If you sometimes feel confused about your career path, you aren’t alone; many people take years to find a career that is right for them, and many more have to try out a couple different fields before they find a perfect match. Here are just a few ways to make great decisions about your career trajectory, and why doing so can be a life-changing experience.

Don’t Make Long-Term Decisions in the Heat of the Moment

While it can be tempting to come up with career ideas in the heat of the moment, making decisions on the fly can cause us to create unrealistic goals and even undesired outcomes. Pursuing a career can take years or even decades, so if we aren’t deeply convinced that a particular path is right for us, we’ll be more likely to give up when the going gets tough.

Put Personal Rewards Over Money

For many people, dreams of success often center around high pay. Earning a good salary can be a nice thing, of course, but a big paycheck will not make us happy if we dread going to work each day. As more and more people are discovering, in fact, career satisfaction has very little to do with income and social status. It’s important that we pay our bills, of course, but we shouldn’t confuse high earnings with happiness. Indeed, when we make money our first priority in life, we’ll likely sell ourselves short.

Make Time for Your Passions

If you can’t find a job that you’re completely passionate about, find one that will enable you to pursue your passions on the side. If you don’t have some sense of work-life balance in this day and age, you’ll likely experience career burnout and dissatisfaction. That is something that no one should have to struggle with in the long-term.

For these reasons, making great career decisions doesn’t have to be a difficult process. It isn’t always easy to find the perfect job or the right way forward in life, but with a bit of problem-solving and a positive attitude, we may just find the career path that is right for us. And that is career-building at its best!