How To Find the Career For You with Lisa Nicole Bell

Marc Luber: Hey everyone – Marc Luber here from Careers Out There. As you know, we’re always talking on the show about how you can find a career that fits you so you can love what you do. Well today we’ve got a special guest. She’s a really inspirational person and she’s gonna share her insights on this. I want you to meet Lisa Nicole Bell. Here she is!

Lisa Nicole Bell: Hey Careers Out There – it’s Lisa Nicole Bell: author, filmmaker and entrepreneur – bringing you my insight on finding a career that you love. So for those of you who don’t know me, I’m the author of a couple of different books – I create all kinds of cool, socially-conscious multimedia projects. That includes film, TV, new media, websites, anything that’s really going to move the social conversation forward as far as a social progress agenda. I also create companies – I’m the CEO of Inspired Life Media Group. We have several companies in the group that all share this objective of creating really inspiring and empowering, actionable content.

So I want to talk to you about how you can go about finding a career that’s a good fit for you. It’s a question that I get asked quite a bit – and as I travel the country and the world doing speaking engagements and talking to crowds of all different sizes, this comes up a lot. Especially for new entrepreneurs – or people who are just looking to make a career change and trying to decide what’s going to make the most sense for them. So here’s the basic formula – before I even explain all this other stuff. Here’s how it works. We have the thing that you’re good at – right? This is something that you have a natural aptitude for, and it’s something that you’re passionate about. It’s something that comes very easy for you. So this is a skill set and this is something that you’re good at. Then we have something that you’re passionate about. This is something that you care very much about, something that you do for hours on end, even if you aren’t being paid for it. These 2 cross at some point. And right here, right here, at the intersection of my arms, THAT is the sweet spot. That is where we find something that’s marketable that you can actually use whether you are seeking out a traditional job or you’re starting a business of your own.

I’m gonna use myself as an example to share how this works because I believe that if somebody’s gonna advise you of something they should have used the system themselves. So here’s how it works for me: I am a communicator through and through. I’m a lover of media. Any type of film, TV, books, anything that deals with communication and media, I love it. So one of the things that comes very easily for me is ingesting large amounts of information, assimilating large amounts of information and then communicating. So my natural aptitude is towards communication: speaking on stage comes very easily for me, working in front of the camera comes easily for me, behind the camera comes easily for me. Any type of talking and communication, writing…What am I most passionate about? I’m most passionate about social change.
So we have the fact that I’m a rock star communicator, we have the fact that I’m crazy, silly, stupid passionate about social change and media and then right there at the middle we say, well what is the way that we can make that economically sustainable? What is the market willing to pay for the intersection of those 2 things? And so there’s a lot of different manifestations that that can take on. I can decide to be an author. I can decide to be a public speaker. I can decide to be an entrepreneur. I can decide to be a content producer. Incidentally, I wear all of those hats at various times.

So my point to you is that no matter what you’re passionate about – whether it’s cupcakes, or dogs or grass, you can find a way to make that profitable for yourself. If you’re looking for a traditional job, then we also want to weave in this whole idea of branding. Because we know that branding is a very important aspect of finding and keeping the right job or the right business in this economy. The old rules don’t apply any more. And so if there is some skill set that you have, if there is some passion that you have, you want to stay very plugged into that as you’re going about this process of sorting out your new career because people really respond to that. When you’re passionate about something, people can pick up on it. People often tell me that my energy is infectious. Other people pick up on that energy and they feel like I’m a moving train and people like to jump on moving trains. So even if you’re applying, again, at a traditional company, this still applies because if you’ve got that energy and you’ve got that momentum, employers want to have that on their team. There’s something called intrapreneurship, which is not – entrepreneurship is going out and starting something. Intrapreneurship is having that entrepreneurial spirit within the corporate culture. So if you’re bringing that to the company, you’re making yourself an indispensable leader by really showing them what you’re made of, showing them how passionate you are, really highlighting the things that you’re best at and you’re strengths and developing yourself in that regard.

So – that is what I have for you on finding a career that you love, something that you’re great at. Whether you are in a career that you love right now and you really want to take it to the next level, whether you’re looking for a traditional job or whether you just want to start your own business, these are the types of thought processes that you want to start having so that you can really do everything it is that you want to do. I hope that was helpful for you. It’s been a pleasure hanging out with you for a few minutes. Visit me on line at Lisa Nicole Bell dot com and I’ll talk to you soon.

©2011 Careers Out There