Careerism and the Agony of Choice

So, here's my first blog entry, welcome.

It's been prompted by my own recent career issues, and crises of confidence in what it is that I do today, set against what I would really like to do.

Am sure this is not new ground for anyone, and people everywhere will be going through, or have been through similar crises in the past.

The agony of choice is a favourite concept of mine - the ability to choose in our society today is fantastic, and I wouldn't be without it, but the downside is the lack of certainty. Oh for the days when life choices for people were simple - the pit, the shipyards, manual labour. Of course in reality it would be odd to hark back to those tough, narrow existences, but one positive was the sense of certainty it gave to people - along with community and identity.

Nowadays we are freer to be what we want to be - but whilst reaching out and achieving that could be fantastic, in practice achieving it is less straight forward.

A really good book I've been using as a tool to help with my current career crisis is Anita Houghton's "Finding Square Holes":

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Finding-Square-Holes-Discover-Perfect/dp/1904424848/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258294897&sr=8-1

I've been working through this over the past week and it has been excellent - thought provoking and esteem building. Key premise is that career satisfaction comes when your work is in line with your core values and strengths, and the book challenges you to identify those for yourself. Everyone has them, we just sometimes forget to remember them and assume that what we are good at, everyone is - when in reality they aren't!

It also uses Myers Briggs MBTI principles (which is something else I will blog on anon) in its analyses, something that is very useful and illuminating. As an aside, for those familiar with MBTI, I'm an ENFP (again, for those not, I'll explain more anon, but I do love categories...).

The point of mentioning this book is that it is incredibly helpful for starting you on your way to dealing with the agony of career choice - it narrows things down for you and gives you a proper sense of perspective.

So, my challenge is now to do something with what the book has helped me uncover. A particular problem for me is I have a well-paid job (heart bleeds eh?) but it's current configuration is not in line with my values or strengths.

As such my work led to a personal crisis - symptoms including running around the house screaming with frustration before work, and then leading into contracting a pretty bad fluey virus which laid me low for a couple of weeks. I'm convinced the two are related, and that moment of crisis gave me several moments of clarity which led me to decide to take a long hard look at myself and what I'm doing with my life.

Hence buying the book above - and then hence onto this blog. One of my passions has always been writing, and the world of blogging is a great outlet for that, so here I am. A theme I'll probably return to is my coming to things late - so yes, I know blogging has been around for ages and I'm late on the bus, but it never really appealed or seemed important until now.

I now see it as an outlet for creative talents I have, as well as my desire to share information and help enlighten people (very ENFP tendencies). So it's a conscious choice I've made - to start to write and express myself. I've always felt I had interesting things to say, just without an audience. As of today I have no audience of course, but we'll see how that goes over time.

We'll also see whether I keep this blog going - a real talent of mine is bright ideas that burn out quickly through lack of will to keep them going, but in this case I hope my not giving myself too many boundaries I can use this as a forum to create and express myself.

So -I'll keep you posted on my careering anon, hopefully to be able to report some success. The goal I've set myself is to find a role in which I feel happy and fulfilled by April next year - be that in current job, company, or elsewhere. Look forward to trying!

The above was written in considerably less than 40 mins - a good start, wonder how long it will take people to read.

All feedback welcome.