These Two Simple Exercises Can Help You Radically
Rethink Your Career
Reverse-engineer your way into a career change you never would have
considered possible.
You’re feeling stuck in your job, so you do the obvious thing: You
sit down and brainstorm all the other positions you’re qualified for. It
doesn’t go well. No matter which way you cut it, your options look limited.
Before you find the nearest wall to bang your head against, take a
step back and turn the question inside out. Instead of, “What’s available to
me?” ask yourself, “What type of work will make me happy?” It’s not as
idealistic as it sounds. If you can come up with an answer–even a vague one–you
may be able to reverse-engineer your way into a career change that you never
would’ve considered possible.
Here are two exercises to help you do just that.
1. PLAN YOUR CAREER IN REVERSE
Most of us know where we’d like to be next
year or the year after, but when hiring managers ask, “Where do you
see yourself in five years?” many
of us already already start to wince. Robert Wong, the cofounder and VP of Google Creative Lab, thinks
that’s a sign you need to contemplate the long-term more, not less.
“First,” he suggests, “imagine your most successful,
self-actualized future self in 20 years and write it down. Once there, imagine
what you would have had to achieve 10 years prior, and write that down.
Then go back five years. Then two and a half years–until you get to one year
from today.”
Wong freely admits that this is hard. “It’s easy to fantasize
about the future: ‘Oh, I can be retired in the Mediterranean!’ or, ‘I could be
running a Fortune 500 company or have a restaurant in New Orleans!’ But if you
go back assuming that happened,” he explains, “you realize that a year from now
you would have to achieve something to get to that end state.
The point, however, isn’t to obsessively plan every detail of your
professional life and then just spend the next several decades merrily
executing them, Wong says. No one’s career works that way. Instead, it’s to get
into the habit of translating your future goals–however distant, vague, or
ever-shifting–into actions you can take right now. Wong doesn’t remember where
he first heard about this exercise, but he knows that the instruction was to do
it every week.
“It’s less about helping you get to like your goal as much as
about propelling you forward,” he explains. Ultimately, Wong believes, “Most of
us don’t really know what we want,” in part because we can’t possibly know what
jobs of the future may await us to fulfill those wants. He
sees this thought experiment as “a way to try on different artifacts of the
future”–no matter how imaginary in the present–“and bring them back.”
Wong’s own “epiphany” after doing so, he says, “was that it wasn’t
about what the end goal was at all. Even if you change the end thing, it was,
‘Oh shit, I have to do something different tomorrow.”
2. ASK “WHO AM I?”–YOUR JOB NOTWITHSTANDING
“You probably find it easy to say where you are from, what you do
for a job, and the roles you play in life–father, teacher, plumber, etc. But
when asked to describe who you are at the core, how easily do those
words come?” asks Shantell Martin.
Martin, a British artist whose
collaborations run the gamut from
Kendrick Lamar to the MIT Media Lab, proposes a deceptively simple exercise to
find out: “In five minutes, without describing where you are from, what you do,
or the roles that you play, write down or record who you are.”
“It may be a description; it may be an idea or an emotion; it may
be a future vision,” she explains, “but I think a lot of people who are quite
sure of themselves try this and they’re like, ‘Oh wait, who am I when I strip
that back?'” Martin knows a key reason for that is how closely many of us
identify with our careers–which she doesn’t necessarily think is a bad thing.
But, like Wong, she suggests there’s a risk in getting it backward, allowing
what we do to stand in for our sense of self.
“Anyone who’s tried this challenge understands that there is no
real easy, quick answer,” says Martin, which is why she finds it valuable.
“Part of my work is asking who we are, and who you are, and ‘Are you you?‘”
“It’s bizarre to me that as we progress [into adulthood], this
isn’t something we have the words or vocabulary for [any longer],” she she
says. “When we’re kids we have these inclinations to do what we love . . . If
you’re doing something obsessively as a kid, there’s a chance that your fight
and your passion is tied up in there.” Martin believes grownups need to get
back into that habit, mining our childhoods for “what those clues were at a
young age that perhaps weren’t encouraged or promoted or even seen.”
At the same time, she believes this exercise can help you
reconnect with your sense of self, even it has nothing to do with your work.
“It depends on your personality and your understanding of what success means,”
Martin says. “We shouldn’t be forcing people–like, ‘Find your passion and turn
that into a job.’ If you’re happy with having a nine-to-five and having kids
and being able to provide for them, then great!”
Martin’s own answer to her prompt? “I’m a curious, questioning
individual who is always striving to figure out ‘self’ and figure out if
progress exists . . . My core being is to make and to share–and that’s as far
as I’ve got,” she says. But she’ll keep asking. “We have a lifetime to figure
that stuff out. Being patient is good . . . Patience doesn’t mean standing
still.” Martin adds, “It just means moving forward in the right direction.”
BY RICH BELLIS
https://www.fastcompany.com/40520507/these-two-simple-exercises-can-help-you-radically-rethink-your-career?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=3&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=01252018
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