The M.A.P. Maker

Take a free-range approach to your internal voices

If you're anything like most people, you have multiple voices in your head competing all at once for space. Some of them you like, so you welcome them out in the open. Others you want to keep hidden away. Not only do you not want others to see them, you don't even want to acknowledge them yourself. 

For example, let's say that your self-image is overall one of a positive, can-do type of person. The glass is half-full - and thank god there's room in the other half for oxygen, because you need that to breathe!

So one of the voices in your head that you let out regularly is your positive-thinking voice. That's the way you like to see yourself, so you let that voice out into the open as often as possible. 

But you might also have an inner pessimist. It tells you what you can't do, and what's not possible. It is driven by fear of what might happen, and wants to avoid it at all costs. You don't want that to be part of your repertoire,  so you proceed to ignore it. 

Why let the negative voices out into the open?

Why would you want to let the voices you don't like as much have their say? Here are three really good reasons:

You just might learn something.

If you persist in pretending that internal pessimist doesn't exist, you miss out on a golden opportunity to learn something that might help you create the life you want. Used judiciously, that pessimist can call attention to potential pitfalls before you experience them. It can help you navigate sometimes treacherous landscape and minimize the pain. 

They won't go away just because you pretend they don't exist. 

In fact, they might just get stronger. It's the old pressure cooker thing. Stuffing it down and not giving it any release creates more pressure.

Not only that, when you ignore something, it's effectively invisible. And when something is invisible to you, you are helpless to do anything about it. Letting it out in the open helps you keep track of what's really going on. 

Sometimes they take control unless you give them focused time.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are voices that run roughshod over the life you're living. Take an over-active internal critic, for example. It might be such a habitual voice that you scarcely notice it's not actually you. 

Giving it focused free-range time lets you listen objectively to what it has to say. You can both learn from its valid points (sometimes rephrasing them first into less toxic phrasing) and identify the aspects that aren't valid so you can counter them. 

How to go free-range

Taking a free-range approach to your chorus of internal voices isn't about letting them run amok willy nilly, hither and yon. In the US, the definition of free-range for poultry isn't a bird that lives outside. It's a bird that has access to the outside at least part of the time (and yes, I know that opens a whole different can of worms that is outside the scope of this blog). So it doesn't necessarily spend its whole life roaming free.  

It's the same with those less-savory internal voices. You don't want them to have the run of your brain, but you don't want to shove them into little boxes and stuff them down in the cellar either. 

Here are some ways you might take a free-range approach. 

Journaling

Start by taking stock of what those voices are. Do you have a an internal critic? A pessimist? Make a page in your journal just for that list. You can keep adding to it over time as you identify more. 

Pick a voice, and give it space to run (but only a defined space - it doesn't get to take over the show). Let it say what it wants to say. Get those thoughts out of your head and down onto paper. 

Then start asking questions, like:

• Is this valid?
• Is this 100% accurate?
• Are there any different ways to look at this?
• What flawed assumptions is this voice making?
• What can I learn from this voice?
• Where is the kernel of truth that I can use to improve / increase my chances for success / etc.?

Talking with a trusted friend

Another good way to give those inner voices some free-range space is to find someone in your life you can be honest with. Ask them to simply listen, not judge, argue with, or try to fix what those voices have to say. 

Once you get it out there, then you can start talking about the specifics (use the questions listed above as a starting point). Having someone else in the picture is a great way to get a more objective perspective. 

Coaching

You can take the external discussion up a notch by working with a coach like me. This is someone whose focus is helping you sort through things, find clarity, and adjust your choices and actions accordingly. 

Therapy

Sometimes the source of those voices goes deeper than a coach would be qualified to help you with (for example, if you needed to delve into childhood issues). In those cases, working with a therapist can be invaluable. 

Ultimately, whether or not you decide to take a free-range approach with those voices you're not so fond of, they're there. And that means that, in some way, they're having an impact on your life.

Deciding to consciously, purposefully let them into the open will both help you make sure they're not sitting behind the steering wheel without your realizing it, and give you the opportunity to tap into whatever valid, helpful insights they might actually have. 

--

If you liked this post, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

 --

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Year-in-review questions to make the most of 2010

'Tis the season to look back on the year that was and ask, "So, uh...how'd it go?" If you want to get the most out of those 365 days, take a look back and ask some year-in-review questions. Here are several year-in-review posts I've written in previous years:

Year-in-review question #1: What went right?

Year-in-review question #2: What went wrong?

Year-in-review question #3: What did I achieve?

Year-in-review question #4: Who do I appreciate?

Year-in-review question #5: What was less than preferable?

Year-in-review question #6: What do I love about my life?

Year-in-review question #7: What difference did I make?

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Your career passion possibilities are practically endless

When you think about pursuing your passion in your career, what do you think of? If you're like most people, you probably think of a single path that you were "meant to do."

Over the years, I've seen that kind of thinking keep people frustrated and stuck. They either feel frustrated that they haven't found that One Thing, or if they do think they have found it, it seems so out of reach that it will never be anything more than a pipe dream. 

That's unfortunate, because the reality is that there are multiple careers that could be their "passion path." 

How do you find those paths? The idea is conceptually pretty simple:

1. Find your Passion Factors (the underlying reasons why you love what you love - more about how to do this here)
2. Use your Passion Factors to brainstorm potential career paths 
3. Use your Passion Factors to evaluate those potential paths

Ultimately what you are looking for is a path that is chock full of those Passion Factors. It's simple logic:

• If your Passion Factors are the underlying characteristics that tend to be in place when you feel energized...
• And a job is packed with those Passion Factors...
• Then the odds are excellent that you will feel energized by that job. 

I have stopped thinking about passion in terms of a noun people are passionate about (e.g., I'm passionate about photography, or organizing events, or software programming, etc.). Rather, what most people think of as their passion, I think of as a vehicle that allows them to experience their Passion Factors. 

For example, one of my Passion Factors is "exploration and discovery." Two of what I would traditionally say are my passions - my Passion Catalyst coaching and my travel photography - are both vehicles for me to experience that exploration and discovery. 

Thinking about things this way blows the doors wide open on what a passion-filled career could look like.

I recently heard from a client who just took a job that she never in a million years would have thought of taking before identifying her Passion Factors. But when the opportunity came up and she looked at it through the lens of those Passion Factors, she realized that it was full of them. And she loves it!

And when you know your Passion Factors, not only can you recognize potential new career paths, you can also recognize opportunities to bring more of them into your current work (for example, via a project, or how you approach the work you do). 

I'm convinced that one reason we have such an epidemic of people feeling disenchanted and disengaged with their work is that people don't realize just how much opportunity there is to tap into that energy. 

Don't let that be you!

[FYI, my e-book, The Occupational Adventure Guide, is a great way to go deeper into this process.]

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Stop resisting change and ask these questions

Do you ever find yourself gripping your current situation with white knuckles (either the situation as it is or as you think it should be), resisting change with every breath? Fighting change is often fighting reality, and as one of my favorite quotes from Byron Katie goes, "When I argue with reality, I lose - but only 100% of the time."

Over on the Advanced Life Skills blog, Jonathan Wells takes a look at how to overcome that tendency and to start exploring the new. He writes:

Why not take a careful look at your own life, and ask yourself the following questions:

1. What areas of my life no longer seem to be working?
2. What goals have I been unable to reach?
3. How long has this been going on?
4. What adjustments seem reasonable?
5. What’s preventing me from trying a new approach?
6. What price have I paid for not making adjustments?
7. When am I going to try something new?

Now write down three possible approaches for each area that needs some adjustment.  Choose one approach, and take action.  Notice how things changed.  Were your new results better, the same, or worse?  If they were better, look for ways to fine tune your new approach, and take more action.  If they were the same or worse, try the next approach on your list.

The key here is to open yourself to exploring something new. Take a deep breath and get curious. What's really going on? If it helps, treat it like you're asking those questions about someone else's situation that you happen to be intimately familiar with. Step away from the tendency to take it personally and look at it objectively. 

Asking these questions helps create clarity (which helps, because fuzziness tends to feed fear). And experimenting with possibilities gives you a low pressure, low risk way to move forward and discover what works. 

Take a deep, honest look at your career, and your life. Are you resisting change? Try Jonathan's questions and see where they take you. 

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Is your personal growth work bringing you down?

If you're reading this blog, you're probably no stranger to self-help. And while personal development is great, it also has a hidden dark side. Rather than helping you grow and thrive, personal growth work has the potential to suck you down.

It's not the personal growth work per se. Rather, it's what your inner critic does with it. You know the inner critic, right? It's that voice that sits there and tirelessly tells you how what you're doing isn't good enough, that you're not doing things right, that you don't have what it takes. On and on it goes.  

In their brilliant book, Embracing Your Inner Critic, Hal and Sidra Stone note the dangers of diving into self-help work without an awareness of the inner critic's tendencies. 

Embracing Your Inner Critic is based on Voice Dialog, a therapy technique the Stones developed that gives identities to each of the internal voices that are constantly yapping at us. Setting the stage for how the Inner Critic uses personal development work against us, they write:

...the Critic works closely with the Rule Maker, the Pusher, and the Perfectionist. The Rule Maker is the person who figures out the way we should be in the world in order to make things safe for us. The Perfectionist sees that we do things properly. The Pusher jams us to see that things are done right away and that we keep doing more and more things. The Critic then plays off these three selves and criticizes us when it feels we are not playing the game correctly, which is most of the time. 

Turning their focus to personal development, they write:

In all of the learning that we do in relation to personal growth, we have a partner. It soaks up information like a dry sponge. It is operating right now as you read this book, and it will use this information in some way to criticize you. 

See how that works? One minute you're blissfully ignorant, the next minute you have learned how you should be, or what you should be doing, or how you should be responding. And then when you don't, your inner critic has a field day, using it to demonstrate just how much you suck. 

If you're not aware of the potential for that to happen, your personal growth work can quickly turn to quicksand, sucking you further down with every step instead of building you up. 

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

 

Passion Catalyst lesson #4 - You are your own best expert

This is a series of lessons learned in my nine years as a Passion Catalyst.

One of the first things I tell new clients is, "I don't have the faintest idea what's best for you." I follow that up with, "What I do have is an unshakable belief that you do!"

Over nine years of watching clients go from confusion to clarity, not once has the answer to what is right for them come from an outside source. They may feel like they don't have the answer at first, but what's really happening is that the answer is simply obscured. It's there; it's just covered up. And our focus is on uncovering it. Think Indiana Jones hacking through the jungle to find the treasure covered in overgrowth. 

What is the number one reason people's self-expertise is obscured? Focus. 

More to the point, they have an over-developed focus on external factors, and under-developed focus on that internal self-expertise. And that isn't a reflection on them. When I hear people get down on themselves because "I'm __ years old and I still don't know what kind of career I would really love," I always respond with one question: "Why would you?"

Think about it. We live in a culture that celebrates action and achievement. But self-awareness? When was the last time you saw an Introspection 101 class? So when our environment focuses our attention on that external aspect, if we happen to stumble into a career we love it's really more luck than anything. 

Want to build your self-expertise? Keep these three pieces of the puzzle in mind:

1. Develop the self-expertise
2. Compile the self-expertise
3. Use the self-expertise

Develop the self-expertise

I think of developing that self-expertise as an excavation process. The answers are there, but they're going to require a little digging. One great place to start is the Passion Factor exploration I mentioned in lesson learned #1 (in a nutshell, identify the common themes present when you feel energized by first asking what you love doing, and then asking why). 

There are a lot of great books with a lot of great approaches to self-exploration (I'm fond of my own e-book, The Occupational Adventure Guide). And that's where your self-expertise starts. Get to know what makes you tick so you can consciously make it part of your decisions. Otherwise it's all guesswork, and that is ineffective at best.

Compile the self-expertise

Another huge mistake I see people making is doing all this self-exploration work and then just letting most of the insights float away. Maybe a percentage of the insights they gained stick with them, but the rest disappear again. Why? It's hard to keep something in your head when your attention is elsewhere. So as they go about the day-to-day business of life, those insights start to drop off the radar screen.

To make the most of the self-expertise you are gaining, compile the key things you learn along the way. Think of it as creating a reference guide to what makes you tick. Instead of leaving it on pages and pages and pages of a journal, for example, summarize the key points on one page for an at-a-glance view of what you have discovered. 

You can create various categories for it, for example:

• What energizes me
• Ways I get in my own way
• Questions to frequently ask
• Dangers to be aware of

Not only will this give you a useable reference guide as you make decisions going into the future, it will also serve as an ongoing reminder. The question I always ask my clients is, "How much of this will you remember in five years when you haven't been intensely focused on it week in and week out?" Your self-expertise is only as robust as what you can remember. 

Use the self-expertise

Self-expertise is great, but it's little more than glorified navel-gazing if you don't do something with it. The great thing about compiling your insights in one place is that now you have a tool you can use as you move forward. 

For example, in my work with clients I have them make a list of the underlying themes that tend to be present when they're on fire (which we identified by exploring what they love doing and why). Putting those in one place creates what I describe as an internal compass. It's a distillation of where the energy comes from that they can use to both generate ideas and evaluate options. It takes the guesswork out of the process. 

If you do lots of great self-exploration, but then it stays buried in a file in a drawer, the odds are good that you will only harness a fraction of its value. Make the most out of the time and effort you have invested by summarizing the insights you gain in an easily digestible format. Then make a habit of referring to it frequently. 

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Getting Things Done: What's the point?

Here's a question for those of you who are Getting Things Done fans. As you devour GTD books and create systems that allow you to squeeze more productivity per square minute than should be humanly possible, have you ever wondered, "What's the point?"

Don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing taking a GTD approach. I could use an uber-sized chunk of that in my own life. I mean the question more literally. What is the point to it? Where are all your jam-packed days leading you? 

Today over on Half-a-dozen Monkeys, there is a post on the need to incorporate a long-term framework into your GTD efforts. 

The post got me thinking about all the clients I have worked with who have been masterful at getting things done, but ultimately realized that all the energy and effort they were putting into their highly productive days wasn’t actually taking them anyplace they really cared to go. 

If you think about GTD in terms of ROI, the payoff doesn’t just come from being able to tick a higher density of things off your to-do list. It also comes from the cumulative effect of day after day, after month, after year of doing those things. If it’s not taking you anywhere that feels meaningful and fulfilling, you’ll likely come up empty.

That's the case regardless of whether or not you are a GTD afficionado. Take a look back at last week. What did you do? What actions did you take? What items did you tick off your to-do list? Was any of it leading you in a direction you really care about? 

If the answer is no, I encourage you to spend some time exploring that long-term vision so you can tap into the cumulative potential of day after day spent taking action aimed in a direction that matters to you. Until you do, your career is at risk of amounting to little more than a series of well-executed steps taken for their own sake. 

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Use your wildest dreams to find a career you love

One question I often see to help people find work they love is, "What are your wildest dreams?" The question is intended partially to help people think about what they love, and partially to expand their focus past what's readily within reach. 

To make the most out of the question's ability to help you zero in on a direction that lights you up, you need to take it a step further than "What are my wildest dreams?" For each of the dreams you identify, spend some time asking, "Why? What is it about this dream that is so compelling? Why would I love to do this?" 

No doubt you'll discover some simple escapism, but you'll probably also find some valuable insights about where the energy comes from for you. 

As you ask why, pay attention to the reasons that come up. Pay special attention to the reasons that come up repeatedly. The reasons why something energizes or inspires you - the underlying themes that tend to be there when you're on fire - are the passion equivalent of transferable skills. Career paths that have those underlying characteristics have a high likelihood of energizing you. 

[Read more about turning your career into a juice delivery system.]

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Visual Self-exploration: Your Life in Pictures #11

Welcome to this week's installment in the Your Life in Pictures series. In this series, you will find photos to use as a point of departure for self-exploration.

Q: What insights does this picture prompt about your career? Your life? 

[Click on the image to see it full-sized.]

Pictures have great potential for self-exploration, because they provide a point of departure for asking, "how does this apply to my own life?" There is no specific meaning to any of these pictures. They are simply here to give your brain/intuition/creative mind/etc. something to bounce off.

Your exploration could be intuitive and non-linear, or it could be a logical analysis of an idea the picture prompts.

Need help sparking your picture-based self-exploration? Try these questions.

More information on self-exploration using the Your Life in Pictures series.

Visit the Your Life in Pictures archive.

[photo by Curt Rosengren]

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Visual Self-exploration: Your Life in Pictures #10

Welcome to this week's installment in the Your Life in Pictures series. In this series, you will find photos to use as a point of departure for self-exploration.

Q: What insights does this picture prompt about your career? Your life?

[Click on the image to see it full-sized.]

Pictures have great potential for self-exploration, because they provide a point of departure for asking, "how does this apply to my own life?" There is no specific meaning to any of these pictures. They are simply here to give your brain/intuition/creative mind/etc. something to bounce off.

Your exploration could be intuitive and non-linear, or it could be a logical analysis of an idea the picture prompts.

Need help sparking your picture-based self-exploration? Try these questions.

More information on self-exploration using the Your Life in Pictures series.

Visit the Your Life in Pictures archive.

[photo by Curt Rosengren]

--

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst