One of our friends and career consultant likes to say that there are three keys to creating unstoppable momentum in your life:

• Clarity
• Congruency
• Consistency

Clarity means discovering what you are designed to do. A career assessment can help you do that by identifying your greatest motivations and talents. Some also provide a list of careers that you are likely to find satisfying.

Benefits of clarity
One of the greatest benefits of Clarity is having realistic expectations for yourself. For example, a Jeep and an Indy racer are both cars, but designed to do very different things. You wouldn't expect a Jeep to be competitive in the Indianapolis 500. Nor would you expect the Indy racer to negotiate a logging trail. They are designed for different purposes. So to it is with people. Clarity allows you to have realistic expectations of what you can and cannot do.

It's one thing to know what you are designed to do. It's another to do it. The main idea of Congruency is to align what you do with your assessment.

Is your congruency out of alignment?
When it comes to congruency, most of us are rather badly out of alignment. You may need to make some adjustments. Most will be incremental, but some may be radical, such as changing professions. The goal is to spend more time using your strengths. That's where performance and satisfaction both peak.

Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent.
Consistency means staying with it. Have you ever been caught in traffic in a large city? You accelerate as the light turns green, only to stop at the red light on the next corner. This pattern of starting and stopping repeats itself over and over as you make your way to your destination. It's impossible to gain any momentum.

Careers can have momentum, too. Career momentum is achieved by practicing Clarity and Congruency over a long period of time. How long? Dr. Bernard Bloom of Northwestern University discovered that it takes between ten and eighteen years to achieve world-class performance in any career. You'll never get there if you keep switching careers.

The end of this story: The secret to gaining momentum in your life is to do what you are designed to do over a long period of time.

Article by Henry Neils, President and Founder of Assessment.com, the leading online career assessment company focused on helping employees and employers work together for their mutual benefit. Millions of people have gained personal insight into their careers by using the tools, such as MAPP™ (Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential), provided at Assessment.com."