Fifteen years ago, when my (now) husband and I sat down to plan our wedding, we agreed—the first step we needed to take was obvious.

In order to come up with the answers for what kind of wedding we wanted to have, we needed to ask the right questions.

And so, as two marketers making our union official—we wrote a creative brief. Romantic, I know.

In our brief, we asked:

• What’s our goal?

• What would make the wedding feel like a success?

• How do we want the celebration to make us feel?

• What feelings do we want to bring out in our people?

• And by the way…who are our people and who are they to us?

• What adjectives would we use to describe what we want to create?

The brief kept us on task, on-brand and in lock step as a couple throughout the planning process. When families, vendors or random people with opinions pushed too hard on their hopes and dreams for the event, we always came back to the brief. It was a reminder of our intention to build something together that was authentically us. Not just the wedding. The marriage.

We’ve come back to this approach various times in our lives. After the births of both of our daughters, we wrote briefs on how we wanted those first postpartum weeks to feel. Everyone seemed to fall in line except for the babies. Go figure.

Now, in my work with clients in career transitions, I use the creative brief for a fresh look at what they want to build in this next chapter, asking:

• What will success look like in your career, right now, in this stage of your life?

• Why are you doing this work?

• What problems in the world do you want to solve?

• Who do you want to help?

• How are you uniquely positioned to do this work?

• Who’s on your support team? Who’s not?

• How do you want to feel on a typical day in your work?

• How do you want to make others feel?

• If your work had a single message, what would it be?

• What’s the tone of how that message is delivered?

• What are your non-negotiables in your work? And your nice-to-haves?

I have come to appreciate using the career creative brief in my own work and business because as I discuss often, I like ideas. I’m prone to epiphanies. I fall in love…a lot. The brief helps me focus and gives me criteria for evaluating my ideas. It gives me a way to either connect them to what I want—or to say, "Yes, that is a clever idea, but I’m not going to be the one to bring it to life." Writing a brief is a way for you to declare—this is what you want and who you want to be in your work. And it’s a way to remind you of this unique design when you act like a human and veer off your path.