Uncover Your Skills and Aspirations by Using Your Nonconscious

 When you write fiction, you unlock some powerful parts of your brain. You may see more options than usual.

Your future, like everyone's, is a bit random, non-linear and volatile. You usually refuse to believe it, and fear it.

Check with your own past and derive courage from it.

Exercise: Fiction about Yourself

Fiction has the power to break us out of the regular patterned way we see ourselves. It helps us create room for careers and opportunities that we wouldn't see possible in any sort of traditional planning exercise. How you react to that fiction can be just as telling as the story itself. It can enable you to take a leap of faith, which can be hard to do when you're examining yourself. It is indulgent, necessary, and sometimes exactly what you need when you feel stuck in life or limited by what you have done before.

Write Fiction About Yourself

1. Begin by making a list of real milestones and experiences from your life. Include any resources you have, such as your home, or a skill you've already mastered, and be sure to, add anything that showed up on your nonlinear career map (3).
2. Add ten fictional milestones as bullet points anywhere on the map. Choose things you have never done. Things that excite you. Challenge yourself to imagine something completely fictitious, not just a path you didn't take.
3. Now comes the creative part. Consider all of these points as a whole and write three alternative stories of your life. Omit bullet points that are true or add in fake ones to build a completely different bio, one you would have never previously considered. Write a future biography for each story line. What did this fictional character end up doing? How did this character achieve his or her goals?
4. As you look at these alternative biographies, consider what it would mean to actually pursue these paths. What skill would you have to learn? What city would you have to move to? How could the current realities of your life actually help you move into one of these fictional futures? What would you have to let go of? What would this new path enable or change?
5. Reflect on the implications of these stories and questions on your own life.

50 Ways to Get a Job, page. 38-39

Paths not taken

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less
travelled by, And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, Mountain Interval

Think of the most important steps, turning points and decisions in your life to date. Record three or four key turning points like this:

Look at one of the turning points you have outlined above. Now draw out your paths not taken ('the things I nearly did/could have done') as shown below:

Paths not taken - questions to ask yourself

• What choices were available to you at this turning point?
• How did you choose the path to take?
• How have you made career decisions since?
• What difference would a change of path have made to you?
• Where have you adapted and shaped your career?

How to Get a Job You Love, page.52