Jeff Saperstein

IS THIS YOU?

Jane is a highly educated and accomplished 40-year-old, who has attended some of the United States’ top-ranked undergraduate and graduate universities. She works in a boutique consulting firm specializing in strategic planning in non-profit organizations in one of the most prestigious cities in the country. From all objective measures, Jane has it all. Despite all of this, she feels unhappy, unfulfilled, and unchallenged in her current career.

MOVING FORWARD

I ask Jane to imagine and visualize precisely what she’d like her work and life to look like in three years. She identifies five or six attributes that would take her from being unengaged to excited, from tedious to energy-charged. Jane can’t imagine herself making what she’s described — all within the reasonable grasp of her current experience and capabilities — happen because she can only see the obstacles in her way and the parameters of her current job title and functions.

Expressing her ideas of how she could move forward, she says, “but I tried that before and it didn’t work” or “I cannot get myself to believe it could be true.” Jane is stuck. She sees an “objective” reality of self-defining limitations, and cannot imagine “subjective” possibilities. She operates from the energy of fear and scarcity, rather than from joy and abundance, so she stops herself from moving forward.

REDEFINE YOURSELF

When we define ourselves by field and job function — lawyer, consultant, teacher —  we follow a logical mindset to our career path that can inhibit our ability to see the “room” we live in subjectively — our experiences, hopes, values, and unique perspectives. David Gelernter, in his just released book, The Tides of the Mind, suggests, “The mind is a room with a view from inside; we observe the external world and our private inner worlds. Mentally, we are stuck inside our rooms as we are stuck, physically, within our bodies”. Our view may be what others expect or define for us or what we choose to remember… all while placing self-imposed “limitations” that we’re conditioned to accept as true.

LET GO OF LIMITATIONS

We may strive for external validation and track references early in our career when we want to acquire skills and experience that credential us for a professional career. However, the same attitude may inhibit us from expanding from these definitions in order to springboard to what may be next in a more fulfilling transition to living/working with our values in a different career/life stage.

CHECK IN WITH YOUR PAST SELF

How can we begin to imagine from our subjective perspective a future that better fits who we want to be and what we want to do?

One approach is to identify past satisfying experiences we’ve had in school, our early career, or events with friends and family. Identify five to 10 such experiences and write down what you recall. What did you do? How did you work? What was the context? Was there a purpose or a result that made you feel right? Who did you work with and what roles did you play? What made you feel good?

Chances are you’ll see some common attributes to these experiences that are like dots you can connect. Perhaps you enjoyed being in highly productive, motivated teams with people who helped you raise your bar of excellence. Maybe your activities had a definite beginning, middle, and end with measurable outcomes that gave you satisfaction for a job well done. Conceivably, being a project leader and creating order from chaos, and guiding the team, really satisfied you. Once you identify the attributes from your past experiences, you can then begin to imagine how to structure your work to engage and satisfy you.

(Note: we didn’t identify job titles; we identified work/life experiences that resonated with you because you remembered how you felt while doing them. By doing this exercise, it puts you in the subjective ”inner room” that involves more of your self-awareness, internally generated self-esteem, and imagination than the guideposts of the standard CV and work history description.)

DREAM BIG, START SMALL

Imagining a future that could satisfy you is a great first step to a values-based transition. But believing alone will not get you there. Taking first steps, which may just be saying out loud what you want, need to be followed with real planning and actions to turn imagination into your new lived reality.

Do you want more information? Schedule a complimentary Coaching Session with Jeff Saperstein today! Click here to access his Scheduling Calendar.