NEXT GENERATION SUCCESS
Chapter One - Part B: The Actionable Plan
Know Who You Are Before You Walk Into Any Room
A Note Before You Begin
Before you take a single assessment, before you write a single goal, before you update a single line of your resume — there is foundational work to do that most career development programs skip entirely.
That work is identity.
Not personality. Not temperament. Not a list of adjectives that describe how you tend to behave. Identity.
Identity is the answer to a deeper question than "what are my strengths?" Identity is the answer to: Who am I professionally? What do I stand for? What will I not compromise? Where am I going? And who do I need to become to get there?
Every assessment in this chapter is a tool. Tools are only as useful as the person using them understands what they are building. This actionable plan will help you use the assessments to build something real — a professional identity that is grounded in your values, aligned with your vision, and strong enough to withstand the pressure of the job market without losing who you actually are.
There is one more thing that needs to be said before we begin.
You have two identities. Both are real. Both matter. And they need to stay in their proper places.
Your professional identity is who you are at work — the mentor, the educator, the coordinator, the analyst, the nurse, the manager. This is the identity you present in interviews, on your resume, and in professional interactions. It is not a mask. It is a curated, intentional, values-based presentation of the parts of you that serve the professional context.
Your personal identity is everything else — the parent, the spouse, the sibling, the friend, the person who loves the beach and falls asleep during movies and takes years to finish a complicated puzzle. This identity is equally real and equally important. It simply does not belong in a job interview.
The discipline — and it is a discipline — is knowing which identity walks into which room.
The professional who has not done this work will either bring their personal life into professional spaces where it creates vulnerability and distraction, or they will lose their personal identity entirely to a professional role that was never meant to define the whole of who they are.
Neither outcome serves you.
Both identities deserve to be built intentionally.
That is what this chapter is going to help you do.
STEP ONE: Take Your Strengths Assessment
Before you can build a professional identity you need accurate information about how you are naturally wired. The four recommended assessments from Section 1.3 of this chapter each provide a different lens. Complete at least one before proceeding.
CliftonStrengths (gallup.com/cliftonstrengths) — $19.99 for Top 5 / $49.99 for Full 34
HIGH5 Strengths Assessment (high5test.com) — Free
VIA Character Strengths Survey (viacharacter.org) — Free
16Personalities (16personalities.com) — Free
IMPORTANT: Do not read your results casually. Do not skim. Read every word of every result description as if it were written specifically about you — because it was. Highlight or underline the phrases that make you think "yes, that is exactly how I operate." Those phrases are the raw material for the work that follows.
STEP TWO: Connect Your Results to Identity — Not Just Personality
This is the step most people skip and it is the most important one.
A strengths assessment tells you WHAT you are. It does not tell you WHO you are. There is a difference.
WHAT you are: "You are a Learner. You are an Achiever. You are a Communicator."
WHO you are: "I am a professional who uses my hunger for learning to stay ahead of changes in my industry. I use my drive to achieve to set standards that my team can rely on. I use my ability to communicate to translate complex information into language that anyone can act on."
Do you see the difference?
The first version is a description. The second version is an identity statement. The first version tells an interviewer something about your personality. The second version tells them something about your professional value.
ACTION STEP: For each of your top three to five strengths results write one sentence that begins with "I am a professional who..." and describes how that strength shows up in your work. Do not write what the assessment says about you. Write what YOU say about yourself using the assessment as evidence.
Write your statements here before moving to Step Three:
I am a professional who...
I am a professional who...
I am a professional who...
I am a professional who...
I am a professional who...
STEP THREE: Build Your Professional Identity Statement
Now take the statements you wrote in Step Two and combine them into one cohesive professional identity statement. This is not your resume summary. This is not your LinkedIn headline. This is an internal document — something you write for yourself, not for an employer — that defines who you are professionally at your core.
A professional identity statement answers four questions:
1. What do I do professionally?
2. Who do I do it for or with?
3. What values guide how I do it?
4. What professional boundaries will I maintain regardless of pressure or circumstance?
Example of a weak professional identity statement:
"I am a disciplined, purposeful worker who is good with people and wants to make a difference."
Example of a strong professional identity statement:
"I am an educator and mentor who develops professionals at every stage of their career. I work with individuals who are willing to do the disciplined, purposeful work of genuine growth. I operate with absolute integrity, measurable results, and a commitment to telling people the truth even when it is not what they want to hear. I will not compromise my ethics for any employer, any salary, or any professional relationship."
Notice that the strong version includes boundaries. It says what the professional will not do. That is not arrogance. That is identity. And identity without boundaries is just a personality description.
ACTION STEP: Write your professional identity statement below. Take your time. This is one of the most important things you will write in this entire program.
My Professional Identity Statement:
STEP FOUR: Build Your Personal Identity Statement
This step surprises people. Most career development programs do not ask you to write a personal identity statement. This one does. Here is why.
If you do not know clearly who you are personally you will not know where your professional identity ends and your personal identity begins. And that confusion is dangerous. It leads to oversharing personal information in professional contexts. It leads to making career decisions based on personal emotions that should have stayed home. And it leads to the gradual erosion of the personal self into the professional role — until one day you look up and realize you have been so focused on being a professional that you forgot who you actually are as a human being.
Your personal identity is not less important than your professional identity. It is more important. It is the foundation everything else sits on.
A personal identity statement is simply a clear, honest description of who you are outside of work. It includes your roles, your values, your passions, your relationships, and the things that bring you genuine joy.
Example:
"Outside of work I am a parent, a sibling, and a loyal friend. I love the beach and find genuine restoration near the water. I am a person of deep faith and that faith guides my decisions in every area of my life. I love cooking for the people I love. I am competitive enough to spend years on a puzzle that most people would give up on in a week. I fall asleep during movies without apology. These are not weaknesses. They are the dimensions of a full human life and they are not for sale to any employer."
Notice the last line. Your personal identity is not available for professional consumption. It is yours. It is protected. It is what you go home to at the end of the day.
ACTION STEP: Write your personal identity statement below.
My Personal Identity Statement:
STEP FIVE: Draw the Line
Now that you have both statements written, you are going to do something that most people never do consciously — you are going to decide in advance where the line is between your professional identity and your personal identity in a work context.
This is your professional boundary framework. It is not a list of rules. It is a set of decisions you make now, in a calm and reflective moment, so that you do not have to make them under pressure in a high-stakes professional situation.
Answer the following questions honestly and specifically. These answers are for you — not for an employer, not for a resume, not for an interview. They are the internal compass you will use to navigate every professional situation you encounter.
Question One: What personal information will I never voluntarily share in a professional context?
Question Two: What values are so fundamental to who I am that I will not compromise them for any employer, any salary, or any professional relationship?
Question Three: What kind of work environment or organizational culture is incompatible with my values and therefore not worth pursuing regardless of the compensation?
Question Four: What professional behaviors am I willing to engage in at work that I may not practice in my personal life — and where is the line on that?
Question Five: At what point would I leave a job, a client, or a professional relationship because continuing it would compromise who I am?
STEP SIX: Build Your Ten-Year Professional Vision
Now that you know who you are and where your boundaries are, you can set a direction that actually fits the person you have just described.
Most people set career goals based on what they think they should want — the job title that sounds impressive, the salary that would solve their current financial stress, the position that would make their family proud. Those are not wrong considerations. But they are not sufficient. A career built on external expectations rather than internal vision will eventually produce exactly what Esau produced — the short term gain and the long term loss.
Your ten-year professional vision is not a prediction. It is a direction. It is the answer to the question: If I show up as the professional I described in my identity statement, operating within the boundaries I just defined, where do I want that to take me in the next ten years?
Ten years is the right timeframe for this exercise — not one year and not a lifetime. One year is too short to build anything meaningful. A lifetime is too long to plan with any specificity. Ten years is long enough to require genuine growth and short enough to plan for with realistic detail.
ACTION STEP: Answer the following questions to build your ten-year professional vision.
In ten years what professional role or position do I want to hold?
In ten years what impact do I want to have had on the people I have worked with or served?
In ten years what professional reputation do I want to have built?
In ten years what skills, credentials, or experiences do I want to have developed that I do not currently have?
What would I need to believe about myself to make that ten-year vision a reality?
STEP SEVEN: Build Your SMART Goals From Your Vision
Now take your ten-year vision and work backward. If that is where you are going, what do you need to accomplish in the next twelve months to be on track? Those are your SMART goals.
SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The key word most people underweight is Relevant. Relevant means aligned with your vision and your values — not just professionally achievable but actually pointed in the direction you said you wanted to go.
A goal that is achievable but not relevant to your ten-year vision is not a SMART goal. It is a distraction.
ACTION STEP: Using your ten-year vision, write three SMART goals for the next twelve months. At least one must address a professional skill development need. At least one must address a networking or relationship goal. At least one must address a credential, certification, or professional milestone.
SMART Goal One:
Specific — What exactly will I accomplish?
Measurable — How will I know I achieved it?
Achievable — What resources or support do I have available?
Relevant — How does this connect to my ten-year vision?
Time-bound — By what specific date?
SMART Goal Two:
Specific:
Measurable:
Achievable:
Relevant:
Time-bound:
SMART Goal Three:
Specific:
Measurable:
Achievable:
Relevant:
Time-bound:
STEP EIGHT: Craft Your Professional Self-Introduction From Your Identity
Your professional self-introduction — your elevator pitch — should not be a summary of your resume. It should be an expression of your professional identity. The difference is significant.
A resume summary says what you have done.
A professional identity-based introduction says who you are, what you stand for, and where you are going.
An employer does not just want to know your job history. They want to know if you are the kind of professional who belongs in their organization. Your introduction is your first and most powerful opportunity to answer that question.
The formula is simple:
Line One — Your professional identity in one sentence. Not your job title. Your identity. "I am an educator and workforce development specialist who has spent sixteen years helping professionals close the gap between where they are and where they want to be."
Line Two — Your most relevant specific achievement. One sentence. One measurable outcome. "In that time I have developed curriculum that has been adopted across multiple industries and personally mentored professionals who have gone on to secure positions at organizations including..."
Line Three — Your forward-looking professional direction. One sentence. "I am currently seeking opportunities to bring that curriculum to college programs and corporate training environments where it can serve at scale."
Line Four — Optional. One sentence connecting your professional values to the opportunity. "I do this work because I believe that the right preparation, the right tools, and the right guidance can change the trajectory of anyone's professional life — regardless of where they started."
Notice that this introduction does not mention family, personal circumstances, hobbies, or anything from the personal identity statement. That information belongs at the dinner table. This introduction belongs in the interview room.
ACTION STEP: Write your professional self-introduction using the formula above. Practice it aloud until you can deliver it in sixty to ninety seconds without reading from notes and without it sounding memorized.
My Professional Self-Introduction:
STEP NINE: The Five Things You Do Well — Your Professional Genius
Albert Einstein is often credited with saying that everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life believing it is a failure.
That fish is not a failure. It is a genius at swimming. The problem is not the fish. The problem is the evaluation criteria.
This step is about identifying your five specific professional gifts — the things you do with such natural excellence, such genuine engagement, and such consistent results that they belong at the center of your professional identity. Not twenty things. Not everything. Five.
Here is why five matters.
When a candidate walks into an interview and says "I can do anything" or "I am a fast learner" or "I am very versatile" they have communicated one thing clearly — they do not know themselves well enough to be specific. And an employer who is serious about building a team does not want a candidate who can do anything. They want a candidate who can do specific things excellently and who knows exactly what those things are.
Think about it from the employer's perspective. If you ask someone what they are great at and they say "anything" — the next question in a serious interviewer's mind is: can you go to the moon? Because if you can do anything surely you can do that. The answer reveals the problem immediately. "I can do anything" is not a professional identity statement. It is hustle language. It signals that the candidate is looking for any available opportunity rather than the right specific fit. It signals temporary rather than invested. It signals that no real self-knowledge work has been done.
The candidate who says "I do five things with genuine excellence and here is what they are" — that candidate has done the work. That candidate has something specific to offer. That candidate is someone worth a serious conversation.
A NOTE ON MISTAKES:
Before you identify your five things I want to address something that prevents most people from doing this exercise honestly.
Fear of being wrong.
One of the most important professional lessons I ever received came from a supervisor who sat me down after I had made a mistake and was convinced the sky was falling. He looked at me calmly and said: "I can fix almost any mistake. Just calm down and let's talk this through."
That sentence changed everything about how I relate to error.
Mistakes are not evidence of failure. They are the process of learning. Einstein made mistakes. Steve Jobs made mistakes. Elon Musk made mistakes. When I started self-publishing books I made one hundred mistakes. The learning that came from those one hundred mistakes is now in this textbook serving you.
You are allowed to be wrong about your five things and revise them later. You are allowed to discover through experience that what you thought was a strength is actually a growth area and that what you dismissed as ordinary is actually extraordinary. That is not failure. That is the process of learning what you are actually made of.
Give yourself grace to get this wrong the first time.
Now let us find your five.
FINDING YOUR FIVE — THE PROCESS:
Step One — Look at your strengths assessment results. Which results, when you read them, made you feel seen? Not just described but genuinely recognized? Those are candidates for your five.
Step Two — Think about the feedback you receive most consistently from people who work with you or have been served by you. Not the compliments you fish for — the ones that come unsolicited, repeatedly, from people who have no reason to flatter you. What do they keep saying? Those are candidates for your five.
Step Three — Think about the work that makes you lose track of time. The tasks that do not feel like tasks. The problems you find yourself thinking about when no one asked you to. The areas where you find yourself going deeper than required because you genuinely want to understand. Those are candidates for your five.
Step Four — Think about what you were doing the last time someone said "how did you do that?" or "I could never do that" about something that felt completely natural to you. The things that seem ordinary to you but extraordinary to others are often your greatest professional gifts.
Step Five — From everything identified in Steps One through Four, select the five that appear most consistently and feel most authentically yours.
Write your five here:
My Five Professional Strengths — The Things I Do With Genuine Excellence:
1. _______________________________________________
How this shows up in my professional work:
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
2. _______________________________________________
How this shows up in my professional work:
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
3. _______________________________________________
How this shows up in my professional work:
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________
How this shows up in my professional work:
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________
How this shows up in my professional work:
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
These five things now become a non-negotiable part of your professional identity. They go into your self-introduction. They go into your resume bullet points as the lens through which your achievements are framed. They go into your interview responses as the foundation of every answer about your strengths. And they go into your ten-year vision as the core capabilities around which your career is built.
STEP TEN: Know Your Learning Style
One of the most common professional interview responses that signals underprepared candidates is "I am a fast learner."
It sounds like a strength. It is not — not by itself.
Here is why.
Every serious employer who hears "I am a fast learner" has a follow-up question waiting. What is your learning style? And most candidates who confidently declared themselves fast learners cannot answer it.
A fast learner who does not know how they learn is like a car with a powerful engine and no steering wheel. The speed is real. The direction is uncertain.
Knowing your learning style is a professional competency. It tells an employer not just that you can learn but how to support your learning effectively — which makes you more valuable, not less, because it removes the guesswork from onboarding and professional development.
The four primary learning styles are:
VISUAL — You learn best by seeing. Diagrams, demonstrations, written instructions, charts, and visual representations of concepts. If someone explains something verbally without showing you, you may need to draw it or write it down to fully process it.
AUDITORY — You learn best by hearing. Verbal explanations, discussions, lectures, and talking through concepts out loud. You may find yourself remembering things better when you heard them explained than when you read them.
KINESTHETIC — You learn best by doing. Hands-on experience, practice, and application. You need to try something to truly understand it. Watching a demonstration helps, but until your hands are on it the knowledge has not fully landed.
READING AND WRITING — You learn best through text. Reading detailed explanations, writing out notes, and processing information through the written word. You may retain information from a manual better than from a verbal explanation.
Most people are a combination of two or more styles with one dominant preference. Knowing your primary and secondary styles allows you to seek out the learning environments and methods that work best for you — and to communicate that preference clearly to employers, mentors, and colleagues.
ACTION STEP: Identify your primary and secondary learning styles from the four described above. Then complete the following statements.
My primary learning style is:
My secondary learning style is:
When I am learning something new I perform best when:
When an employer asks me about my learning style I will say:
Chapter One Actionable Plan — Completion Checklist
☐ Strengths assessment completed — results read thoroughly ☐ "I am a professional who..." statements written for top three to five strengths ☐ Professional identity statement written — includes values and boundaries ☐ Personal identity statement written — honest and complete ☐ Professional boundary framework completed — all five questions answered ☐ Ten-year professional vision written — all five questions answered ☐ Three SMART goals written — all five components completed for each ☐ Professional self-introduction written and practiced aloud ☐ Five professional strengths identified with specific workplace applications ☐ Learning style identified — primary and secondary — with response statement writtenA Final Word on Identity
Esau had a birthright. He had access to something extraordinary — a covenant inheritance, a legacy, a future that had been set apart for him before he was born.
And he traded it for a bowl of soup because he was hungry in the moment and had never done the work of understanding what he actually had.
Do not be Esau.
Know what you carry. Know what it is worth. Know where you are going. Set boundaries that protect the inheritance. And do not make permanent decisions from temporary feelings.
The job market will pressure you. Employers will tempt you. Financial stress will rush you. Fear will tell you to take whatever is available right now before something better disappears.
In those moments come back to this chapter. Come back to your professional identity statement. Come back to your ten-year vision. Come back to the boundaries you set in a calm moment before the pressure arrived.
That is your Jacob. That is your tent. That is the covenant mind operating the way it was designed to operate.
Rome was not built in a day.
And neither are you.
But you are being built. And the foundation you lay in this chapter will hold everything that comes after it.
Grandma DeeDee was right. 🙏
— Daisy Rice