Brain Health Part I: Career Success

Are you concerned about your brain health as you age? Gretchen Reynolds, a physical education columnist for The New York Times, often writes about how learning a new sport as a midlife adult may be good for your brain. In fact, learning anything new produces positive benefits in the brain. But until recently, studies have only focused on higher cognitive learning in children. This study presents the need for adults to improve both physical and motor learning. And of course, this will affect your career!

Grey and white matter in the brain

How do different kinds of learning impact the brain? Physical learning develops gray matter in the motor control region of the brain. Language learning develops white matter in the language processing area. Familiar physical exercise, while beneficial to overall brain health, does not result in the same benefits as learning a new sport. This means your daily walk won’t necessarily cut it. Sedentary activities such as filling in crossword puzzles or playing video learning games have limited benefit on brain development.  

Brain Health and Your Career

Why does this matter to The Career Profiler? There are two main ways. The first is how brain capacity affects career success. The second is how high brain capacity affects career choice. This article will focus on the first. Greater success can be found in those careers with a well-developed brain.

For example, a 21-year-old man recently took the BullsEye Career profile package. He was raised without a television in his house. His mother, a preschool teacher, encouraged him to engage in non-screen activities like outdoor play. Much of his playtime included tinkering, building, music, reading, and journaling as required by his mother. In high school, he played all the team sports until injuries sidelined him.

Juggling is a great activity to improve brain health

He also earned top grades, becoming a valedictorian. Of all the people who have completed my BullsEye Career profile package, he scored the highest on the ability profile as a whole, if not the highest on all individual ability test modules. Even if he was smart to begin with, his activities, as we now know from motor and cognitive learning studies, no doubt expanded his brain capabilities.

The same is true when you learn a new physical exercise as an adult. Especially for second career applicants, picking up a new hobby like juggling or snowboarding might be a way to ensure your brain stays sharp for your next job. 

What’s a sport or activity that you want to pick up? Maybe this is an area that you need coaching in, either from a physical fitness coach or a career coach. The Career Profiler can help you identify your driving aptitudes and develop your capacity in the areas that you are already fit to expand in. Keep your  brain healthy by learning new things and working with a career coach to expand your potential.

Reviewed October 28, 2026

Some natural abilities feel like more than things you can do. They create a strong pull toward particular activities. In career profiling, these are important clues to the work you need opportunities to do, as well as the work you can perform well.

I explain these internal needs through a hunger-and-thirst analogy. Hunger prompts you to seek food; thirst prompts you to seek water. In a similar way, a strong driving ability can pull you toward activities that give it expression, even before you have words for that need.

The analogy describes the felt need for an outlet. It is not a medical explanation of hunger, anxiety or depression. Career profiling explores work needs and fit; it does not diagnose or treat a health condition.

What are driving abilities?

The Highlands Ability Battery identifies a group of five driving abilities. They concern different ways of reasoning, generating ideas and relating to the spatial world:

• Classification
• Concept Organization
• Idea Productivity
• Spatial Relations Theory
• Spatial Relations Visualization

The publisher explains these in What Are Driving Abilities? Your pattern matters: low, middle and high ranges all contribute information about suitable roles and responsibilities. The aim is not to collect the highest possible scores.

When an ability feels like a need

In my consulting work, a sufficiently strong ability can show up as a persistent need to use it. The phrase “press point” is a way to describe that pressure for expression. I use it to discuss the strength of a person’s need, rather than present it as a universal score cutoff or a clinical threshold.

When that need has little outlet, a person may describe restlessness, frustration or dissatisfaction with work. What looks like a lack of motivation may be a question worth exploring about the activities their day actually contains. The profile and consultation help examine that possibility alongside other explanations and circumstances.

Spatial visualization needs a tangible outlet

Spatial Relations Visualization is Highlands’ label for mentally manipulating three-dimensional objects. Highlands connects strength in this area with an orientation toward hands-on work or tangible results; see its explanation of spatial reasoning.

In practice, that outlet can take different forms: working with buildings, machinery, plants, physical systems or anatomy. The subject that attracts you and the kind of work you want to do still matter. A spatial ability does not prescribe one occupation.

Ask what a role actually lets you do. Will you work with the tangible subject, make or repair something, investigate a physical problem or see a concrete result? The job title alone may not tell you.

A different route to satisfying work

One college client I worked with had strong needs for hands-on work. The mathematics required for an engineering route presented a significant barrier for him at that stage. He was in a communications program, but it did not provide the kind of work he needed to do.

Leaving college was a difficult decision. He had connected a degree with being successful and had to reconsider what a successful route could look like for him.

He returned to practical work he already knew. Within three months, he had started his own sprinkler business. In his first year, he acquired 40 recurring clients. He was happier with the direction he had chosen and was building a successful business.

This is one client experience from my practice, with identifying details omitted. It illustrates the value of examining the route as well as the destination; it is not a promise that leaving college or starting a business produces the same outcome for someone else.

Find the outlet that fits the whole person

A driving ability identifies something important to consider, but it does not settle the entire career choice. Interests, work style, external needs and training requirements also need to fit. Read why natural abilities alone do not settle career satisfaction.

Sometimes the next step is a different role. Sometimes it is training, a trade, a degree or a change in the tasks your current job provides. A project outside work may also provide an outlet; the consultation explores whether that meets your needs or whether the work itself needs to change.

Understand your own pattern

Find My Profile Package to compare the assessments, reports and debrief formats. First, buy and complete your chosen package. Each assessment includes consultation, through the available video-plus-consultation or consultations-only format.

Decide your next step at the final profile consultation. You and Marjorie Wall Hofer can create a plan for the goal you choose. Targeting and Landing are possible next phases; both involve further coaching sessions with Marjorie, with the scope agreed together.

The Career Profiler owns TestEts, and Marjorie is the consultant for clients coming through this website. A separate free 30-minute introductory consultation clarifies the process and package choices before purchase.

Don’t Wait! Get out of a job you hate faster and escape the career pendulum

Waiting too long to leave a job is the primary act that kicks the career pendulum into effect.

The Career Pendulum Effect is a reactionary decision made in direct response to detesting your job. This means you choose a new job that is completely opposite to the current job you hate. Relief sweeps over you when you are finally free from the burdens of that horrible job. But they are often short-lived. That is the first swing of the pendulum.

Swinging from one bad job to another

Choosing the radically different job is usually no more enjoyable than the one you quit. The problems with the new job are simply different from the old one. Choosing a job that is radically different from the one you hate is almost always another bad career choice.

Surprisingly, the job, the one you detested, actually had some elements in it that you liked.  That’s why you chose it in the first place! So when you choose an opposite career, you choose a job that doesn’t have elements you liked in the first job. Inevitably, you choose yet another job you hate. That’s the second swing of the pendulum.

When you don’t get it right, you build a career history of swings between a series of jobs you don’t like, each for different reasons. This is a series of bad job choices which leads to years of fluctuating misery. It must be avoided at all costs!

The decision to change to an opposite job is the result of excessive internal stressors. Internal stressors are a host of factors that determine your feelings about a job. Personality or ability needs, work interests, management style, and corporate culture are the main factors.

Here’s an example. Harry hated his job in information technology. It required him to work in isolation for hours on end, and demand that he constantly learn and integrate new trending processes, techniques, applications and programs with existing software.  What made it even worse was that he detested the competitive, cutthroat culture. One day, he just walked off the job without giving notice. Nobody really was surprised; he hated his job that much. The longer Harry stuck with this job, the longer the internal stressors built up. When these stressors reach a certain level, a person simply can’t handle the pain of it any longer.

Harry didn’t like his work or his environment. His personality demanded people contact because he was an extrovert. Like most men, he possessed the talent to see in three dimensions when given a two dimensional object. This talent requires some kind of hands-on work. However, his IT work was completely abstract. This particular talent only gains strength with age. Furthermore, Harry liked to be available and helpful to people, while the competitive culture overran his cooperative personality. Oftentimes, people don’t analyze their internal landscape like this to figure out why they hate a job. Career testing could have identified all of these factors that drive many people to hate their job. But Harry had never taken a career test, so he stayed in the job so long that these misalignments grew to debilitating stress levels. His performance was now suffering, creating additional stress that compounded the issue.

The reactionary response, like walking off the job, is typically set into motion by a single event. This is what I call the ignitor. It catalyzes all the built-up internal stressor. Like a match that ignites a gas soaked, wood-filled fire pit, a single, often-times innocuous event sparks the reactionary response. On the day that Harry quit, his boss criticized his work in front of colleagues. In a competitive environment, performance is paramount. But Harry’s need to own his work made it incredibly difficult for him to handle criticism, especially criticism and in front of colleagues.

Faced with a mortgage, children with private school payments, and a spouse who had just re-entered the job market in a lower level job, he knew he needed to find a new job–quickly. What is fresh in his mind is the things he hates: the constant learning, competitive culture, and isolation. With the levels of stress in his life, he couldn’t see anything but these problems.

Combat career pinpoint vision

He had what Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book Blink as “pinpoint vision.” Under extreme stress, such as when their lives are in perceived imminent danger, police officers will only see the gun. They won’t see the hand, person, room, or anything else. They won’t see that it is a toy gun, or that the person holding it is showing signs of distress on his face instead of anger. They will simply see the gun and only the gun. If that gun happens to swing in their direction, they will fire theirs before “the gun” shoots them.

This is what happens in stress career-decision making as well. Under extremely high stress a person is more likely to make “tunnel vision career decisions” that often lead to a career pendulum swing.

Harry took a job as an IT trainer with a community college. The new job wasn’t isolated; it had lots of people contact. He didn’t need to learn something new every week, but instead was able to train others about what he already knew. And, best of all, he was working in the cooperative, helping environment of a college. He chose this job in response to everything he hated about the previous job.

A year later, he wondered why he was now hating this one! Thinking back, he thought, “I considered all the elements I hated most about the other job. I steered clear of them and chose this job. I made a good career choice!” What had he failed to do? He didn’t consider all the other aspects of work he needed to be happy. For example, he had a driving need to work with his hands. This need, like many others, are not so evident. When you compound high stress into a decision situation, the weight of dislikes overshadows everything making it virtually impossible to see even obvious aspects needed for a happy career. The pendulum was about to swing back again.

If you’ve been wondering about leaving a job you don’t like, it is most important to leave a job sooner rather than later. It is equally important to explore positive and negative aspects of a job. What makes you happy and what makes you stressed? Career testing and an excellent career coach can help you do just that.

When the career pendulum hangs balanced in the middle, it no longer swings between one bad job choice and another. It is at rest when all, or almost all, aspects of work that make you happy are met by a job.