Last week I spoke at Service Design Bristol. It was lovely to spend the afternoon and evening in another city. The meetup is relatively new and what I loved about it was how the talks were both quite personal - no corporate case studies of service redesigns. This gave the evening a different quality which I enjoyed.
I spoke about designing your own career. This is something I’ve been thinking about recently off the back of participating in Kate Weiler’s course last year and re-visiting my values.
It’s fairly mind blowing to me that I’ve got to almost 40 without properly thinking in this way about my work life. I’ve spent the majority of the last 17 years of work moving away from things rather than intentionally moving towards something. Maybe that’s because I’m not a long term planner and I’ve always wanted to remain open to opportunities. But I do think it’s led to reactive decision making rather than proactive.
Don’t get me wrong, that has it’s benefits sometimes. I likely wouldn’t have taken the leap into freelance if I hadn’t been pushed by a job I couldn’t stay in. But I do wonder, why we often let ourselves get to such a low point before we make a change.
Being freelance has afforded me the time, space and most importantly, permission, to finally start thinking more intentionally. While I’m never going to be someone who has a 5 year plan, I do now have goals and a word for the year each time we tick over into January.
The biggest shift however, and one I’m still navigating myself, is designing my work around my values and who I am as a person. In school we were always taught to centre what you did around what you were good at. And I think I’ve continued this aptitude based approach for much longer than I should have.
I only first started articulating my values about 4 years ago when I worked with a coach. It was a really helpful exercise but I don’t think I really used them in my day-to-day life or decision making. Revisiting the exercise more recently, and now as a freelancer and business owner, I found they had shifted slightly. These shifts provided interesting insight for me. I also finally started to use them as starting points for planning my year and my goals - an exercise I really enjoyed.
It goes without saying that you get to know yourself better the older you get. I know keeping stress and anxiety levels low is really important for me. I know I wont exercise unless I can start work later and fit it in first thing without having to drag myself out of bed too early. These are just two examples of other ways I have adapted my day-to-day work life to better fit who I am as a person.
This is very much a work in progress for me. It’s something I’m experimenting with, learning about and enjoying speaking to people about.
If you have a group of people you think might be interested in having this discussion I’d love to share my talk with them. Drop me an email to discuss further: hello@designforjoy.co.uk
Have a good week folks.
I wanted to also share a couple of resources. I spotted this book by School of Life last night which looks topical. The Squiggly Careers book is also helpful for practical exercises you can do in this space.
“What you’re good at” can also only usually be defined by what you can see in front of you as well. I had no idea my job role, or something like it, existed when I was at school. I could only consider getting jobs that I see and know about (hence I think a lot of kids want to be bin men, nurses, vets, teachers, carers). There’s something to be said for pulling back the curtain on lots of jobs that exist but people don’t know about. I’ve been thinking about this for a while and keep wanting to create something that helps do this!