Carol McClelland, eWomenNetwork Member: San Mateo, California, and eWomenPublishingNetwork member & Author of Your Dream Career For Dummies

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Rachel is self-employed and thoroughly enjoys her work as a realtor. Her recent engagement, however, has made her more and more aware that her seven day a week schedule is taking its toll on her personal life. She’s torn between the work she loves and the life she sees in front of her.

Claire has created a blended career that works quite well for her. She has a part time bookkeeping job and runs a cosmetics business. Although the lifestyle is working for her and she feels free to be herself in both of her careers, she is coming to realize that she is bored with her ventures.

Although each woman enjoys parts of her work and her lifestyle, they are each missing something significant when it comes to their work/life.

Where do you stand?

• Are you able to be yourself at work?
   
• Does your work or business impinge on your personal life?
   
• Is your work environment supportive?
   
• Are you frustrated with what you do each day?
  

If you are missing one of these elements, it’s likely your work is like a bad dream—unsettling and confusing.

If you are missing two or more of these elements, it’s likely your career is becoming a bit of a nightmare. You are ready to do anything to get your life back.

To create a lifestyle and career that truly work for you, it’s important to take a close look at your entire situation. Your main objective is to find a way to combine who you are, how you live, how you work, and what you do. Now that’s a Dream Career.

Describing Your Dream Career in Detail

Building your dream career is like building a dream home. The more time and energy you put into exploring your needs, interests, and desires, the more likely your house (or your career) will be a good match for you.

Spend some time thinking about the questions described in this section. If you can, write down your thoughts so that you can review them at a later date. Keep refining your picture until you feel it describes your current ideal vision for yourself and your life.

• When left to your own devices, who are you?
   
• How do you function best? What do you value?
   
• How do you define success?
  
• What are your best traits?

By understanding your true nature, you are better able to create a career and a life that fully expresses who you are.

For example, if you like structure and work best in an environment that provides that structure, you need to make sure your work environment fulfills this need. If you like freedom and flexibility, create an environment that supports these characteristics. Putting yourself in an environment that’s counter to your natural style can have dire consequences.

• How do you want to live your life?
   
• How do you want to spend your time?
   
• With whom do you want to interact?

Although it’s easy to think about the ways you’d tweak your current lifestyle, I encourage you to broaden your perspective. If you could redesign your lifestyle just the way you want it, what would it look like? How would it feel?

By giving voice to your dreams about where you’d like to live, how you’d like to spend your time, and who you value, you enhance your ability to identify opportunities that move you closer to your ideal.

• What work environment makes you most productive and happy?

Think about your entire work arrangement from your schedule and time off to your pay and benefits, from your personal work area to your work location, from your work colleagues to your customers and those who manage your work.

By understanding what’s important to you in your work environment, you have a much better chance of creating it. Whether you negotiate with your manager or yourself to get what you need to be productive, the changes you make in your work environment can enhance your time at work.

• What skills do you enjoy using at work?
   
• What topics fascinate you?
   
• How do you like to help others?

Even if you don’t see an immediate way to turn your passions into a cash producing venture, continue to nurture your interests by using your skills and being involved with others who share your fascination.

In the fourteen years I’ve worked with clients to identify their dream careers, I’ve watched clients incorporate a wide range of passions, such as astronomy, signing, archeology, spirituality, and entertaining, into their work.

Keep your mind open to the possibilities. You never know what opportunities will present themselves to you.

After you answer these questions, put your notes away for a couple of days. When you return to them, refine any details that don’t reflect your ideal picture.

Then take a step back to see if you can identify any developing themes.

• Is one element of your life/career more out of sync than the others?
   
• Did you get any new insights about why your current situation
  isn’t working for you?
   
• How would you best describe your dream career at this time?

Taking Action to Create Your Dream Career

Use your vision of your dream career as a point on the horizon to shoot for. Don’t be alarmed if you can’t make all of your desired changes overnight. The most important thing is to keep taking the actions that move you in the direction of your dream.

Look over your notes and choose one change you’d like to make. Start with something that feels easy to tackle. Then brainstorm a variety of ways you can achieve your desired goal. After reviewing your options, choose the action that’s likely to create the best results for you.

Don’t worry if you don’t see how it’s all going to play out. Often taking the action in front of you will open up possibilities you couldn’t have seen before you took the original step. Pay attention to your intuition in this process as well because sometimes the next “logical” step isn’t the one that’s going to create the most payoffs for you.

If you are contemplating a significant change to your business or your job, give yourself the opportunity to explore your options first. Test the waters before you take the leap. You may discover ways to refine your plan that will save you significant amounts of time, energy, and expense.

Throughout implementing your vision, keep a creative mindset. If you can only see one or two options, stop yourself and look at your situation from a bigger perspective. If you can, bring in a coworker, a fellow businesswoman, or a friend to help you brainstorm an array of options. Often someone who is outside the situation will see things that you can’t see because you are too close to your own situation.

Here are some ideas for the three women highlighted at the
beginning of this article.

• Maria, the marketing communications employee, might explore other companies in her area to see if any have a culture that suits her style better. If the culture she dislikes is endemic to her industry, she might explore the possibility of transferring her skills to another industry that is more consistent with her style.

• Rachel, the recently engaged realtor, might experiment with different schedules to see if she can create an arrangement that melds her personal needs with her professional responsibilities. Another option might be to partner up with another realtor who is also interested in creating a bit more balance in her life.

• Claire, the bored business owner, might begin by making a list of all the skills and interests she enjoys. With that list in hand, she can discern whether she can reconfigure her current business to incorporate more of her passions, whether she can find a part time job that’s a better fit, or whether her best strategy is to target an entirely new venture.

Sometimes a small change or a series of small changes over time can have an unexpectedly large impact on how you feel about yourself, how you work, and how you live.

Keep making the choices that move you closer to your dream, and there’s no stopping what you can create for yourself!

About Carol McClelland

Carol McClelland, PhD, Founder of Transition Dynamics Enterprises, Inc., provides hope, insight, and a sense of direction to people who are in the midst of transition in their personal lives and their careers. As the author of Your Dream Career For Dummies, the Career Clarity Program™, The Seasons of Change, and Nature's Wisdom Deck, Carol provides clients with unique tools, refreshing perspectives, and powerful insights to help them transform their confusion into clarity. In addition to her work with clients, Carol trains coaches, therapists and other transition professionals to incorporate the Career Clarity Program and The Seasons of Change into their work with clients. For your free Career Insight Packet, visit http://www.transitiondynamics.com/free.