I hereby grant you permission to dream about your job. This is your official permission slip. Want to know how to use it to its fullest extent? Read on.
The average American lifetime includes 90,000+ hours of work time. If you are not using those hours to live out a dream, you might be feeling a little disappointed, numb or fearful right now.
I understand.
Many of us don’t dream at all, we’ve been too disappointed in the past. This is your wake up call to get your mojo back.
First determine the kind of dreamer or non-dreamer you’ve been. It’s very important to own up to where you currently are, before you can shift it. There are the usual pitfall ways of being we’ve coined at Handel: the chicken and the brat. And then there are some other variations with some clever names to describe them. See if you identify with any of these:
1) Hard-working Passenger: You’ve been on “a treadmill,” doing the day to day and you just ended up here.
2) Good-on-paper: You’ve been doing what you think you are supposed to and it looks great on paper, but you question if you’re really happy or if you are going to have severe regrets sometime soon.
3) Numb: You’re vaguely aware you want something different, but no idea what.
4) Chicken: You’re scared to think up or admit what you really want.
5) Avoider: You can dream on a large scale, but you don’t make it personal so you don’t have to deal with change.
6) Doomser: You just don’t think your dream is possible.
7) Apathetic (often masks chicken): You think your job is just a means to an end. You pretend you don’t care much.
8) Stymied: You don’t know what steps to take to get to your dream career. (Aka confused or stuck.)
9) Brat: You are having a hard time motivating yourself to take the right steps in service of your dream career.
10) Hero: You are in your dream career and know how to design it so it just keeps getting better and more riveting.
Did you see yourself in one (or more) of these? Isn’t it a slight relief to just give name to where you honestly are?
After you can own the level at which you’ve been living, you have more power. You can look critically at the assumptions that have been holding you back, and prove them wrong. We use an exercise called a purge and a talkback to accomplish this. At the end of this stage you should be feeling like dreaming anew.
And now you have permission. For more on how to write a juicy dream, design the action steps and find the discipline to take them, please join our 4-Week Design Your Career Teleseries. You can register at anytime during the 4 weeks and attend the group phone sessions live, or listen to the recordings afterwards.
Love,
Laurie