Today ‘s post is the first in a series about preparing for New Year’s resolutions. Let’s use 2012 to focus on the right things for each of us, instead of general goals that sound good. Let’s work on identifying what’s truly important, so we can edit away the distractions that inevitably arise. Let’s base our goals in a larger purpose, so we know exactly why we’re pushing through the hard, when the hard moments inevitably arise.
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What’s your five-year plan?
If you’re anything like me, that common career/life question can leave you blinking back tears and forcing down panic. A plan? A PLAN?! I recently worked with a career counselor who asked me about a plan, but all I could picture were generalizations. I want a decently paid job I love, I want work-life balance, I want kids in a few years, I want to maintain a great relationship with my husband, I want a big nest egg, and I want to take fabulous international vacations every year, but I have no sort of plan. Because a plan would require knowing what that “decently paid job I love” might be so I could actively work towards it.
Really though, where do you see yourself in five years?
Listen, career counselor lady, I DON’T KNOW, or I wouldn’t have hired you to help. I may as well tell you I see myself living at the end of a rainbow cavorting with leprechauns and learning the fiddle, because I can’t quite picture myself in a mythical perfect job. I can tell you I probably see kids. And a lot of associated sleepless nights. And that it doesn’t sound fun at all as I try to juggle kids and a high-powered job. I don’t want life to happen to me. I don’t want to get by. I want to steer the HSS Stumble and Leap towards something great. I want direction, so during each stormy colicky child night I still know where I’m heading and why I’m fighting through the hard.
In other words, I want to define my vision and purpose, so I know why I’m bothering with that dratted five-year plan. I want a personal values statement. I want a personal mission statement. Because the five-year plan and the 2012 goals to achieve it flow from my purpose, and not the other way around. When we understand our truest self, we can make goals that nurture it.
So how do we start to define our core values? How do we know our most honest self, without influence from parents, friends, media, advertising, and cultural expectations? It’s not easy. It can require some soul-searching. So today I’m going to ask some hard questions that you can take home and ponder. Brainstorm a bit, and don’t be afraid of messy fragmented thoughts. Sleep on them. See where they take you, even if you’re uncomfortable.
Grab a pen and paper, set aside 20 minutes, and let’s dive in:
These questions all came straight from George Kinder’s life planning exercises, which I found on Get Rich Slowly. These questions start off easy (I’d travel! I’d start an inner city non-profit focused on girls! I’d build a home for my family with a semi-unstructured garden full of organic vegetables and hidden vine-and-flower-filled, sun-speckled corners! I’d have a vacation home in Spain and raise adorably bilingual children!) Yeah, it’s easy to plan a great life if money weren’t an issue and it’s easy to resent the “yeah, right, not in a million years” nature of the question. But as Kinder’s questions become more focused, you have to dig deep. You have to face who you are at your core, once your choices get stripped away. And then, you can take that core and start to plan a life that honors it.
According to Kinder, the third question usually generates responses that follow five general themes:
- Family or relationships — 90% of the responses to the final question contain this topic.
- Authenticity or spirituality. Many responses involve leading a more meaningful life.
- Creativity. Surprisingly, a large number of respondents express a desire to do something creative: to write a science-fiction novel, or to play guitar like Eric Clapton.
- Giving back. Further down the list are themes about giving back to the community, about leaving a meaningful positive impact.
- A “sense of place”. A fifth common theme (though nowhere near as prominent as the top three) is a desire to have some connection with place: a desire to be in nature, to live someplace different, or to help the environment.
Those five themes are only general options. Maybe yours is different, the only important thing is that it’s yours and, not that you have an emerging sense of your driving life-themes, you can start to visualize how it might look if you aligned your life to support your values. If your family and friends are more important to you than anything else, picture how your “best self” might honor that. Would you make time on Sundays for family dinners instead of running errands? Would you be the person your friends called for advice and sympathetic listening? If your themes tended towards giving back, do you see your best self as a mentor? As an organizer? A fundraiser? Are you collaborating? Are you leading? Are you solitary? Are you solving problems are you focused on action? If you’re focused on creativity, are you building something big or are you focused on the feeling of creating the art itself? What feels like it might energize you? What feels like it might drain you? What activities within your self-identified themes get you most excited?
All these questions are attempting to take your best version of yourself and identify who you are when you’re living your values. Are you generous? Are you observant? Are you making jokes or performing? Are you analytical? Are you fixing things or helping people? Who are you when you’re living a life that matters?
That’s your vision for yourself. That should help define your goals for 2012 and beyond. Because this isn’t about developing a set of resolutions or a five-year plan. That’s a to-do list, not a vision. Instead, our goal is to build a life that supports our truest values and our best version of ourselves. Identify who you are when you’re living your best self at home, at work, and in your community. And let that guide you towards an overarching vision of who you can be, and the values that drive you.
Next week, we’ll be back with more posts on taking those values and turning them into concrete goals. Following that, we’ll talk about habit formation and ways to reinforce success.
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The five year plan is so tricky for me right now. I sort of finshed everything on my last five year plan early and I’m left wondering “now what?” Next week I will be spending 28 hours in a car, plus 3 glorious days of isolation in a house in the mountains and I’m planning to spend some of that time journalling and mulling over these (and other!) questions and figuring out what to do next. Do you want us to do our own blog posts about it or leave our thoughts in the comments?
I really think that 2012 is going to be a “rebuilding season” for me. Figuring out new goals and starting to line up the dominoes I want to knock down in a few years.
First of all, congratulations on your achievements! That is huge, and I can’t wait for all of us to be able to look forwards from a place of accomplishment and not from a place of doubt. Those three days in isolation are a rare gift that sounds like its coming at just the right time. I can’t wait to hear more about your “rebuilding season.” And I absolutely welcome blog posts about this process – both where you’ve been and what you’re working through now. We can all use the support of this community in the comments and full posts.
I too need to rebuild. Oh, so badly. Sign #1 that I need to rebuild? The fact that this is the extent of the energy that I can give to commenting about needing to rebuild.
I can promise that there’s energy generated in the process of rebuilding, even if it’s utterly draining when you hit the “oh cr*p, what next?!” stage. Start small, if that’s all you can handle right now. And know you’re not alone.
One of my driving goals in life is to help artists (musicians, comedians, filmmakers) learn how to use the web to earn money, support themselves, and build a business. If I were to align my actions with my values, I would put a lot more work into educating these people on these skills & strategies.
I have a lot of that knowledge in my own head, and I’m applying it to some clients right now. But I could have a bigger impact if I teach them. If I create content &resources that explain these concepts in easily-understood terms, and help a wide audience of artists understand what they need to do to succeed. It would make me more valuable as a consultant, it would enhance my brand as a knowledgeable expert in my field, and it would help lots of people get a better grasp of how to take their future into their own hands.
Right now I’m so swamped with DOING this work that I can’t find time to write or speak or teach about it. That’s a priority-shift I envision for myself in 2012 (and beyond). Thanks for getting me to think about this, and to commit to following this path.
I can’t wait to see what you accomplish in 2012. Bigger, better, and even closer to your core values and big picture goals.
I told my husband the other night that “I fight for my happiness everyday.” It came out during a conversation we were having about mental health and how it has a heavy impact on our everyday life — both together and as individuals.
That conversation has been plaguing my brain ever since. I think this post helped me realize why.
I know what I want my life to be. I think about it everyday. I FANTASIZE about it even. And everyday I work toward it. I feel it and know that it’s right and ultimately what I want. I know my answer to #1 on Kinder’s list. But when I got to #2 and #3… something else suddenly became just as important.
When I strip everything away — the dreams, the life goals, the desires, etc. — all I want is for my husband and I to understand our own mental health and how it affects our relationships, our decisions and the life we ultimately want for ourselves. I want to be able to talk about it in an educated manner, both in retrospect AND in the moment. I want to OWN our disabilities and grow to understand them on a “PHD in Psychology” kind of level. We have taken steps in doing this already, but I realize now more than ever that we need to go even further.
I can’t live the life I see for myself without tending to that part of me. Nor can my husband. Maybe that’s what I meant by “fighting for my happiness.” Shit, man. I could wake up tomorrow and be as successful as Tina Fey, but would I be mentally stable enough to enjoy it? Sure, I could fake it for a while… but in the long run? No way. And as for my husband? Sure, he could wake up tomorrow and be CEO of a successful educational non-profit, but would he be mentally ready himself? And what if we BOTH woke up tomorrow, as Tina Fey, as the non-profit CEO? Would WE be mentally ready together? I’m not so sure — at least not in the long run. Neither he nor I possess the power to magically erase depression or social anxiety or general anxiety or attention deficit disorder. No one can. Brain chemistry doesn’t work that way (ya hear that, Mom????). But what we DO possess is the power to understand those disabilities better. And eventually BE better. And I think that’s what I want in life… when I really break it down to the core.
Going to share this with Mike tonight.
Thanks, B.
Thank you Brit, for sharing. You and Mike are so strong and I’m blown away by how you’re making all your professional dreams happen. I know you’ll both put that tenacity and vision towards this core-goal too. You’re amazing. You’ve got this fight for your happiness. We’re here for you too, in case you ever need solidarity.
I think this is my weekend task, Becca. For me, 2012 offers the opportunity to build on a huge 2011 but as I’ve never planned before, I’m at a loss. Turning 30 seems like as good a milestone as any to stop, think and plan.
Transition points like big birthdays or the new year are always good for reflecting, especially if you just had a big year. If you accomplished things without a plan (and I know something about that) then I can’t wait to hear what you do with more focused direction.
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Eh. Even when you’ve figured out who your honest self is, having the courage to openly acknowledge what it is that you want can be *hard*. That’s before even thinking about how you can then go about getting those things. Then again, *hard* is better than a life lived in misery.
I’m going to have to print this post out and mull over it some more on my holiday.
Bitterly hard. But my depression this year was entirely due to ignoring the question of who I really am for the ease and comfort of who I thought I should be (and the combined effect of years spent just trying to make it work). It’s taken months of self-work, months of tears, months of constant self-doubt, self-hatred, and fear that I’d never figure it out to finally learn find my true self. Months of process and processing. I felt so lost on my journey. But the questions I bought up here (and hope to bring up in other posts) are the questions I wish someone had asked me. I came up with the answers on my own – even as I still continue to work through and refine them – but I only figured out the questions once I already knew my answers. And it would have been easier – though never easy – if I’d had a little guidance about the direction of my search. Because the five year plan and typical career counseling questions didn’t work for me at all, because I had to actually get down to the hidden core of things. And as awful as this journey has been, it’s been worth it.
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I hate the fact that I read this and then wanted to crawl curl up into a ball in the corner. In this year+ of unemployment I have felt a bevy of emotions and have dealt with a multitude of things that just don’t seem real.
This state is not who I am. I don’t know who I am anymore because I let my job define me for SO LONG. And I’m really tired of trying to figure it out. I just want a job so I can go back to working my ass off. How silly is that?
I’d like to go back to work so that I know I’m valued. I thrive on success and recognition, of which I have had very little in the last year.
And there are things I know I must do, but I avoid them because I fear failure, confusion, rejection. I used to be so confident, so cocky. Where is that woman? I miss her.
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