How to get paid to be Yourself
The four part system I've used with thousands of people, including myself, over the past decade to create alignment.
Grab a coffee and tuck in, this is my full career alignment playbook. If you systematically follow the advice and exercises below, you will absolutely create work that feels aligned. It works no matter the state of the economy, your industry, seniority, or life stage. It is the result of a decade of tried and tested wisdom packaged up in the simplest, clearest, most actionable way possible. Please enjoy and feel free to ask questions in the comments. I’m here to help.
For me, it all started with getting fired.
Getting fired is the universe telling us not this way. It’s a spiritual course-correction if we have the courage to listen. This is what happened to me in 2018. And it was a wake-up call, a cold bucket of water on the face. Stop trying to make corporate tech Anne happen the universe shouted. This is not who you are.
Instead, I needed to learn to tune into myself and honor my unique design, which I had spent the first 32 years of my life more or less dismissing as not valuable or serious or responsible enough to build a career around: my ability to effortlessly form relationships, intuitively see people’s potential, and articulate guidance in a friendly, clear, and compelling way.
Luckily in 2017 I had begun coaching and become obsessed. Here was something that required those natural strengths to be successful. Plus it had the potential to provide the kind of freedom and lifestyle I was craving after a decade of intense corporate culture. Getting fired was the permission slip I needed to follow what was at the time an untraditional path.
I joined a training and coaching company and started building my own practice on the side, inspired and lit up by the insane amount of energy, ease, and flow I felt working in a role and industry that fit me instead of making myself miserable by trying to fit in.
Within three years I was running my own thriving coaching practice full time, making more money than I had in tech, and teaching the hard-won wisdom I gained through my own messy, painful process of career reinvention towards something much more energizing and aligned. I wrote about the journey in detail here.
What follows is the philosophy and four part framework I used on myself and thousands of people over the past decade to create aligned careers.
I call it the Career Fulfillment Playbook and I compare it to a house. Just like you need a sturdy foundation to build a house, you need a sturdy foundation to build an aligned, energizing career where you get paid to be yourself. When you feel lost, stuck, bored, gray, or burned out it’s because your foundation needs strengthening.
The Playbook is broken into four section which represent the fundamental themes that come up time and time again in every piece of career fulfillment advice. I did this because this process can be overwhelming - what do you pay attention to and what do you ignore? So the Playbook was designed to be simple, structured, comprehensive, repeatable. Anyone can get paid to be themself if they know what to focus on.
Everyone’s foundation is stronger and weaker in different areas. Don’t beat yourself up if your foundation is weak. None of this stuff was taught to you in school. But of course, it should’ve been.
Because learning how to tune into yourself, trust yourself, and use your creativity as your compass is what creates alignment and fulfillment. Alignment in one area of life acts as the first domino. The feeling is so good, you’ll lose the ability to tolerate things that feel off. We spend a third of our life at work, align here and the rest of your life will follow.
1 YOUR BRAND
It takes less energy to be yourself.
Work should feel like an extension of who you are and how you want to live your life. Of course no job can never ever fulfill every part of you, but to get paid to be yourself you want your natural strengths and interests to be at the heart of what’s required to be successful in whatever you do every day. This way, instead of wasting your finite store of energy figuring out how to get better at things that don’t come naturally to you, or psych yourself up to do things you’re not interested in, all your energy can go toward creating impact. The more you enjoy what you do, the more successful you’ll be.
The challenge to get here is multifaceted.
We exist in a culture where conforming is encouraged. It was likely pressed upon you from a young age to be responsible by following safe, predictable paths through life: a traditional career, with a brand, a ladder, and a pension. And of course that path is great so long as it’s energizing.
But the thing is, who we are and what we want is constantly evolving. The world is changing more rapidly than ever. And discovering your own nature and matching your life to it takes trial and error. As such, it’s normal to find yourself in a role that doesn’t fit or to outgrow a path that once felt right.
If this is you, rest assured: nothing has gone wrong. This is just part of what you’re here to learn. Life is a journey of self-discovery.
The universe doesn’t offer you anything that you don’t need. You might get offered a whole lot of shit you don’t want. But there’s nothing that could possibly happen that doesn’t contain a gift that you need for your comprehension of how to be here joyfully. Every single thing that happens is designed beautifully for you, a perfect curriculum for everything you’ve ever sought.
Will Smith
One of the big things that tripped me up is that the skills we were taught in school - primarily to work hard at all the subjects to get good grades - are not the same skills that make us successful in life. When you treat your career like homework by working hard to achieve in things you’re not that interested in, you move out of alignment and into exhaustion.
The reality is, you will never be able to compete in the long run with people who are naturally suited to and lit up by the work you’re trying to convince yourself you can do too.
I learned this the hard way. I was putting myself in roles that required a brain naturally wired for quantitative analysis and strategic planning, both things I’m fairly weak in but had convinced myself were necessary for success in life. And then I was applying my learned tendency to work harder than everyone else in order to achieve at the thing I didn’t really like. Plus, when you do things you don’t really like, you find yourself surrounded by people whose values and orientation in life will be different than your own. For me, this lead to boredom, burn out, and ultimately getting fired.
Instead, career alignment requires you to own your authentic frequency and find a way to use that to deliver value to the world. This is how you get paid to be yourself.
So how do you do this?
Start with your Strengths
Find the way you naturally add value in the world and put this at the heart of your work. This is about the role you have, how you add value to any community, business, or problem. It’s the very start of how you get paid to be yourself. Of course there’s a ton of strengths test out there, but I found while certainly many of them were insightful, none of them gave me results that were tangible enough to help me take immediate action to reorient my career.
So I spent seven years doing this work manually with my clients, asking the specific questions I knew would help us get useful answers and then using my ability to intuitively read people and patterns to articulate each of their natural strengths in a useful way. This allowed them to define their ideal role, carefully screen opportunities, and talk about how they add value naturally when networking and interviewing.
After doing this with hundreds of clients, I noticed themes. So last year I plugged in seven years of work into ChatGPT and made my own strengths test that I consider the most useful on the market if you’re trying to figure out what you should do next.
If you want clarity on what inherent strengths should be at the heart of your role so you can thrive, take my free Flow Zone Assessment.
Apply your Strengths to the topics that Interest you
Then you want to take your Strengths, the way you naturally add value to the world, and you want to apply them to topics that you’re actually Interested in. This is really about orienting yourself in the right industry.
Work does not have to feel like work. When work is aligned it feels interesting and fun. It feels like an opportunity to grow into a part of yourself you can’t wait to discover.
Don’t confuse this with passion. Follow your passion is terrible advice. Because passion is so weighty, so singular, so all-consuming. And I find that people often feel like well, nothing in my life feels this way so I must not have a passion so therefore I guess I’ll just continue to do this thing I don’t really like because I’m not someone who is passionate about anything. This is why it’s such terrible advice. Because passion doesn’t arrive one day full formed, it emerges slowly, through fostering your interests.
And the good news is, to be aligned your work just has be interesting, it doesn’t have to be a passion. Start by considering the topics you like learning about, what problems you want to solve, what kind of things are fun for you to create. This starts to give you an idea of the communities and companies where you can take your strengths and provide value while having fun.
Some examples
Women’s health
Home organization
Ancient history
Under-served urban communities
Building my own product
Fashion
Human psychology
Experiential events
Food
Interior Design
Don’t know? If you don’t have many interests then it’s time to start turning up your curiosity. Unplug from The Matrix / dopamine drip feed of always-on content and start tickling your brain and nurturing your creativity. Cultivate some hobbies. Start reading more books. Subscribe to Substacks that inspire you. Find new podcasts. Go to the art store and buy whatever supplies spark your interest. Take a class in jewelry making, sewing, wood working. Start writing. Refresh your closet and work on your personal style.
I find that the more space you make for your curiosity and creative self-expression, the more you wake up your soul, connect to yourself, and create the conditions for new ideas to come through. Clarity comes through creation and creative expression, not consumption.
It’s all well and good doing something you love, but if you aren’t able to meet your Lifestyle Priorities then work won’t fit.
You have to ask yourself, what kind of people do you want to work with? Do you want to work for yourself? On a team? In a start-up? A multi-national? What kind of flexibility do you want and need? How much money do you need to make to make the lifestyle you want? Actually do the math.
If you can answer these questions and you combine them with your Strengths and Interests, you will have a list grounded in who you are and what you want that you can use to generate hypotheses of what comes next in your career.
Step 1. Take the Flow Zone Assessment, pull out the phrases from your top two Flow Zones that feel most like you and would describe your ideal role.
Step 2. List out your areas of interest
Step 3. List out your Lifestyle Priorities
Step 4. Develop your hypotheses. Consider everything you’ve written and start ideating: what are 3-5 ideas you have on where you could take your career?
Want more help? I go deep with my clients on these questions to get at the heart of who they are and what they want. We plug our work into an AI prompt I wrote from my eight years of doing this work 1x1 with hundreds of people. This produces a North Star tool that allows you to rate opportunities against each other and robust list of hypothetical ideas of all shapes and sizes to catch hidden patterns, unleash your creativity, and expand what you see as possible.
This initial work creates a great level of clarity. But clarity doesn’t come through reflection alone, it comes from taking your dreams and ideas into the real world. And that’s where shit gets messy and where people lose steam. The next three sections address these barriers.