The last two Mondays Work articles told stories designed to prompt you to consider your skills, abilities, interests and natural talents. While defining your skill set is highly important to career decisions, the next main component that leads to career satisfaction and success is, “What gives you a sense of purpose?” — the heart factor.

Give your heart a moment, and you may find the career differentiator that creates the success and satisfaction you are seeking.

When it comes to your career selection, a question that is often productive to ask yourself is, “What pain have you experienced that you would like to help others avoid on this journey of life?”

I answered that question in the “Closing Thoughts” chapter of my book, Future@Work - An Employee Survival Guide for the 21st Century. I wrote, “As a child I remember sitting around our small kitchen table eating dinner each evening listening to my father complain about work and the people he had to work with. Every day. Eventually, the company was sold, and he and many other employees were let go. A few years later the company closed. He had been there 34 years. Now, at 82, he still reminisces about work remembering the disagreements and conflicts that were part of his routine. I wish instead he had stories to tell of success and helping others grow and of happy pride-filled times of team accomplishments. He doesn't.”

My father passed away a few years ago and even the last memories I have of him include time at that same table where he still spoke negatively about work — 20 years after he retired. Straightforwardly, all the turmoil he felt was because he was never in the right job. He had great ability to do his job, just not any heart for it.

The “pain” of listening to my father vent daily about his unfulfilling career led me to my youthful conclusion that work was a life sentence and that you worked only to create security, which my father was outstanding at providing.

Then, as years passed, expanded career creating thoughts entered into the picture as my life evolved from focusing on work as more than a job that had to be endured. I wrote in "Future@Work,": “Do you also hope that work will be something you get to do, rather than have to do? Do you also hope that work will be a place of pride of accomplishment, of camaraderie and of personal fulfillment? You and others can make it that way.”

My father’s challenge led me to develop a career helping others find a better job, a better life and certainly happier times around the dinner table. What’s your mission? What would you like to correct in the world?

The career question for this week is, “How would your family and friends describe your dinner table conversations?”

Send your career-related questions to me at nsynko@SynkoAssociates.com. To learn more, visit our website at Synko Associates or follow this column each Monday in AnnArbor.com.