Drawing by Elizabeth Wagele
Some Achievers (a personality type in the Enneagram system) are especially practical and want to make things work better. Some want a job that will further their reputation and their opportunity for advancement. Some do well as newscasters, actors, or announcers-they're often good performers (Tom Cruise). According to Ingrid Stabb, if you are looking for a new career or assessing your present career, it's likely that one of these career needs will outweigh the others:
• the opportunity to work on your interests or passions
• the income it will provide, or
• successful affiliation with other people. Here's an Achiever example of each:
Following her passion and making improvements
Ginger earned a BA and MA in modern thought and literature in four years at Stanford University, and then took a stint in business. She started as an assistant director of a learning center for kids that was hiring top college grads to become the company's future leaders. The new service Ginger developed became a cornerstone of the national corporation's revenue model. When the company acquired a high school tutoring business, when Ginger was twenty-five, she became its chief operating officer. This wasn't her life's calling, however. After winning a poetry contest and giving a prestigious poetry reading, she pursued a PhD in comparative literature. Now she combines her management experience and literary passion as a tenured professor at a university's center for new media.
Working for income and increasing efficiency
In the course of her career, Mandy has gone from a college residence hall leader to forging a reputation for success in the cutting-edge field of executive coaching for CEO's of Fortune 500 corporations. Her first big contract was with Apple Computers. She then spent years working with companies from Sun Microsystems to Hewlett Packard to Intel. She gets to know people within the context of the corporate culture and then helps them find more effective ways to work together.
Affiliating and being an effective leader
Others influenced Richard to follow what they thought was the appropriate paths for him. With encouragement from his parents and the help of a college professor, he pursued medicine and ended up at a hospital that emphasized affordable health care. For fifteen years he was the chief of radiology. Early on he wanted to change the world and the system. But by the end he realized he could make just as meaningful an impact by simply assisting an individual woman who came to him with a suspicious lump on her breast and needed to make a decision about what to do. He became a healer as opposed to just a diagnostician.
(This is the third in series of career motivations. For the first and second, please see my Psychology Today Blog of 5-17-11-on Perfectionists and my WordPress blog of 6-14-11 http://ewagele.wordpress.com/ on Helpers.)
