Time to get serious

There have been several moments in my life where I thought of starting a blog, but (of course there is a but) it has never really felt like the right time. Today is honestly not much different, however there is something else I have been putting off “for later” and today is the day I finally realized these two things could be combined. Maybe a lesson here is that you need a lazy mindset to come up with creative solutions. In any case, I love productivity hacks so here I am! Time to get serious about blogging - and also the other thing I’ve been putting off.

Yes, the other thing. For a while I have been trying to figure out what kind of work would suit me best and what kinds of things I like to do. This has led me down several different paths, including one path that led me to a seat across from a university career counsellor. After a nice chat where both of us openly discussed the career choices we had made so far, I went home feeling slightly relieved that I could get some guidance from someone who could relate to how I felt. However, a career counsellor is no magician. As much as you and I may wish someone else could tell us what we are meant to do, it is ultimately up to us to figure that out for ourselves. That is also exactly what I was told, and in a few days I would receive an email with an assignment to do. Once I finished the assignment the career counsellor would meet with me again.

It sounded like a decent plan and when the email arrived I opened the assignment in high spirits, anxious to finally discover my purpose. If only it were that easy.

The assignment was to analyse periods of my life related to “work experience, activities, education” or to make it simpler: just about anything worth mentioning on a CV. It came with lengthy instructions explaining the value of this kind of introspection followed by long forms with questions intended to be answered for each of my experiences -separately. Still motivated enough, I read over the questions:

• Where and when did I do this?
• What were my tasks/ what did I do?
• What were my good qualities?
• What were my limitations/weak points?
• What did I learn from this?
• What did I like/enjoy? Why?
• What did I dislike/not enjoy? Why?
• Why did this period start?
• Why did this period end?

I could definitely see the value of this. It just felt incredibly overwhelming. Even now, typing out and reading over these questions makes it feel daunting to actually sit down and thoroughly analyse and describe each of my experiences. Why? Well, introspection is hard. It takes a good amount of time and energy. But maybe I feel especially apprehensive of this task because my experiences have all been so different. In trying to discover what suits me I have hopped from one thing to the next. I have been gaining new knowledge and skills each time, which I definitely carry with me and rely on to make each new decision. I just never really stopped to systematically reflect on my experiences and then formulate concrete answers to these kinds of questions, and definitely not for every single work experience/activity/education. Whoa!

So maybe, two whole years after first opening that assignment, it is about time that I do. In the hope of possibly inspiring some more of us to do the same, I will finally tackle these questions and dedicate a new post to each one of my experiences. One-by-one. Join me if you feel like it, or not if you don’t, but in any case I feel like it is time for me to get serious with this. I will be sharing my personal reflections with you and am very open to hearing your thoughts on these.