Creating a vision for your new career

One of the first challenges people face when reinventing their career is coming up with an idea of what they’d like to do.  Typical career counseling generally suggests starting off by analyzing your skill set and matching them to a list of potential occupations.  Although this strategy may be useful for new grads, it is less effective for those who have a lot of experience under their belts.

Why is this?  Once you’ve been in the work force for a while, the above equation misses critical factor in career success-- your life!  As time passes life’s complexities increase, and as a result there can be a mis-match between your job and what you need (or want) for your life.  This causes a significant amount of unhappiness; much of career satisfaction is directly tied to how well a job helps you create the life you want to live.

You may have heard the saying: ‘If you can see it, you can be it’.  This is the principle to employ when creating a vision for your new career—you must see it before you can make it real.  But don’t get stressed out if you don’t know exactly what you want to do—many people who have successfully reinvented themselves started without knowing that.  But what everyone knows at the start—including you!-- is the kind of life they dream of living.

This means that when you seek to reinvent your career, the best place to start is by first coming up with a vision for your ‘ideal life’ (once you’ve done so, you brainstorm ideas for the kinds of careers that can deliver it!).  The best way to start creating a life vision is by imagining a picture of your ideal day.  You wake up in the morning—where are you?  What does the room look like?  Who’s with you?  Visualize all these details and make them real.  Continue on in your mind, creating a picture of this day, including your surroundings, who you’re with and what you do.  But don’t panic—you don’t need to know specifics!  Just come up with a general idea of what you’d enjoy (i.e. being in a small office interacting with a team or alone in your home office typing on your computer).

By designing a picture of your ideal day, you can begin to seek the kind of work that turns that vision into reality!  In our classes I recommend that people write down their visions; you can also create a ‘vision book’ with pictures, words and phrases that represent your ideal day and life.

Don’t be afraid to stretch yourself and create a picture that seems almost scary in its possibility to make you happy.  Your ideal day (and life!) should speak to your heart, excite you, make you thrilled and a little bit scared, and bring you a sense of fulfillment.  If it doesn’t, then dream bigger!  As Les Brown says: “If you shoot for the moon and miss, at least you’ll land among the stars!”