Stop making sense and you may ask yourself...how did I get here?
Posted 05-21-24
The number one problem my career coaching clients have - once we get past their bad jobs and bad bosses and stupid processes and useless corporate bureaucracy they hate and - ahem, a common problem my career coaching clients have is a failure of imagination. It goes like this:
Mr. Hypothetical Client is an accountant. He’s totally fed up with his job, bored by his field, hates his work with every fiber of his being, can’t stand the thought of another day in his drab, dull office, crunching numbers, poring over spreadsheets. I ask him ‘What would you want to do for work if there were no constraints? If money weren’t an object, if you had no obligations, you could do anything in the world… but you still wanted to do some productive work?’
And he answers: ‘Maybe… I could be… an… auditor?’
Holy hell. Really?
I think some of my coaching clients try to jump ahead to ‘where’s this question going, ultimately?’ rather than answering what I’ve actually asked. So when I pose an open-ended, truly fantastic, ‘what would you do if you had a magic wand?’, they start calculating ‘Hmm, why is he asking me this? He’s probably trying to figure how to guide me to a next job that I’ll really like. So what do I think I might like that will make sense in my life?'
NO NO NO NO NO.
Stop making sense! I want you to imagine the work you might do if there were NO CONSTRAINTS. Your answers need not be connected to reality in any way. This is a feature of the question, not a bug. Even for the (I’d expect exceedingly small) segment of the population for whom ‘auditor’ might be an exciting job, ‘auditor’ is a terrible answer to this question. A great answer would be Astronaut. Or Professional Rodeo Clown.
Get weird! Embrace total irresponsibility! Simultaneously address your fears of bulls AND clowns!
Don’t get me wrong: I live in reality. We may go through the entire coaching process to find at the end of say, 3 or 6 months that it really will be an audit job that gives Mr. Hypothetical Client a shot to improve his career and life. But that’s not why I ask this question.
The idea of this question is to take the coaching client fully out of all the practical concerns about how their next landing spot would fit into the parameters of their current life. If you have 15 years experience as an accountant, and your whole life is predicated on an accountant’s salary and an accountant’s hours etc. etc., when you try to imagine your next job, your brain is going to do its very best to talk you into finding something extremely accountant-like. And again, you may really enjoy being an auditor, but when you are starting from the origin of ‘accountant’, your selection of ‘auditor’ as your dream destination tells us exactly nothing about you.
After all, that’s what this exercise is really about: figuring out who you are. I want you to generate a list of totally fantastic (in the true sense of the word) dream careers, many of which, in your estimation, could never happen for you. Start from the impossible, splash down wild ideas on loose scraps of paper whenever they strike, reject nothing. Only after you do that will we begin to consider whether and how your dream careers might connect to or be reachable from your current life.
(By the way, even when I have pushed them multiple times to be sure they are operating with no constraints in this phase of the process, plenty of clients end up coming up with at least one job or field that, while different from their current work, is totally attainable for them.)
For most of us, our work is a very big piece of our life. So when we talk about changing our job, we’re talking about changing our life. You really have to drop all reference points to your life as you know it to think BIG enough to begin to imagine the possibility of real change.
Will you start making your NO CONSTRAINTS, totally impractical, never-gonna-happen (you think), dream job list today?
Subscribe to my Substack for more content like this, click here
The number one problem my career coaching clients have - once we get past their bad jobs and bad bosses and stupid processes and useless corporate bureaucracy they hate and - ahem, a common problem my career coaching clients have is a failure of imagination. It goes like this:
Mr. Hypothetical Client is an accountant. He’s totally fed up with his job, bored by his field, hates his work with every fiber of his being, can’t stand the thought of another day in his drab, dull office, crunching numbers, poring over spreadsheets. I ask him ‘What would you want to do for work if there were no constraints? If money weren’t an object, if you had no obligations, you could do anything in the world… but you still wanted to do some productive work?’
And he answers: ‘Maybe… I could be… an… auditor?’
Holy hell. Really?
I think some of my coaching clients try to jump ahead to ‘where’s this question going, ultimately?’ rather than answering what I’ve actually asked. So when I pose an open-ended, truly fantastic, ‘what would you do if you had a magic wand?’, they start calculating ‘Hmm, why is he asking me this? He’s probably trying to figure how to guide me to a next job that I’ll really like. So what do I think I might like that will make sense in my life?'
NO NO NO NO NO.
Stop making sense!
Get weird! Embrace total irresponsibility! Simultaneously address your fears of bulls AND clowns!
Don’t get me wrong: I live in reality. We may go through the entire coaching process to find at the end of say, 3 or 6 months that it really will be an audit job that gives Mr. Hypothetical Client a shot to improve his career and life. But that’s not why I ask this question.
The idea of this question is to take the coaching client fully out of all the practical concerns about how their next landing spot would fit into the parameters of their current life. If you have 15 years experience as an accountant, and your whole life is predicated on an accountant’s salary and an accountant’s hours etc. etc., when you try to imagine your next job, your brain is going to do its very best to talk you into finding something extremely accountant-like. And again, you may really enjoy being an auditor, but when you are starting from the origin of ‘accountant’, your selection of ‘auditor’ as your dream destination tells us exactly nothing about you.
After all, that’s what this exercise is really about: figuring out who you are. I want you to generate a list of totally fantastic (in the true sense of the word) dream careers, many of which, in your estimation, could never happen for you. Start from the impossible, splash down wild ideas on loose scraps of paper whenever they strike, reject nothing. Only after you do that will we begin to consider whether and how your dream careers might connect to or be reachable from your current life.
(By the way, even when I have pushed them multiple times to be sure they are operating with no constraints in this phase of the process, plenty of clients end up coming up with at least one job or field that, while different from their current work, is totally attainable for them.)
For most of us, our work is a very big piece of our life. So when we talk about changing our job, we’re talking about changing our life. You really have to drop all reference points to your life as you know it to think BIG enough to begin to imagine the possibility of real change.
Will you start making your NO CONSTRAINTS, totally impractical, never-gonna-happen (you think), dream job list today?
Subscribe to my Substack for more content like this, click here