I’ve just taken a look at the first answers back on my Summer Newsletter Reader Survey. I realise I forgot to place the link on my blog , so here it is if you would like to take part: Click here to take survey
I’ll post a full breakdown of your responses and what I’m going to do as a result of your feedback in a week or so. But for now I want to pick up on a theme I noticed emerging.
Many of you asked for more information about personality tests and how they can help in the search for work that’s right for you. So here’s a short list of my favourite assessments, all of which I’ve taken myself and found useful….but please keep reading to the end, where I mention an important caveat!!
1.http://www.self-directed-search.com
This questionnaire measures interests and abilities, and as well as making job/career suggestions, also sheds some light on the work environment that suits you best. You can take it yourself online for $4.95.
For more info and a quick and dirty version of the test that you can do for free see this old post.
2. Strengthsfinder
Another do it yourself test. This one identifies your top 5 strengths/traits (e.g. empathy, positivity etc) and describes how you could use them in the world of work.
Each book comes with a unique code that you then enter online to take the questionnaire. You can buy the book through Amazon here
3. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
This is (in my view) the “gold plated” personality assessment indicator. The MBTI establishes your preferred way of taking in information and making decisions and indentifies your personality “type” (out of 16 possibilities). There is a lot of research you can access which describes the types of role and environment to which someone of your personality type is usually drawn.
I took the MBTI shortly after leaving commerical law and immediately understood why that world had not been a good fit for me. It was a huge relief to know it wasn’t my personal failure, but a misfit that would have been shared by many others of my “type”.
There are various websites that offer the MBTI, at quite a range of prices. Just be aware that the lower the fee, by and large the more automated the process. It’s worth paying more to ensure you get one to one feedback with a trained practitioner. More on how I run the MBTI here
4. Ask friends, family and colleagues.
Ok this isn’t a scientific test but it’s a very good way to get some free and instant feedback on what others see as your greatest strengths and skills….which should provide reassurance on existing career ideas and/or give you some new ones. See this former post for details.
CAVEAT!!
Personality assessments are excellent for feeding back to you in a clear, intelligible, manageable format, key aspects of your personality. If you’re feeling in a muddle, they can help enormously in identifying the wood for the trees.
But there is a danger that we expect too much from them. No personality assessment will tell you categorically that you should be a brain surgeon, or a gardener (or at least, no good one!).
Yet in the midst of career uncertainty, we often hope for these sorts of simple answers.
Here are 2 approaches I’d recommend when embarking on “self discovery”:
1. Don’t spend too long on the theory
I’d use one or more of the tools above to get a general picture, and then refine this with action.
There’s no substitute for actually trying stuff out to know if it’s for you not.
2. Get comfortable with a degree of not knowing
During a discussion on our organisation’s emerging corporate strategy, my fun focussed former boss once startled me by declaring: “I’m very comfortable with ambiguity”.
It had never occured to me that it was POSSIBLE - let alone desirable - to feel no pressure to dot all Life’s i’s and cross its t’s.
His words have swum into my brain on many occasions since. It’s a cliche, but viewing our winding path through life as a journey rather than a series of goals we must execute with unfailing precision does seem to me to be the wiser and happier perspective.
So I’ll leave you with this passage by Kahlil Gibran from the Prophet:
“And a man said, ‘Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.’
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, ‘I have found the truth,’ but rather, ‘I have found a truth.’
Say not, ‘I have found the path of the soul.’ Say rather, ‘I have met the soul walking upon my path.’
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.”
Occasionally, something lands in your in box which really makes your day. Here’s an extract from one such email, the inspiration for this recording:
“Dear Sarah
It has been just about a year since we met, briefly, last summer. I wanted to let you know of the big change I’m about to undergo, and thank you for your role in convincing me to pursue it.
A lot has happened since then, and the bottom line is that my partner and I have decided to give up on Beijing and the appeal of a steady income, and instead are buying a five-star inn and restaurant in New Zealand that has just hit all the right buttons with us in every possible way.
We leave Beijing on Aug 1 and have been walking on air in the 7 days since the word of our visas’ issuance came through from New Zealand. The place we’re buying is called Pen-y-bryn, and is located in Oamaru on the South Island. Here’s its website: www.penybryn.co.nz
I figured that life is too short to keep doing something that I don’t enjoy in the hope of one day being able to do what I do enjoy, and have decided that I’d rather enjoy what time I have here on earth rather than just keep accumulating money that does no one all that much good.
I think that I shall really enjoy my time in New Zealand, and hope to make it home for the rest of my days.”
Listen to James and me talk more about his dream, how he made it happen and how you can bring your own dreams to fruition too.
A real quickie to let you know about this free event on the topic of dreams that I just found out about. I’ve no idea what it will be like and I’m not affiliated with it in any way - but I wanted to pass it on as it’s on the subject of recent posts and there are some big names including Jack Canfield (of chicken soup fame) featured. Plus it’s free, so nothing to lose!
P.S. You’re likely to be emailed about other paying events after this but you can always unsubscribe if future emails aren’t relevant.
Personally I’ve found it useful in the past to get on a few lists to see what’s out there and whose messages resonate, and then after a while if I don’t want to carry on receiving emails I just unsubscribe. Any big name will be very careful of their data protection/email policy and I’ve never had a problem with spam as a result.
Happy Sunday everyone! Glorious day here in Bristol.
Whatever it is, I bet you’ve found a million reasons why it’s just not sensible.
But the fact is that these ways of life exist. Other people are living your dream right now.
Even the most quirky ideas can be made into profitable ventures. Just look at the huge trend for glamping - luxury camping - featuring stays in tipis, yurts and “ecopods”:
If other people can make a success out of a dream that isn’t sensible, why not you?
I think the real issue isn’t the viability of the idea per se, but our faith in our ability to pull it off.
I don’t want to be glib. It’s easy to say that whatever your dream, you can find a way to make it happen and I do believe that in the vast majority of cases that’s true.
But let’s look at that unspoken fear. After all, life can be brutal. You might indeed find you just don’t have the talent, or meet the necessary requirements.
Let me show you why, even if that proves to be the case, it still doesn’t matter. I’ll use every boy’s one-time dream - being an astronaut - as an example.
Here’s something I pulled off the internet :
Astronaut requirements
1. Bachelor’s degree (engineering, biological sciences, physical sciences, mathematics) from an accredited college or university
2. Three years of related experience - A master’s degree equals one year of experience, and a doctorate equals three years.
3. Passing a NASA space physical examination
4. More than 1,000 hours experience as pilot-in-command of a jet aircraft (pilots only)
5. Height of 64 to 76 inches (162.5 cm to 193 cm) for pilots
If you’re very short, not in top health or not sufficiently academic, you can wish all you like but it doesn’t look like you’re going to make it as an astronaut.
Which would you rather do:
- Squash that dream and do something sensible instead. With the unrealised dream remaining as an undercurrent “what if?” throughout your life.
- Go for the dream, and even if you miss it, have a ball getting a close to it as you can.
It’s a great truism that if you shoot for the moon, even if you miss you will land amongst the stars.
With approach 1, you’re maybe an estate agent (no disrespect intended to any estate agents reading this).
With approach 2, you’re NASA ground crew. You have a job where every day you are right at the heart of innovation in space travel.
Back to your dreams…
I love this quote by Carrie Fisher’s character in When Harry Met Sally (just substitute the man for the life you’d like ).
All I’m saying is that somewhere out there is the man you are supposed to marry. And if you don’t get him first, somebody else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that somebody else is married to your husband
How about putting a small stake in the ground now….please comment below to share your unsensible off-the-beaten path dream!
I’ll start with an unrealised one of my own:
Spending every late summer/early autumn writing and relaxing in a log cabin in Canada….very On Golden Pond.
…not too sure where I have been to not have watched this before now, but for those of you that have also not seen it, here is the powerful and touching Last Lecture - on Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams - by Randy Pausch, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
Randy Pausch gave this lecture after being diagnosed with pancreatic liver cancer, 7 months before he died.
I love in particular his reference to brick walls -
“brick walls are there for a reason. To show you how badly you want something. They are there to stop the other people.”
A great attitude which I will try to adopt the next time I hit a stumbling block.
Do find a quiet hour - it’s worth it - and soak in the humour and wisdom in this very special talk.
An aside:
The themes in Randy’s speech tie in very well with my embryo thoughts from this earlier post on childhood dreams - about helping children think independently and creatively about what matters to them in life.
Following encouraging feedback (thank you, readers!) I’m getting together a small group of people in the next month or so for an initial brainstorm session on how to take this forward. If you live near Bristol and are interested in being a part of this please email me on sarah@cowsfrommywindow.com
And all of you, please do keep your thoughts coming via the comments!
One of my former bosses had a peculiar but endearing habit. I’d be working away at my computer one so-so afternoon, marooned in my depressing office-for-one at the very end of an interminably long corridor.
Suddenly I’d hear a rapid foot shuffle and a head would appear round the doorway:
“Are you having FUN?” the head would enquire with a slightly manic, but highly infectious grin.
Barely waiting for an answer, he would vanish as quickly as he had appeared.
I was always cheered by these odd interruptions, as in truth I was NOT having fun. I was on an internal secondment in a role where frankly I was a little out of my depth. Plus as a natural extrovert I was dying a death of a thousand cuts stuck by myself in a dusty hole far away from human company (the charity I worked for operated out of a row of Victorian terraced buildings…tiny rooms opening randomly off a maze of interlocking corridors).
Now looking back I wonder how - and more importantly WHY - I stuck it out for so long. I guess because
- I blamed myself for the job not working out. if I could do it better, be smarter, work harder, I would be happy.
- I was afraid that people (chiefly the senior management team I reported to but also my peers, not to mention myself), would think I was a failure if I asked to go back to my old job.
- Although I’d been happier in my permanent role, I knew it wasn’t what I ultimately wanted to do either, and I didn’t know exactly what I DID want instead…
I wish now that I’d had the gumption to draw a line under the whole experience earlier on, instead of clinging on and watching my confidence shrink day by day - to the point where I was rushing to the toilet after meetings to hide my panic attacks.
Perhaps some of you reading this are having a bad time of things work-wise at the moment. Perhaps it’s gone on so long you’ve sort of got used to it…lowered your expectations.
Let’s remind ourselves. Work isn’t supposed to be something we endure. It isn’t supposed to be something that makes us feel bad about ourselves.
Ask yourself: are you having FUN?
And if you’re not, don’t wait any longer.
Identify what needs to change and DO NOT give yourself a hard time for desiring these changes.
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce.” – Thich Nhat Hahn
If there’s any chance of moving to a better environment within your current organisation, speak to your boss/other supportive person in a position of influence.
If you think a bigger move is needed, seek out that more fertile environment elsewhere.
Stand up for your inner lettuce! And good luck with your transplant….
Over the last few weeks I’ve been mulling over how to take Cows to a different audience.
My clients, usually now halfway through their lives and careers, often recall their childhood dreams. For whatever reason - poor careers advice, absence of a suitable role model, lack of confidence, parental or societal pressure to do something “more sensible” - their dream remained just that.
So I’ve been thinking - wouldn’t it be great to work with today’s children. Encouraging them to think independently, to dream, to believe - to understand that they have choices and the power to direct the course of their lives as they wish.
I’m right at the beginning of exploring this idea. This is where I’ve got to so far:
1. I want to focus on the children who need it most.
My first thoughts turn to children in care, children living in poverty, children in struggling schools.
But I’m not ruling out taking it wider than that. Certainly I had a fairly privileged upbringing, but my academic independent girls school, whilst delivering stunning exam results like a well-trained battery hen, did little to foster individuality or creative thinking.
2. I’d like to develop a model that can be replicated nationally - and beyond.
…using my new home city of Bristol as a testing ground
3. I want to draw on my strengths.
I admire the outward bound approach, art therapy and so on. But I’ve no training or skill in those areas. So I’m thinking more along the lines of group workshops, possibly with some one to one follow ups. Very like the work I do now with adults, but adapted to a younger audience: informal, fun but with a serious purpose underneath.
4. It’s essentially a not-for-profit exercise….but.
There’s real value in a child knowing that someone is there for them, purely to draw out that child’s own aspirations, with nothing in it for themselves. I want this work to be a Cows contribution…making the world a better place and all those well-worn but important cliches.
BUT is there a model where those that can pay do so, funding those that can’t?
Would you, as a parent, pay for this kind of thing - say via a summer camp, or as an optional add on after normal school hours? i.e could this work more along social enterprise lines?
Other questions:
What age range would work best? I’m drawn to the 10-13 age as a very formative stage…a time when positive, self-affirming messages could help bridge the awkward transition to adolescence.
What do you think?
I would welcome your thoughts….please leave a comment!
I’m delighted that Pam Slim of Escape From Cubicle Nation is launching the series.
Pam writes a thought-provoking and entertaining blog about how to transition from corporate prisoner to thriving entrepreneur. With Chris Guillebeau from the Art of Non-Conformity, she recently launched the 100 Dollar Business Forum to help aspiring entrepreneurs start a business for 100 dollars or less.
For 20 minutes of great advice from Pam on starting a business on a shoestring, use the media player below or click here to download the MP3.
Interview synopsis
Listen to Pam talking about
• the types of business most easily started with very little investment
• how to make sure your product or service is something your market REALLY wants
• how working in groups can drastically speed up the creation of your business idea
• her favourite business that started out on a shoestring (and a slab of Red Bull)
• what she would do with a 100 dollar budget!
If you’d like to hear more from Pam, do check out her blog at Escape From Cubicle Nation. Sign up to her newsletter on the right hand side to be kept informed of forthcoming initiatives like the 100 Dollar Business Forum.
“How can I be sure that this time I’ve got it right?”
One of the fears that keeps would-be career changers paralysed is that the new direction will prove no better than the last. Having got it wrong before, we don’t trust ourselves to be wiser the second (or third) time around.
That’s why I see so many people holding out for an epiphany. That magical moment when all doubt dissolves in the face of absolute clarity.
I like believing in things and epiphanies, like White Christmases and forgotten fivers stuffed down the back of the sofa, do come along from time to time. In fact my brother Chris’s huge life change came about from watching an epiphanetic (what is the adjective?!) TV programme about helicopters.
However, I never got one myself. So I have always found Anais Nin’s words very comforting:
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
When I first considered becoming a career coach I was beset with uncertainty. I asked my own coach at the time if she had had doubts about embarking on coaching as profession. “I never doubted my ability to coach” she replied, “though I did have serious doubts about whether I could build a financially successful practice.”
I found this only partially reassuring.
Like her, I had doubts about whether I could build a sustainable practice.
However I ALSO I had doubts about my abilities as a coach.
AND I had doubts about my motivation. Was I drawn to career coaching simply because I myself was at a career crossroads? Would other people’s stories, fears, hopes and dreams prove far less fascinating than my own?
Despite incessant rumination, I couldn’t find a way to answer these questions satisfactorily without actually starting as a coach. So in the end, I just went with it as my best guess, in the absence of any other clues about what I should be doing with my life.
Happily everything turned out well:
- I was less self-absorbed than I had feared (!): indeed other people’s stories were equally compelling.
- Although my first “go” at coaching was toe-curlingly inept, thankfully it was on a training teleclass with only my fellow learners as witnesses. And like everything in life, I got much better with practise.
- The marketing/income generation side has been a learning curve too, but always curving in the right direction.
And if things hadn’t turned out so well, at least that would have been informative. I’d have picked up some extra valuable fragments of the mosaic.
Are you waiting for your career epiphany? Can you start building a mosaic instead?
Money - ugh! I’m British and as you fellow Brits will know, money is not something we tend to openly talk about.
It’s very different here in China, where it’s common for a taxi driver/shop assistant/random acquaintance - in fact anyone you engage in casual conversation - to ask you what you’re earning or how much you’re paying for your flat.
Once you get used to the directness, it’s actually quite liberating. And let’s face it, money is something we need to look at square in the face when it comes to making a career change.
That’s why later this month I’m going to be launching my 20×20 podcast series: Your Money or Your Life?
I’ll be interviewing 20 money/career change experts for 20 minutes each about money and its relationship to successfully changing career.
I’ve got some great people lined up already who will be talking about how to:
• Develop a healthy relationship with money
• Protect your income as you transition to your dream work
• Be financially successful in your new business venture.
Please tell me - who would YOU love to hear from? What are your concerns around money?
I’ll do my best to interview people you’d like to hear from - and I’ll certainly try to address any and all topics you raise.
Thank you for helping to make this series as rich (no pun intended) and informative as possible!
I’m so excited to have just finished recording the latest podcast in the 20×20 Your Money Or Your Life series. 
One of my former bosses had a peculiar but endearing habit. I’d be working away at my computer one so-so afternoon, marooned in my depressing office-for-one at the very end of an interminably long corridor. 
Over the last few weeks I’ve been mulling over how to take Cows to a different audience.
“How can I be sure that this time I’ve got it right?” 
