I mentioned AI a few times in this presentation because I've recognised how impactful it is for personal growth. So if you can have those interactions using Pi or Claude, and really think about what it is that you want to do and who you are, then I think that's going to be a rich exploration to kick off this journey.

Rob: I really love that. An exercise I did a few years ago that I found personally very confronting, but incredible in that same genre, was writing your own eulogy. It's an exercise where you imagine being at your own funeral and you have to write a speech: what would somebody say about you? It's quite confronting, but it forces you to think about what's important to you in life and what would that look like at the very end if you'd achieved everything successfully. I find it a mind-blowing exercise.

Guest: And what you're talking about there is establishing your purpose, the years and the legacy that you want to leave behind. Getting to know yourself is how you're going to get there, and there are so many great things in your presentation to help people do that.

Rob: For those people who might be younger, because a lot of the self-discovery stuff is a bit easier to understand once you're more mature, if you're at high school, your school may have you do a career aptitude inventory. Kelly mentioned a couple of online tools as well, like the DISC inventory. And we've got one on our website at Choosing Your Uni that's specifically about what to study. Those are really good ways to just explore, answer a whole bunch of questions, and get some feedback from the assessment. Does that make sense?

Guest: Absolutely. And I would challenge young people especially to get out there and talk to other human beings. It can be confronting to really open up and ask more experienced people in your life what they did to get where they got. Using the wisdom of others is definitely a fast track to knowing what you want to do in your career, and those people might even become mentors over time.

Using LinkedIn to access mentors, industry peers, and the hidden job market

Rob: Absolutely. And one thing that's so different these days compared to when you and I would have been starting our careers is this little thing called LinkedIn. Most people watching might have heard of it but think, "Oh, that's an old person's thing." Tell me if I'm wrong, Kelly. But it is the most unbelievable platform for actually connecting with people in a professional sense, because you can literally connect with CEOs, vice presidents, startup founders, whatever floats your boat. Those people are available on LinkedIn, you can search for them, and you can message them directly.

Guest: Exactly, and it's global. So why stop here when you can look outside our own country? I find people are most generous when you reach out to connect or send a brief message. There's a free feature on LinkedIn where you can send a short note to people: make sure you craft that message in a way that shows you're genuinely interested in them and have some pointed questions to ask. They're much more likely to say yes to a further conversation.

Rob: Such good advice. We're humans: we're the centre of our own story. And so it makes your ego feel nice and warm and fuzzy when somebody reaches out on LinkedIn and says, "Hi, I admire your work. Would you take 15 minutes to have a conversation about what you do and how I could maybe build a career like yours?" The very top people, CEOs and the like, aren't necessarily going to be answering your DMs. But the majority of people, particularly a few steps down the career ladder, are more accessible. You just have to dare to do it. And I'd put out a challenge to everyone watching: what is the most unexpected person you could connect with outside your own circle, using a platform like LinkedIn, who actually responds and gives you a little bit of their time or information? There could be some really radical results from that.

Guest: Absolutely. And you would be amazed at what kind of people will actually respond. If you don't try, you'll never know. And one of the things you mentioned is one of the things that holds most people back: the lack of action. It's one thing to make plans, but if you don't translate them into meaningful actions, that's how you end up stuck. Sending a bunch of DMs on LinkedIn to people whose work you admire is just an easy way to start taking action. That turns into conversations.

Rob: And working with a coach who will, let's be honest, politely give you a kick up the bum when you need it, and gently guide you when you need that too. That's the advantage. When you've got people in your corner supporting you, encouraging you, and speaking the truth, sometimes we just need the truth. And that's often the hardest thing to hear, but it's actually what gets us moving. I'm a big fan of coaching as a mechanism to take those actions you need to take. We also provide that encouragement and support to help you think about things a little differently.

Guest: Wonderful.

Rob: We could go on and on, Kelly. I feel like we've only just touched the surface. There is so much great content in there for people to go back and unpack. So if you've got more questions, reach out to Kelly directly: details are in the session description down below. Otherwise, drop your career questions in the Discord or the Facebook group. If you're in that situation where you don't know where to get started or you're trying to work out your next step, you are not alone. That's the whole reason we built these communities and why Kelly agreed to join us today. Kelly Wade, thank you so much for joining me at the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much, Rob. I really hope people find value, and I look forward to hearing from some of you in due course.