Taking stock
It’s the last day of 2007. It’s time to take stock of the year that will come to an end in a few hours. The year may have been delightful or dreary depending on the events that unfolded in your personal and professional lives. If you are one of those who experienced a lot of difficult situations, it will help to focus on the opportunities that accrue during those trying circumstances and work from there.
To do that, you need to reassess your value system, passions, and gifts. It’s also worthwhile to keep in touch with your reason for being, spell out your road map, and familiarize yourself with a self-evaluation process that will serve the needs of your life and work. It’s imperative to be clear about what’s important to you, and about what you can do and conquer both on personal and professional levels.
Margaret Newhouse, assistant director of career services for Ph.D.s at
“Your skills primarily affect your choice of tasks; your interests, the substance of your work and the organization’s purpose; and your values, the work environment and life style you will adopt,” emphasizes Newhouse. For example, how you choose to exercise a gift for presentation and a passion for the visual arts depends on your values. A desire for financial security might send you into corporate communications; for autonomy, into freelance writing; for variety and intellectual challenge, to patent law; or for public impact, to advocacy work or corporate social responsibility involvement.
Ideally, you want a career that falls in the area where your values, interests, and talents crisscross. However, Newhouse explains, it is possible to find work that utilizes your skills, does not contradict your values, and provides you the financial sustenance and flexibility to follow your passions and express your gifts “extra-curricularly.”
Newhouse believes there are many ways to compose a life, and the “music” that will satisfy your desires, as long as you are true to yourself in most dimensions of your life. She recommends a few exercises to get you started.
Look Back And Relive Your Successes
An old staple, probably first suggested by Richard Bolles of What Color Is Your Parachute? fame, is to think back over the experiences you have had in your life and pick three to 10 that have the following characteristics: You were the chief or significant actor; you, not the world or any significant others, regard it as a success: you achieved or created something with concrete results, or acted to solve a problem, or gave something of yourself that you are proud of; and you truly enjoyed yourself in the process.
List each experience, explain why you consider it a success, and write a paragraph or two detailing the experience step by step. Extract from these stories the values and interests revealed about you and the skills and attributes you displayed. Then look for patterns. In other words, what do they reveal about what you like to do and do well? For example, Newhouse relates, somebody involved in music I’ve worked with recalled a “peak experience” participating in an organized cross-country bike tour, which led her to investigate and ultimately take a job leading bike tours.
Follow you Passions
Think about your interests and passions. What do you do in your spare time or what would you do if you had spare time (think about creative, outdoor, social, and intellectual activities)? What did you love to do when you were young? If you were given a limited sum to spend in a bookstore, what types of books or magazines would you spend it on? What do you think and talk about? Is there a cause you feel passionately about, some injustice that you hate, or something that the world or your community needs?
Newhouse’s favorite example of following a passion is the story of an assistant professor of math that loved playing games (particularly Magic). He now works as a game designer for Wizards of the Coast, the producers of Magic. Another one is about a neurobiology student she worked with who developed a passion for combating illiteracy and is using a post-doctoral fellowship to make a career switch to educational evaluation.
Use Your “Gifts”
Your “gifts” are those talents that you employ so naturally and happily that you may not even consider them special. Because using your gifts expresses your uniqueness and brings you joy, you need to find ways to incorporate them into your work and life. To ascertain your gifts, Newhouse suggests a review of your “success stories” and look for talents that appear consistently. She adds, “Think of what totally absorbs you or what people often ask you to do for them or what help you most enjoy giving others.” Finally, she iterates, try asking people who know you well what they think your particular talents are and work from there.
An anthropologist, Newhouse says, identified two of her gifts as teaching and jewelry making; she now has a freelance career teaching writing skills to consultants, and she creates and sells her own jewelry. A British historian, on the other hand, found he had a talent for computer programming, which at first helped support his graduate education but eventually led him to a career niche in bioinformatics (creating software tools for molecular biologists). Whew!
Introspection with the help of exercises, Newhouse enthuses, is necessary for knowing yourself, but it is not sufficient. You need to connect it with what’s out there in the world. To do that, brainstorm with friends, observe closely, and ask a lot of people about their work and their life.
Networking To The Max
Although using career books, the Internet, and trade journals can be productive, essentially you must embark on a networking venture. “And networking is one of the most valuable skills we can learn,” Newhouse underlines.
The more you learn about possibilities, the more you can clarify what you’re looking for. It’s as important to rule things out as in, and often you can do that in a low-cost way by talking with people about their jobs or doing an internship. Sometimes you rule things out only after you’ve been in a job, or perhaps your values or your life circumstances change (such as having children). “It’s a long, iterative process, but as I see it, the journey is the point of it all,” Newhouse articulates.
Taking stock is good for the body and the soul, the heart and the mind. Let’s take time to that as we welcome 2008.
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E-mail bongo@vasia.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.
