Many women reach a point in life where they feel primed to try something new. Maybe your youngest child has just started a full day of school. Everybody’s finally left the house in the morning. Your pour yourself a cup of coffee and enjoy the unaccustomed quiet. But one more child in school means one more tuition, and as the children grow up, the expenses grow with them. You now have some mental space to contemplate your next move. What might it be?

Or maybe you’ve been working while raising your family, perhaps as a bookkeeper or secretary. It helps pay the bills, but you’re not exactly earning a fortune. You dream of doing something else, something more lucrative, with a more flexible schedule. But what might that be?

Many women hope to turn their talents into a career, to do something fulfilling that makes a real contribution to the family income. How do you identify your passion, and move from there to making it a reality?

Pinpoint Your Skills

Some people know from the get-go what they want to do. Rochella Muller, for example, who recently opened the bridal boutique Alinea in Lakewood, always loved fashion and beautiful things. She started out working for a small company that manufactures women’s clothing. When an opportunity arose to open a store of her own, she grabbed it.

But not everyone has Rochella’s focus. Many women feel the urge to do something; they’re just not clear what would best suit them.

There’s no shortage of ways out there to assess your natural proclivities. The book What Color Is Your Parachute? (Richard N. Bolles, Ten Speed Press), is a perennial favorite for those trying to gain focus. The Internet is replete with quizzes, free and otherwise, that purport to reveal the kind of career or business you’d be suited to.

Benyamin Rapaport of EPI (Emergency Parnassah Initiative) has provided career counseling to hundreds of people. A therapist by training, he got into this line when asked to help young men at Yeshiva Sh’or Yoshuv who were ready to enter the work world but had no idea where to begin.

He started out in an experimental fashion. “It was like having my own lab where I could use different assessment tools and try mini-interventions to help people find the right path,” he says.

He used some existing tools, like the Gallup Strengths Finder, a test taken by some 20 million people worldwide and used by thousands of industries. He also created tools of his own. For example, he’d ask clients for a writing sample and evaluate how well they expressed themselves and if their handwriting looked childish or mature. He created a long list of different careers and would read them off quickly, asking his subjects to rate how much they appealed to them on a scale of one to ten. He’d ask people to list five experiences that made them feel satisfied and engaged, and five experiences that made them feel depleted and unhappy.

Kerry Hannon, author of What’s Next? Follow Your Passions and Find Your Dream Job, suggests writing a journal about the best moments in your professional life the things you really enjoy, the things you’ve always excelled in. For example, if you work in a preschool but get most excited when you plan and carry out a sheva brachos, maybe party planning is a better option for you.

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 628)