What Color Is Your Parachute
Seven petals - skills, subjects, people, conditions, values, salary, geography - mapped together tell you what work actually fits, not just what's available.
Seven petals fan out from a centre, each one a separate question to answer before the next opens up.
Reach for this when…
- You've been made redundant and every application feels like guessing.
- You're employed but restless and can't name what's actually wrong.
- A career coaching client keeps listing job titles instead of what they want from work.
How to run it
- Complete the Flower Exercise across all seven petals honestly, not aspirationally.
- Look for where the petals agree, not just the ones that feel comfortable.
- Name two or three roles that fit the whole flower, not one petal.
- Use the interview and networking tools to reach people in those roles.
- Revise the flower as you learn what the market will actually offer.
A worked example
Situation. Andrés Gómez was made redundant from a shipyard in Cartagena, Colombia, and had sent forty identical applications to other shipbuilders with no replies.
Applied. Working through the Flower Exercise with a coach, he found his geography and working-conditions petals ruled out shipyard work entirely - he wanted flexible hours and refused to relocate.
Result. He retrained as a technical trainer for a maritime software firm, working remotely for clients across the same industry he thought he'd left behind.
The catch
The Flower Exercise assumes enough self-knowledge to answer honestly, which stressed or newly redundant people often don't have without a coach beside them. It's built for individual career choice, not organisational design, and some petals (salary, geography) can override the rest regardless of fit. It also comes from a US job-market context, so the interview and networking chapters need local translation.
A flower with one strong petal and six blank ones is not a career plan yet.
Origin: Richard N. Bolles