The Career and LIfe Image Gathering Exercises
The Career Vision Image Gathering Exercise is the version of this exercise that I do most often with my students and workshop participants. Although it evokes imagery from a broad life context, it focuses primarily on work and career. You will want to participate in this exercise if you want to work primarily on your career vision. If you want to work on the broader context of your life vision, you probably want to begin with the Life Vision Image Gathering Exercise. Eventually, you may want to work with both exercises.
I am always struck by the fact that when clients come to see me they all share one thing in common. They are feeling stuck or they are feeling as if the next step is not clear. It may have been very clear two years before. They may have been in a situation where they were deeply engaged in the work that they were doing, it may have been deeply satisfying, but for some reason now they cannot seem to get focused. What also strikes me is how quickly, after a few hours of conversation, the situation begins to change. It becomes clear that this person, who a very short time ago was sitting in front of me telling me how stuck he was, is able to offer all sorts of information about who he is, and about how he is different from everyone else around him. He is able to call up memories and images about those times when work has deeply engaged him, and what those memories and images mean as far as the work that, at some level, he knows that he now wants.
That information is there. If it is there, why can't he, why can't you, just reach in and pull it up? What would it take to get back to the place where you can begin pulling up those memories and those images of what it means to be fully engaged and involved in the work that is going to be most satisfying? If there is a clear "signal" that's down there somewhere, sending information about who you are and how you're different and what that means in the way of finding satisfying work, then there must be some kind of noise that's jamming that signal.
What do I mean by noise? There are different types of noise. There are those messages from our culture about what good work is, what prestigious work is, and what success really means. This is going on all the time in the general culture, and in particular in high-achievement-oriented business culture. There are prevailing notions in the popular culture about what success is. As we saw in Chapter Two, there are also conscious and unconscious messages from parents and other important people in our lives about who we are and what we might do that would fulfill their psychological needs. We all have messages given to us directly, consciously, or otherwise, about what a good life for us would be. These messages usually come with the best of intentions, but often it is hard to separate them from what is genuinely and instinctually engaging for us. There are other types of noise as well. There is fear, fear about lack of knowledge or skill, and about the uncertainty of life generally. Maybe you have a taste of what you want to be doing, but wonder if you can really do the things that are necessary to make them happen.
So how do you get there? How do you short-circuit the noise? How do you work around the noise and get back in touch with the clear signal about who you are and what the work is that you were born to do? What you do not do is begin with analysis. Analysis is very important, but you do not begin there. You cannot think your way into a career or life vision. Many of us have been taught to do precisely that. We are taught how to think our way through situations. We are taught how to very carefully develop a business plan and how to pressure-test all aspects of it before we push the button to invest the money or devote ourselves to a new initiative. We think our way through; we develop a model, and then we act. That is effective when you are about to start a business, or launch a new product. It is not effective if what you are facing is what you want to do next with your life. That type of decision has to come from a place that is not abstracted, not exclusively cognitive. It has to come from a more full-bodied experience of the self and the situation. It must call fully upon all aspects of your consciousness. It has to call on your feeling and your sensibility; it has to call on your deep intuition. Thinking and analysis are going to be very important, but that is not where you will begin this exercise.
The first step, the place where the vision process begins, is with the ability to grasp intuitively images associated with your vision. Images. Just images. What do you know in the depths of your being about the work environment you want, the types of people that you want to have around you, the type of activity that will engage you every day? These images will become the raw data for you to analyze. An image includes all aspects of awareness. After a vivid dream you wake up gripped by that dream. As you focus your attention on the dream experience, you will notice that it has visual, emotional and intuitive dimensions. "Understanding" the dream cannot happen with just one aspect of your awareness. These sensing, feeling and intuitive dimensions certainly lead to a thinking or analytical awareness as well. The image itself is like a work of art. It's like standing in front of a painting. We have all had this experience. Just standing there in the museum with the image working on us. The first step, then, is simply to collect images. Images that are associated with deeply satisfying, meaningful work. When you set before you the task of collecting images, you are able to disengage, temporarily at least, that aspect of consciousness that is limited to discursive reasoning.
Once you have collected images, then you can go back and say, "So what are the patterns here?" Then you can bring your analytical consciousness to bear and say, "What are the core themes? What are the dynamic tensions? You can use your analysis to become strategic and tactical about how you are going to move forward. First, you must slow down. This session is going to be about slowing down. I want to slow you down so that you do that first part of the job well. Later on, you will be able to return to Chapters Four through Eight in Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths, and analyze your experience from this exercise fully.
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