Find Your Flavor: A Recipe for Discovering Your Ideal Career
What do you want to be when you grow up?
That may have been fun or easy to answer years ago, but for teens and young adults, it’s a question that can be disconcerting at best… and sometimes downright frightening now that the question has become real.
Career choice is a huge decision with layers of consequence.
In Find Your Flavor, Lauren Doyle walks readers through the step-by-step process she uses with the 
young adult clients she works with which include:
- Integrating your interests, strengths, and lifestyle desires to create the recipe for the ultimate career success.
- The importance of playing, experimenting, and sampling with potential ingredients to be included in your career recipe.
- How to distinguish between enduring intrigue v.s. hobby-like interests.
- Better understanding and mastering your own mind for more successful life outcomes.
- Guidance on how to get your foot in the door (or on the ladder).
- Learn to use existing social networks to help you land a position in your chosen field.
She offers specific exercises that help readers put these critical, but often ‘invisible’ concepts to work to uncover the perfect recipe for choosing the ideal career. Whether you are a teen considering a college major or a young adult about to launch into a professional role, you’ll definitely want to read this book and ‘find your flavor’ that will put you on the path to success and life-long fulfillment.
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Book Excerpts
- Pages 4-7, Introduction
My goal in writing this book is to help you understand that there is so much more to career choice than your personality profile and aptitude tests. There are also far more choices than you can imagine. At your age, I struggled with career choice and set my sights on being either a therapist or an attorney. My profile tests would have sent me in either direction. My parents encouraged me to pursue a profession in law and continually told me that I’d be so well-suited for it. Apparently, I excelled at arguing with them. I took one summer to explore one of my options and spent a few months inside a law firm. It undoubtedly helped clarify my decision – it allowed me to see the inner workings of an attorney’s life and I wanted no part of it. Therapist it would be.
So, I put myself on that path, knowing that I had a long, long road of post-secondary education ahead of me. But I’d made my choice, set my goals, and persevered. I dedicated eight years to becoming a marriage and family therapist and distinctly remember in the last semester of my graduate program, after all the classes and all the time, sitting in a room and realizing that this was going to be the reality of my choice… and my only thought was, “This is not what I thought I signed up for!” Dimmed room, hour after hour, with people crying and depressed, and most appointments scheduled for evening hours when I’m a morning person! I loved working with people but therapy would be too depressing for me.
“Eight years in and what am I doing? Do I have to start over? How can I do something different?” I stepped back to reassess. I knew I loved business, so I considered pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational psychology. Another commitment of time and money. As I grappled with my decision, I had the lucky coincidence to have a conversation with the mother of one of my clients. I told her I was thinking about working under the guise of business, since I both loved and was fascinated by it and enjoyed working with the human mind. She told me it sounded similar to a program in which her husband was working and then introduced us. He took me to an event the following weekend, where I met the founder of a coaching company that I ultimately began working for the day after I completed my graduate program. It was a great fit. However, it was somewhat of an accidental coincidence that brought it to fruition.
Upgrade Your Menu
I share my story because it was really the result of taking this ingredient and that ingredient… and then mixing it with an ingredient I didn’t even know existed! Until I began grappling with a stranger about what I was thinking, I never even knew that being a business coach was “a thing.” No one ever told me when I was making my initial career choice that such a thing existed. I had been limited by my own inexperienced view of careers and, frankly, the world.
Throughout this book, I hope to be the “stranger you grapple with” who can help you understand that there is so much more to career choice than what you may have been told. Career counselors are nice in theory, and perhaps, you’ve met with one. However, no matter how well-meaning they are, they typically have limited exposure to the students with whom they meet. One or two sessions simply cannot provide reasonable clarity about a career choice you will live with for the rest of your life. Personality profiles and aptitude tests may provide a foundation, but they do not shed light on what may be the missing special ingredient that really creates the recipe that is truly right for you. Choosing a career is a complex process that cannot be oversimplified. I hope to broaden your perspective so that you won’t have to rely on a coincidental accident.
I liken it to having to select from the kids’ menu. Think about going out to dinner with your parents when you were younger. No matter where you went, the kids’ menu was always the same: chicken fingers, hot dog, pizza, mac and cheese, hamburger… with a side of french fries or fruit. That was it. Rarely any variation and nary a creative concoction. I appreciate that the kids’ menu serves a purpose and know that young kids can be picky eaters and usually enjoy what’s on that menu.
That was fine back then. It’s a lot like the 5-year-old making the career choice – limited by what they think they know about the world and what they think they’ll like to do. When it comes to career choices, the kids’ menu typically includes doctor, attorney, teacher, IT specialist, maybe sales representative. In answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” most only consider the career title, even if that title happens to extend beyond the typical “doctor, attorney, teacher,” etc. Only considering the title is like saying, “I want chicken”… yet there are so many different and great ways to prepare and enjoy chicken! The various dishes are driven by the elements of the recipe: actual ingredients, marination, cooking temperature and time, and even when to add various ingredients to take it from plain ol’ chicken to something delectable.
I doubt you are satisfied any longer with being limited to the kids’ menu in a restaurant, and I want to help open your eyes to the expansive list of richer ingredients that you can combine to create the career that will allow you to design and really live the life you want.
- Pages 80-83
Fusion Cuisine
Fusion cuisine deliberately combines elements of various culinary traditions that originate from different cultures or parts of the world. Think: taco pizza, pastrami egg rolls, spaghetti tacos, kimchi quesadilla. Foods that you might never have thought of combining that create a very memorable dish. You get the picture.
Keep the fusion concept in mind if you happen to uncover two areas of intrigue for yourself. In my own example, my intrigues are business and psychology. I didn’t have to choose between one or the other and ultimately created a career that combined the two – a fusion.
Look for crossovers if you happen to have two areas that are truly intriguing to you. Although they may seem disparate (like Asian and Mexican dishes), you can combine them to create something quite different and quite delicious – far, far from the kids’ menu. It’s where you begin to finetune and create a fusion in your own recipe. Remember: Never limit yourself to “either/or” thinking. Use “and” thinking instead.
So many people get stuck making the distinction between interest and intrigue. Typically, the answer lies in past experiences, which is why I always ask my clients to discuss not just previous work experiences but all experiences they’ve had. However, at this point in your life, it is critical to gain as many different experiences as you can.
Experiences are a key component to uncovering the elements you’re looking for in a career, including working style and environment. Experiences layer on top of the subject matter, like spices layering on the main ingredient. Your main ingredient is the thing you need to study deeply to become a true professional. Experience helps to provide insight, but the problem is that we can’t test out everything to really get a handle on intrigue. That’s why the magazine rack exercise helps – it creates a needed shortcut.
You will find that the magazine exercise suddenly helps you gain insight into why you’ve done certain things or have been attracted to certain things throughout your life. This exercise alone begins to open the cabinet of your ingredients to see what you’ve done to date and what you need to do more of – whether that becomes a field of study, your major, or the industry in which you should be pursuing an internship. These things then point you in the direction of your staircase and help you to clearly differentiate between interest and intrigue. For me, I was interested in law, but a summer internship in a law office quickly clarified that while it was an interest, it was definitely not intriguing enough for me to continue pursuing it.
Intrigue = Main Ingredient
Once you determine your area(s) of intrigue, you’re honing your main ingredient. You’re picking between chicken, steak, seafood, or vegan. Now it’s time to introduce yourself to your chosen arena, and that can be done through an internship, shadowing someone you know in the profession, part-time job, volunteering, etc. Once you solidify your main ingredient (or your staircase to return to that analogy), it’s time to start choosing your spices that are going to create the perfect recipe for you. While plenty of people may have the same main ingredient, there are countless spices that can combine to create very The Process: Identifying Your Ingredients different dishes. When we think about the kids’ menu for example, chicken is always in the form of chicken fingers or nuggets. That’s not to say chicken is a boring main ingredient. It’s not. It’s simply time to spice things up.
Depending on the spices you choose, you can create two wildly different tasting dishes from the same main ingredient. Someone may love chicken Parmesan while someone else prefers chicken Piccata – same main ingredient but very different end results in terms of taste… all driven by the spices. You may choose a certain recipe today (e.g., Parmesan) and will find that your tastes change and evolve, and in the future, you may gravitate toward something else (e.g., Piccata). That evolution is never a problem as long as you have the correct main ingredient. However, for many people, as they begin to evolve – if something doesn’t work out as expected or they hit a roadblock – they begin to question their main ingredient or staircase. In reality, they don’t need to change the main ingredient, they simply need to alter the spices. Too many people are conditioned to believe that if a particular opportunity doesn’t work out, they have to start over completely rather than refine what they’ve already done. The idea of simply refining is a huge relief, especially for a lot of my adult clients. They were working with the right main ingredient all along. It provides them with the confidence they need to alter their own recipe and move forward again, rather than becoming paralyzed and worried they’ve wasted their time.
For example, someone may have pursued medicine and becoming a doctor was always their focus – one that admittedly takes a lot of time and commitment. Perhaps they also loved kids, so they narrowed their focus to pediatrics. They get through the internships and residencies, pass the board, and hang out their shingle… only to realize that practicing pediatric medicine isn’t what they thought it would be and they find no passion in it. Should they give up their license to practice medicine and start over? No. They simply need to shift a bit and look for other spices. Maybe it’s the hours they have to keep or maybe they realize that they don’t love kids as much as they thought they did. Or maybe it is pediatrics but in a different format, like research.
About the Author, Lauren Doyle
Lauren Eichner-Doyle is the CEO, Corporate Coach and Speaker for Getting Results, a nationally acclaimed training and development company. Her niche includes coaching sales professionals, executives and entrepreneurs, and her experience as a leading behavior modification specialist enables 
her to deliver real results. She has a unique ability to see “how things work” and subsequently “how to make them better.”
Most recently, Ms. Doyle created a Junior Coaching Program aimed to support long term success for young adults, both for career and mind.
She holds a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a minor in Communications. As the author of a number of publications (including Find Your Flavor: A Recipe for Discovering your Ideal Career, The Hijacker: Overcome Self-Sabotaging Behavior, Secret #5 of Million Dollar Producers and The CHAMPION Path: Double Sales with Less Effort), she has also presented at numerous national conferences.
At the young age of 21, Ms. Doyle established herself as one of the top behavioral therapists in San Diego, CA. By age 24, Lauren worked as the Head Coach and Director of Coaching of a training and development company. During her time there, she trained and managed up to 30 coaches, coached nearly 300 clients, and instructed weekend seminars. Ms. Doyle started her own coaching company, Getting Results shortly after her 27th birthday. At 29, she took on an interim position as the COO of a land development company working on a 500 million dollar project.
Lauren has always valued personal development. She believes that education is a continuous, life-long process. Getting Results has allowed her to continue this quest of ongoing growth, both for herself and for her clients. This experience, along with her decades of personal business experience, makes her one of the most thought-after business coaches available.
