Beyond Careers

New Directions is the national pioneer of a new approach to realizing a person's unique potential, within and beyond traditional careers. We call it the Life Portfolio® perspective. It guides our clients toward career and life paths aligned with their core values, talents, and interests—in short, with who they are.

Our vision makes New Directions especially qualified to guide accomplished men and women facing significant decisions. We challenge them, intellectually and emotionally, to identify and pursue their true paths.

Using the assessments, strategies and tools of our Life Portfolio process, we work with them to create and implement a plan for their next job, their career, and their life. We help them find both employment and creative, meaningful ways to live life beyond a full-time job.

Uniting everything we do is our Life Portfolio perspective.

What is a Life Portfolio? It is many things. It's a flexible life planning tool and portal to new beginnings. It is a new way of thinking and an agenda for ongoing self-discovery. It's a way to integrate life's core elements – work, family and financial needs – into a larger search for purpose and meaning. It's an agenda for turning careers into callings.

Most important, it allows us to answer the question, "What am I uniquely suited for that will give me a complete sense of having fully lived?"

New Directions created and trademarked its Life Portfolio Program® in the mid-1990s in response to new realities. People live longer today. We found that many clients in their 50s, 60s and 70s were perplexed. They wanted to move on, but they did not want to wind down. We recognized that even successful, senior-level executives and professionals need guidance in the uncharted waters of extended middle age.

We also recognized that the extra years people are living are truly a bonus only if they are used well. Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, whose upbeat confrontation with cancer inspired millions, expressed this well when he said, "We don't beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the reaper by living well and fully."

The Life Portfolio perspective helps you do exactly that. You design a balanced combination of pursuits including part-time work, ongoing learning, more family and leisure time, giving back and, for many, a regrounding in spirituality. Each client creates his or her own mix based on individual assets, values and goals. For more information about the program, see SERVICES.

A premise of the portfolio perspective is that people achieve greater professional and personal fulfillment when they focus not on their titles or status but on what they are doing with their lives, on how they live, and what they value.

A Life Portfolio yields more flexibility and control over life. Gaining a better understanding of their goals and options to achieve them equips people to handle the inevitable bumps in the road before they hit them.

Many portfolio clients imagine new possibilities that benefit their communities as well as themselves. As a result, the Life Portfolio vision is a way to make use of the social capital that American's longer lives are yielding.

We have adopted Life Portfolio is as the vision behind our work at New Directions. Our goal is to help you lay out a life map identifying where you belong, why that destination is important and when and how to get there.