About

About The Complete Picture

The Complete Picture is a new career guidance model and education framework.

The concept is based on my observations over more than a decade, working with entrepreneurs and small business owners. It combines established psychological and career theories with critical thinking skills for the purpose of helping someone work out why they’re suited to some kinds of careers, jobs and work environments and not others.

The Complete Picture is a comprehensive approach to career guidance that honours the complexity of real people, making real career decisions, with incomplete and imperfect information in a rapidly changing world.

The program will eventually be available in the following formats: 1-on-1 session with a career practitioner, self-paced online program, and school program.

About Sandy Taylor

Sandy Taylor is a Career Counsellor/ Vocational Coach and the creator of The Complete Picture model.

She has spent the last decade supporting people from all walks of life through career transitions, particularly helping people transition from traditional employment to self-employment by creating work that fits their lives and their goals.

She holds a 600-hour coaching and development certificate that includes subjects like curriculum development and course writing, a Cert IV in Career Development and she’s an associate member of the Career Development Association of Australia (CDAA).

After spending years in international finance and corporate management, she knows firsthand what it’s like to realize you’re on the wrong path – and how powerful it can be when you finally get onto the right one.

My goals for this model

Right now, this model and program are just me. One woman, fitting in an ambitious quest around a day job, family responsibilities and animals who need feeding and tending to, whether it’s Wednesday morning or Christmas Day.

In my dreams, this is where I imagine it going.

I want everyone to have the opportunity to become what I call “real world smart” about themselves. To understand that successful people aren’t better than they are, they are just people whose intelligences and interests align with the work they’ve chosen to do, which also happens to suit how they experience the world, which is what someone’s personality is.

And they’re not successful because they’re better, they’re better because they developed habits and attitudes which enable them to keep doing the work. To keep facing challenges that exceed their current abilities, without ever feeling the need to give up.

The smartest kid in every school class doesn’t necessarily end up the most successful, and the kid who’s always in trouble isn’t bad. The qualities that make them willing to break rules, to not care when authority figures disapprove are the same ones entrepreneurs need. The ability to do something different to what everyone else is doing and has always done and go against the grain.

We need rule followers, rule breakers, peacemakers, and dreamers, because each has a role to play in how our societies are meant to work.

I want young people who feel like they have nobody in their corner, at home or at school, to learn how to believe in their capacity to influence their own destiny. To be their own advocate, even if their voice is barely a whisper. To set their own goals and reach them, even when there’s nobody there to cheer them on or even notice.

The future of this program might be something or it might be nothing at all, but for now, I’m motivated by the possibility of doing for others what my young self so desperately needed: someone to believe in me, even if that someone was just me.