Redefine Your Professional Journey With Insights From Coach Ayelet Shrem

The modern professional journey is continually evolving, and it can often feel like we’re in uncharted territory. What once meant climbing a predictable corporate ladder has evolved into something far more dynamic and self-directed. 

It’s worth asking: What does purposeful career development mean in this new landscape, and how can we navigate it successfully?

Ayelet Shrem, leadership expert and TaskHuman Coach specializing in career development, provides valuable insights that challenge conventional thinking about professional growth and offer practical guidance for anyone looking to take ownership of their career journey.

Career Paths → Professional Journeys

When many of us think about career planning, we might envision a linear progression of job titles and promotions. According to Coach Ayelet, this limited perspective no longer serves us in today’s workplace.

“I like to use the term professional journey,” Ayelet explains. “When you take a journey, there’s a lot of unknown. It’s not about career, it’s about going on a journey and developing throughout.”

This distinction is crucial. 

A professional journey isn’t about following a predetermined path but rather developing a diverse portfolio of experiences, skills, and capabilities that evolve over time.

“In a portfolio, an artist would present their line of work, which could be very diverse,” Ayelet notes. “It could be an exploration of different themes, varying projects that capture that time in the artist’s life, or various commercial ventures. This diversity is how we should look at building our career work nowadays.”

Instead of fixating on job titles, Ayelet encourages professionals to focus on the components of work that truly engage them:

“Noticing not to look for titles, but to unfold the components they’re looking to see in a position. And then look for positions with those components and not necessarily titles.” Why? Titles can block us. Plus, “titles change all the time.”

Why Continuous Growth Matters

Maintaining a growth mindset is essential, even if you’re currently satisfied with your position. Coach Ayelet offers compelling analogies to illustrate why.

“Look at Blockbuster, Nokia,” she suggests. “If I’m not constantly attuned to the evolving landscape of things, I can just ‘fade away’ like a product that is, you know, not valid anymore.”

The business world provides clear examples of the consequences of stagnation, but Ayelet also draws a powerful parallel to relationships:

“We marry someone. If we are not investing day in, day out in that relationship, it fades. That’s why couples break up; they have not invested in keeping up that energy that builds that bond between them.”

Our professional development requires the same continuous investment and attention. As Ayelet points out, “We evolve. And if we’re not keeping in touch with how we have changed, then we drift apart.”

This growth perspective opens us to possibilities we might otherwise miss: “What’s changing? How can I change it? What are some new opportunities that it actually brings?” These questions help us stay relevant and discover paths that “were not even present a year ago.”

What Are Common Challenges To Career Growth?

If purposeful career growth is so valuable, why do many of us struggle to pursue it effectively? Coach Ayelet identifies several common obstacles:

1. Feeling overwhelmed by where to start

“One of the biggest questions that I’m encountering again and again with people is, where do I start? How do I make it something that I can actively do?” Ayelet shares. The sheer scope of career planning can feel paralyzing.

2. Hesitancy to showcase skills and achievements

“A lot of people are kind of stuck with ‘I don’t want to toot my own horn. I don’t like speaking about myself,” Ayelet observes. This reluctance to communicate our values and strengths can significantly limit our opportunities.

3. Limited view of career progression

Many still view professional advancement solely as upward movement. “Moving is not just up,” Ayelet reminds us. “Moving is exploring what else? And to break away from what it used to be to what it can be.”

Practical Strategies For Purposeful Career Growth

Coach Ayelet offers several practical approaches to take control of your professional journey:

1. Document your achievements and skills

“Start naming your past achievements and start naming your skills,” Ayelet advises. This process involves breaking down your experiences, giving them names, noticing what challenges you overcame, how you overcame them, and what skills were used. 

Rather than viewing your career as one undifferentiated bundle of experience, this approach helps you recognize specific capabilities and accomplishments that can transfer to new contexts.

Importantly, this is “an ongoing process,” Ayelet notes. She encourages trying this monthly. “What happened this month? What is worth noticing?”

2. Connect with your values

“Get in touch with what’s really important for you on a more regular basis,” Ayelet recommends. Understanding your values isn’t merely a philosophical exercise but a practical decision-making framework.

“When I do value work with someone, it’s a decision-making system. It’s not fluffy,” she explains. “When I know what’s important for me, it helps me to make decisions.”

These values can serve as a compass for navigating career choices, large and small.

3. Envision your destination

While remaining flexible about the specific path, having a sense of direction is valuable. “Know where you wanna go. Understand how you wanna see your life,” Ayelet suggests.

She compares career planning to a road trip: “You don’t need to know everything about the road, but know what the highways are, where the good spots are on the way, and know the destination.”

Identifying values is also an inherently personal process. For example, not everyone connects with visualization exercises, and that’s okay. “Some people, you would ask them, how do you see your life 30 years from now? They have no clue how to imagine that. That’s cool. Let’s move on to something else,” Ayelet acknowledges.

The key is finding approaches that resonate with your thinking style: “Connect to what you feel you wanna work with. It’s not all tools for everyone.”

4. Seek diverse perspectives

Breaking out of our limited viewpoints often requires external input. “Call upon different perspectives,” Ayelet recommends. “Find five different people who know you and get their perspectives on how they saw you evolve, where they see you going.”

This approach can reveal patterns and possibilities you might not recognize on your own: “What patterns do you identify in yourself? What is one thing that, if you were to do, would definitely surprise them?”

Why And How To Expand Your Comfort Zone

You’ve undoubtedly heard about the idea of “stepping out of your comfort zone” before, but how do you do this productively and efficiently?

For starters, you need to understand the limits and boundaries of your current capabilities. Otherwise, how will you know what limits you’re pushing? 

“There’s that brilliant model that I love to use, so simple, of the Learning Circles,” Ayelet shares. This model can help you “identify for ourselves our comfort zone, what we are shying away from…and what would be a good learning zone that would lead to a growth zone.”

The process gradually expands what feels comfortable: “Everything that we added by learning kind of comes now, so we expand our comfort zone all the time.”

Identifying what lies just beyond your current abilities and engaging in self-reflection around what’s needed to gain confidence, skills, and meet goals can offer “a good north star to strive for and to guide us to what’s next.”

Defining Success On Your Own Terms

Perhaps most importantly, Ayelet encourages us to challenge conventional definitions of career success.

“The meaning of what we call career is the meaning that we give to it,” she emphasizes. “That meaning may change throughout life… there’s less of a generational aspect to it, but more understanding that we define what career is for us and to be mindful about that.”

How TaskHuman Can Help

At TaskHuman, we understand that purposeful career growth looks different for everyone. Coaches like Ayelet Shrem specialize in helping professionals identify their unique values and strengths and develop practical strategies for building a fulfilling professional journey.

Whether you’re feeling stuck in your current role, contemplating a major change, or simply wanting to be more intentional about your development, our coaches provide personalized guidance to help you:

• Document and leverage your unique skills and achievements
• Clarify your values and use them as decision-making tools
• Create a vision for your professional journey that aligns with your authentic self
• Step outside your comfort zone in strategic, growth-promoting ways
• Navigate workplace transitions with confidence and purpose

Ready to take ownership of your professional journey?

Connect with a TaskHuman coach today and create a growth plan that truly reflects your values, strengths, and aspirations.

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