TIP 53
INVENT FIVE ALTERNATIVE CAREERS
It’s pretty damn hard to bring your uniqueness into actual being if you’re always doing the same things as a lot of other people.
Now that you’ve designed your ideal life, you are ready to start figuring out what work would enable you to live that way. Many people seem to get stuck in one field or career. If they apply for a job in another field, there is always the problem of not having the right experience. Here is another coaching assignment to help you consider various options. Pretend that your current job has been eliminated from the face of this earth and that you now have to do something completely different. What might you like to do? Have you always thought it would be great to become a professional dancer? Or perhaps a composer, mathematician, judge, scientist, reporter, or restaurant owner? Pick any five careers that you fancy. Don’t worry if you don’t have the training or education. Write a paragraph about why you’d want this career. Then go on to the next career. Why would you want this one? This will also help you figure out what you really value.
One client, Jenny, a hard-working, 55-year-old corporate executive, did this exercise and came up with a rather unexpected result. She had selected the following five alternative careers:
1. Garden designer
2. Painter
3. Creative writer
4. Interior designer
5. Photographer
Jenny was surprised when she realized that she’d like to look after other people’s gardens. Somehow it just didn’t fit with her idea of the executive life she had. But, she said, “There is a thing inside of me that loves to tidy up and make things look nice.” The five alternative careers revealed a strong creative side that had been stifled. She said, “I’ve never allowed myself time to try them out.” I told her it was time to get started because there was a whole creative side of her dying to get out.
Jenny admitted that she had put her creativity to the side in following a serious professional career. She had always done the right thing in her life. We started to consider other options, and she began to explore courses that she could take. I asked her to take one day at home and make it her creative day. I told her to go out and get a paintbrush and start. Play with it. Buy a canvas. Tend someone’s garden. Volunteer to do the interior design on a friend’s house. Just start. Even if it seemed tiny and all she had was a half-hour, I urged her to pick up a paintbrush or snap a few photographs.
The next week, Jenny purchased the supplies but hadn’t started painting yet. But just getting the supplies had been fun. The week after, she had an offer from a friend to go into the interior design business with her. The next week she had finished a painting and liked it so much that she hung it in her living room. Her friends admired it and thought she had purchased it from a “real” artist. She is now selling her home and moving into a less expensive apartment in anticipation of quitting her executive job to pursue these new interests. She felt stuck, unfulfilled, and dissatisfied, and now she is more vibrantly alive than ever. The future looks promising and exciting instead of dull, drab, and routine. Jenny feels that anything is possible now. The point of this exercise is to get you thinking outside of your normal box.
Because of the incredible rate of technological advances, jobs will be eliminated faster than ever in history. New jobs that never existed will appear or you can even create them yourself. When I started coaching, not many people had heard of life coaching—it was a brand new field. Now there are tons of life coaches out there, and executive coaching has become an accepted part of management culture in most corporations. This all happened in the space of 15 years. This book was one of three books on coaching published at the time and now there are loads of coaching books out there.
There has never been a better time in history to invent or create your own ideal job, work, or business, thanks to the power of the Internet. There has never been a better time for you to get creative and list your own alternative careers.