Your personal values and your career in wellness

Case study – Sophie Clyde Smith:

Sophie is the former Welltodo Careers Manager. In 2019, she took the next step in her career and became self-employed. Her journey is one that will certainly inspire you if you think that entrepreneurship could be on the horizon for you.

Sophie previously worked in financial services recruitment in Jersey. She decided to take the opportunity of moving to London as her chance to work in the health and wellness industry, an industry she was completely passionate about.

Sophie knew that she had a passion for wellness but was unsure what sector or job was right for her. She needed to define her personal values to gain clarity. Sophie completed the same task that you will be doing, and she came up with four key personal values:

1. Love
2. Health
3. Positivity
4. Personal Development

Now, everyone will have a different perspective on what each of these values means, so by grouping the relevant values into themes (shown below), it gives an insight specifically into what they mean to Sophie:

1. Love – caring, affection, fun, laughter, relationships, family.

2. Health – mental, physical, energy, vigour.

3. Positivity – optimism, silver lining.

4. Achievement – personal development, wisdom, discovering and understanding knowledge.

Next, Sophie applied her personal values to her career search, uncovering that being the Careers Manager at Welltodo was a perfect fit. Here’s why…

1. Love – Sophie realised she was able to fulfil this value every day doing the work she does in coaching people, caring for her clients, doing everything she can to improve their lives.

2. Health – Not only would Sophie get exposed to the health and wellness industry through her job, she was also careful to consider the company culture on internal health and wellbeing when making her transition. Sophie was able to fulfil her health value even more through the weekly team workouts that Welltodo offered, and through the shared values the team have on eating healthy food.

3. Positivity – Sophie made the decision to have a positive and optimistic outlook in her role every day and encouraged others to do the same. Through her coaching she was able to positively impart this to her clients to help them through the hard times.

4. Personal development – One of Welltodo’s core company values is self-development. As a business they provide individual coaching and offer support for training and courses, all factors which helped Sophie’s personal development value get fulfilled.

While Sophie endeavoured to fulfil these values in her personal life, she also realised that the ideal scenario for her was to fulfil as many of her personal values in her professional life. This was because she now had an awareness of what these values are. Every time she read a personal development book, cooked up a healthy feast for her loved ones, made the effort to send a special card to a friend, she had an extra sense of achievement knowing she was being true to her personal values. Equally, every time Sophie was feeling a little lost, lacking motivation and disconnected with herself, she could revisit her personal values to realign.

Now it’s your turn. Continue to the next step.