Finding a new vision for my career...

So, here I was almost a year into my new career and I knew it wasn't for me. Not in the long term. If truth be known I knew that from the start. It ticked a lot of boxes but from the very beginning I felt that I was having to leave part of me at home every day when I went to work. I had told myself I needed to just grow up and stop being such a hippy at heart, but turns out the hippy in me is part of who I am and no matter of trying to squash it was going to work.

So it was time to get back to the drawing board and get clear on what I wanted from my career. What would make me happy?

There were a few clear criteria already:
1. I didn't want to leave my job without having something else stable to move into.
2. I wanted a career that offered me a regular guaranteed income every month - I didn't want to go back to wondering every month how I was going to pay the bills.

But what new career could I go into? First I needed to go back and remind myself of what I wanted from my career in a very basic way before trying to attach it to a specific career.

Now we all process and generate ideas in different ways depending on our learning styles. Some people are verbal and linear in their way of thinking and communicating, some people are visual and non verbal, some are auditory, while others are kinetic and need to use movement to process and absorb new ideas.

I'm very much visual. Trying to verbally solve problems confuses me and gets me caught up in knots. And so over the years I've learnt to use collage to process and clarify my thoughts and feelings and create a visual goal of sorts. So that's what I did. Over the following weeks I poured through magazines and pulled out any images or words that I associated with career happiness and spent the evenings quietly putting together images, taking pieces out, adding new elements, stripping it back down again. And all the while getting a clearer and clearer picture of what I wanted my career to involve.

What I ended with were 2 simple pages - one with my favourite quote by Harold Whitman and one with an image that really inspired me as to who I wanted to be in my career - powerful, strong, energetic, leading the way - symbolised by the woman in the picture.
On top of this image I lay the following words: 'create, inspire, show the way - written and beautifully designed products on and offline on subjects that are fun, inspiring & uplifting'.

There it was. The essence of the career that I wanted to create. Now I had 101 ideas of how I might do that so the next stage was to explore what in reality I could create and what it would take me to get there.

Read the next post: Exploring my career ideas