January 22nd, 2007
Step 4: Your Work Life
A Life You Love
Happy New Year! I hope 2007 is off to a great start for you.
This month, I launch a 12-column series in which I highlight the key steps to discovering your authentic career fit. This series will help you find a career you love so you’ll be fulfilled in both work and life.
If you feel stuck, know you’re in the wrong career, are re-entering the workforce after a break or know you could be doing more, this series will help you move on, move up and advance your career. Look for a new column every month - each one will help you define and actualize your authentic career fit.
5 Steps to a Life You Love
This month, I take you through a five-part process to define your ultimate life vision. It’s important to define a happy life before defining your specific career goals. Once you know what’s most important to you overall, you can design your career around those things. Therefore, your career will fit in with your life, rather than forcing your life to somehow fit around your career.
As an executive coach, I help professional women discover their authentic career fit. I want to help you do the same. This means identifying a career that:
- Is a natural fit for your authentic self
- Is in alignment with your skills, interests and values
- Feels right and meets your personal and professional needs
Before I take clients through the steps of identifying their ideal career fit, I first have them define their ideal life. I ask them to create a description of their ultimate life.
Each week in January, I’ll take you through a specific step to help define your ultimate life vision. These exercises involve brainstorming and writing down specific aspects of your ideal life vision. I provide thought-provoking questions to help you get clear on what you’d like your life to “look like.”
A Life You Love: Your Work Life
The fourth step in defining your ultimate life vision is defining your work life. Life is way too short to be in a job that makes us miserable. Doing work we love is part of living life to the fullest!
In this exercise, we’re just focusing on the logistics of your work life. We’re not focusing on what you do…yet. That will come in subsequent phases of the process that I’ll cover in future columns.
The following questions will get you started. Feel free to add additional details that come to mind. If you’re not exactly sure how to answer these questions, that’s okay. Simply write the first thing that comes to mind. The idea here is to start the process of brainstorming your life vision.
Let your creativity flow and do not judge or censor yourself. Have fun with it! There are always practicalities to consider (kids in school, a partner’s job, family nearby, etc.), but you have permission to suspend reality for the purposes of this exercise. Think about it in these terms: “If I could not fail, how would I like my life to be?”
- How many hours a day do you work?
- How many days a week do you work?
- What hours do you work?
- Describe your ideal work day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed.
- Do you work in an office, at home or on the road?
- Do you work for a small, medium or large organization?
Give yourself the time and space to ponder these questions. Remember, don’t filter anything - let your creativity flow!
I suggest you work on this a little bit each day. This will allow you to consistently focus on the process and will open you up to new possibilities.
Schedule time in your calendar to complete this fourth step in the next seven days. That way, you’ll be sure to get it done and not let it linger on that never-ending to do list. Next week, we’ll focus on the next phase: A Life Well-Lived.
I wish you much continued success as you move towards defining a life you love!
Until next week…
Warmly,
Maret
