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:  A Life Well-Lived

The final step in defining your ultimate life vision involves beginning with the end in mind.  In his highly acclaimed book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen Covey discusses specific success principles essential to a happy life.  Dr. Covey’s Habit Number Two is:  Begin with the End in Mind.  This means embarking on your goals, both large and small, by visualizing how you’d like things to be at the end of the process.

When the spouse of a colleague passed away last year, it got me thinking about this success habit in terms of a life well-lived.  My colleague’s children developed a beautiful website to pay tribute to their father.  They included his life story with details of his family life, career, personal passions and accomplishments.  It was a poignant tribute to his life – indeed a life well-lived.

It may sound strange, but after seeing this moving website, I vowed to write my own memoriam.  I knew it would give me the opportunity to review my life to date and see what else I wanted to experience. 

Completing this exercise allowed me to gain a great deal of clarity.  I suggest you complete a similar exercise to help you review your life, thus far, and launch the rest of your life with the end in mind. 

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.

A Life Well-Lived – Your Memoriam

• Who attends your memorial service?

• What do people say about you?

• What stories do they tell?

• What makes them smile when they think of you?

• What makes them laugh when they think of you?

• What do they remember most about you?

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 final 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. 

I wish you much continued success as you move towards defining a life you love!

Until next month…

Warmly,
Maret

This entry was posted by Maret McCoy on January 29th, 2007 under Career with keywords .

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