Career Paths
It is perhaps more challenging for Mediators to find a satisfying career than any other type. Though intelligent, the regimented learning style of most schools makes long years earning an advanced degree a formidable undertaking for people with the Mediator personality type – at the same time, that’s often what’s needed to advance in a field that rings true for them. Mediators often wish that they could just be, doing what they love without the stress and rigor of professional life.
Oftentimes, as with so many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle, in a line of work that begins with passion and dedication, but which comes to require training so that the academia feels intimately linked to that passion. Too many Mediators drift in frustration, ultimately succumbing to the necessities of day-to-day life in a job that wasn’t meant for them. But it turns out that, despite such exacting demands, modern economics places a premium on the very keys to Mediators’ challenges: their creativity, independence, and need for meaningful relationships with individuals who need their help.
There’s Place and Means for Everyone
First and foremost is seemingly every Mediators’ dream growing up – to become an author. While a novel is a classic choice, it is rarely an accessible one, and there are many viable options for freedom-loving Mediators. The internet brings to the world the opportunities of blogging and freelance work – as organizations expand their reach beyond their native tongues, they will come to depend on Mediator personality types, with their gift for language and written expression, to take their rougher translations and stale pitches and inject them with a sense of beauty and poetry. Smaller organizations will need more than ever to express with elegance the value they bring to local communities.
The real beauty here is that it takes a core interest that people with the Mediator personality type share, while helping a cause they believe in, independently, through creative expression and personal growth, and makes it applicable to any interest there is. There will always be a need, and now more than ever, to win people’s hearts and minds with the written word.
Some Mediators will prefer a still more personal touch, being able to work face-to-face with clients, seeing that their personal effort really impacts another’s quality of life. Service careers such as massage therapy, physical rehabilitation, counselling, social work, psychology and even academic roles and retraining can be exceptionally rewarding for Mediators, who take pride in the progress and growth they help to foster. People with the Mediator personality type have a tendency to put others’ interests ahead of their own, a mixed blessing by itself, but when a patient takes their first unaided step in the long road to recovery after an accident, nothing will feel more rewarding than that selflessness.
If to Do Were as Easy as to Know What Were Good to Do...
Where Mediators will not thrive is in a high-stress, team-heavy, busy environment that burdens them with bureaucracy and tedium. Mediators need to be able to work with creativity and consideration – high-pressure salespeople they are not. It can be a challenge to avoid these roles, as they are the basis for so much starting work, and it’s often a risk to break away into something less dependable, but more rewarding. To find a career that resonates with Mediators’ values though, that’s more than just a job, sometimes it’s just what needs to be done.
