Comb your job history to find what makes you tick.

Michael writes that he has had a varied career history. A qualified teacher, he has also worked in restaurants, both as a chef and front of house. He has run his own delicatessen and cafe for five years with success and established a small gardening business. Now in his 50s, he feels he has never really done work that has truly engaged him.

Michael's career history and his feeling of a lack of engagement with work is not uncommon.

I want Michael to consider whether his sense of dissatisfaction is the result of his current unemployment, or whether he truly felt a lack of engagement throughout his varied roles.

Feelings of dissatisfaction can sometimes lead us to focus overly on previous periods of dissatisfaction and to underestimate or ignore times when we were happy in work. This can distort our decision-making.

I would also encourage Michael to take a step back and reflect on the patterns that have emerged to date in his career.

There are several obvious patterns I see.

The first and most general is the movement between self-employment and being an employee. The second is the move between teaching and hospitality or retail. The third is Michael has travelled around the country quite a bit and seems to have enjoyed that experience. These patterns resemble a pendulum as he swings between employment and self-employment, teaching and hospitality, travel and working in one place.

However, there are unifying patterns in his story. The strongest one appears to be that in whatever role he has undertaken, commonly he has ended up being a manager or leader. Interestingly, these management roles have been in small businesses or small schools.

I'd encourage Michael to reflect on these patterns and any others he identifies to help him understand what they might be telling him about his work preferences and his transferable skills.

For instance, do they indicate that he prefers to lead? Does he prefer a small organisation? Does he ultimately prefer to be "his own man"? Does his dissatisfaction arise from wanting to break those patterns, or because he is finding it hard to maintain or re-establish such patterns?

I'd also encourage Michael to make a list of the skills he has acquired along the way. This list is likely to be long and varied given his history. Once he had listed his skills - preparing lessons, public speaking, assessment, food preparation, bookkeeping, marketing, staff rosters etc - I'd ask him to randomly select four or five, perhaps drawing them out of a hat, and to repeat this exercise several times. The idea is to encourage him to look at novel combinations of his skills sets.

In doing this he might be able to break free of some of the stereotypical patterns of skill usage and reveal new possibilities that point towards new and previously unconsidered career options.

In conjunction with this, I'd get Michael to consider things he particularly liked or disliked doing in previous roles. For instance, he expresses no love for meetings, being a counsellor, doing curriculum development and other administrative tasks.

For me at least, a broader pattern emerges of a person who enjoys the independence of self-management or managing a small team, who is focused on service delivery and prefers not to be bogged down in administration and who prefers performing, presenting or teaching to more one-on-one counselling-type roles.

I might have Michael wrong and without meeting him I can never be certain. However, the point is, I'd encourage Michael to look at the patterns in his life in this manner, to enable him to describe them in this way.

This process will help Michael understand where he is more likely to find job satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. That in turn is likely to help motivate him to produce more-compelling applications and interview performance.