Catch up with your dreams...

Thanks to our previous posts, you have taken the time to analyze who you are. Therefore you  probably know by now the strengths you can lean on and the weaknesses you will have to negotiate with.

I suggest that you discover the teenager you were and the dreams you still have. This exercise is almost mandatory if you want to reinvent yourself in the middle of your professional life. The goal is simple and pleasant. It consists of thinking about what you like doing in order to attract your dream and make it a reality.

Today I will introduce two exercises: 

1. The “values” exercise

You are going to picture a graph with 2 axis graduated from 1 to 10:

• The X axe represents a scale of importance
• The Y axe represents a scale of satisfaction
  

Now, I am going to ask you to position different values on this plot. The position you choose will take into account the importance that you attribute to a particular value and the satisfaction you feel when you evaluate this value at this time in your life.

The values that I propose to you for this exercise are the following: your training background, your life as a couple, your family, your job, your friends, your relationship, your personal development, your culture, politics, your health, your leisure, your salary and your quality of life… Feel free to add anything you might view as important to this list !

 The purpose of the exercise is to determine, without judgment, which are the most important elements in your life. It will enable you to see the things that you need to maintain in your future professional life (those values which you give a high importance and satisfaction ranking too). Also, it will highlight where the frustrations areas are (those values which are on the bottom right). You will need to work on these values because although you consider them very important you currently do not gain much satisfaction from them.

 It is necessary to be very careful because if your current or anticipated work does not align with your balance, it will not be long lasting, it may undermine your ecosystem and consequently you will find yourself weakened in the future.

1. The « ideal week » exercise

 This time, I am asking  you to take a blank schedule with a week starting from Monday 7am and ending Sunday 10pm, hour by hour. This exercise consists in imagining the way that an ideal week could occur in your "perfect world".

 You will write down both personal and professional activities in this schedule. You may write personal things such as: 7am: breakfast with my children; Monday 8pm: sport. 12pm: shopping with a friend. And professional engagements such as: Monday 9am: read my emails; Monday 11am: executive board; Tuesday 2pm: management team meeting, Wednesday 9am: meeting with a client.

 This exercise is complicated because you will have the tendency to refer to your actual (or to your last job) as a reference but it is also good to detach yourself from it, go further and really imagine something new. You will have to free yourself from your actual situation and to imagine a future outside of the restraints that you may feel.

 In the end, I will ask you to choose the 5 most important elements of your weekschedule. They can be professional or private. These are the moments that you are going to have to, at all costs, find in your future professional life.

 These exercises are simple and make sense on many levels. However they do require an uncompromising introspection and several hours before they can be exploited.

Mireille Garolla,  Author of " Changer de vie en milieu de carrière" publié chez Eyrolles