Jeff Saperstein

Jane is a highly educated and accomplished 40 year old, who has attended some of the US 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. Yet, she feels unhappy, unfulfilled and unchallenged in her current career.

I ask Jane to imagine and visualize specifically what she would 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 exciting, from tedious to energy-charged.  Jane cannot imagine herself making what she has described—all within 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 did not 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.

When we define ourselves by field and job function: lawyer, consultant, teacher; we follow a career path logic 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 own 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 with a narrative for limitations that we are conditioned to accept as true.  

We may strive for external validation and tracking 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 to springboard to what may be next in a more fulfilling transition to live/work with our values in a different career/life stage.

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 had in our school, early career, or just events with friends and family. Identify five to ten such experiences and write 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 good? Who did you work with and what roles did you play? What made you feel so good?

Chances are you will see some common attributes to these experiences that are like dots you can connect. Perhaps you enjoyed being in highly effective, motivated teams with people who helped you raise your bar of excellence. Maybe your activities had a clear 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 own lived experience that you remember, you can begin to imagine how you can structure work to engage and satisfy you.

Note: we did not identify job titles; we identified work/life experiences that resonated with you because you remembered how you felt while doing them.  This is the subjective ”inner room” that involves more of your self-awareness, internally generated self-esteem and imagination than the objective guideposts of the standard CV and work history description.

Imagining a future that could satisfy you is a great first step to a values-based transition. But imagining 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.