Imagine situations where you’ve been in a restaurant, store, in line at Starbucks, or at a party, and you hone in on someone else’s conversation. Sometimes it’s irritating, and you wish you could somehow tune it out before you throw your blueberry scone at them. But sometimes, or maybe just once, the conversation awakened such strong feelings in you that you wanted to jump on a table and start preaching to the entire room about it.
This is where you want to be. Let me explain.
I read somewhere a long time ago (I cannot remember the source) about an exercise in finding your calling. In this exercise, imagine you’re somewhere in public, and you hear a conversation so compelling that you just have to join in. What is that conversation about? My adaptation of this is to write down the first thing you thought of at the top of a piece of paper, and then begin to make two lists to cultivate further thoughts about it. For example, let’s keep with the Starbucks theme. Suppose you thought “Coffee!” as your compelling topic. Put a line down the center of the paper. On the left side side, write “Ideas.” Under Ideas, write possible careers you could make from that one thought. Let it flow, don’t think about feasibility or logistics. In our example, you could write down: open a coffee shop, become a coffee bean farmer, write a book about various coffees by world region, teach coffee tasting classes, etc. Try to write down 20 items.
Next, reread them and circle the idea that interests you most, or that jumps out at you as you read. Make another column and label it “Considerations.” Here you list things you would have to consider if you wanted to turn that idea into a business. For “open a coffee shop,” you could write: lease/buy a building, acquire vendors, marketing, money issues, employees , etc. Write down as many as you can think of.
Right about now, you should start having some strong feelings about this list, which may include feeling overwhelmed, unsure of yourself, optimistic, energized, terrified, or many, many others. Now, flip the paper over and begin to journal about everything that comes to you regarding the idea and its associated feelings. Take up as much of the paper as you can. Using our example, you could write something like, “Oh geez, I didn’t realize that there was so much involved with this. I have no idea how to open a coffee shop. What do I do? It sounds fun, but do I really want to have to deal with running a store? What if I drain my savings? I feel like I will never really figure out what I want to do with coffee. Maybe this isn’t the right outlet to express my interest in it.” If the idea doesn’t seem to work for you after you’ve journalled, try picking another idea from your list and repeat the steps. Of course, the conversation can move in a positive direction as well. Be honest with yourself; remember, no one is going to read this but you.
The purpose of this exercise is to allow you to make a daydream seem more concrete; to turn a fantasy into reality. Sometimes the fantasy is better, and that’s okay. The goal, however, is to identify your core interests so that you can expand on them and eventually turn them into viable options for a lifelong, authentic career.
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