I think we may be asking GenZ the wrong questions.

I was talking with an intern this week about career planning.

She has 2 years left of school — and is trying to figure out the 1st job she wants, let alone what she wants her career to look like.

You could tell she had been asked a million times what she wants to do and there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm to have the conversation again.

So I said, “let’s put this topic to the side and talk life planning.”

That’s when we started getting somewhere.

Her face lit up as we talked about:

Where she wanted to live
What she wanted to be able to do outside of work
How her relationship may impact her decisions for post-grad
What she thought the traditional career path was vs. what she actually wants to do

As we started putting her life pieces together, you could tell it brought her ease, excitement, and clarity as to what what her career options could be.

So instead of asking “what job do you want?”

Maybe we start asking “what do you want your life to look like?”

Doesn’t mean we forget about career planning.

We are just figuring out how our career fits into our life, and not how our life fits into our career.

If we want the next generation of leaders to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled, we need to start asking better questions.

(and maybe ask ourselves this question if we haven’t already)