Who Am I? #3

“Who am I? Where’s my car?”
-- Los Angeles, CA bumper sticker, circa 1990


I found the car. Where’s the map?

In the last exercise, I outlined my skills and interests, based on favorite things. It was a nice list. But it didn’t resonate – really – with clues that might help me move Into The Future. I still needed something.

Then I realized: you can’t move effectively from The Present to Your Future without beginning at the beginning – defining some kind of a road map. Otherwise, anything you did would be the right thing – even if you didn’t like doing it.

I knew that there would come a time when I would want to travel into the future without a strict set of directions or a firmly defined destination. But I wasn't there yet. I had my Board of Directors to think about. I didn’t want to draw conclusions yet about my future path, but I definitely needed to identify for my Board of Directors the directions that had real potential for me. That meant looking at my raw material from two points of view: the positive, and the negative.

In this blog, I’ll work through the positive, and leave the second half of this exercise for next time.


Identify what has worked

Once again, I reviewed what I had written down so far. I realized that what I had done well, I did because I liked to do them. That was an obvious place to start: Things I like to do/do well.

It’s no small thing to identify only the things you do well that you like. For example, I was touted by my 5th grade piano teacher as a kid who could Go Somewhere in the world of classical music. You know – Julliard, concerts, record contracts, the works. Since music was a dream of my mother’s, I was set on that path – to the tune of practicing four hours a day on weekends.

There were two problems with their approach to building me a future in music:

1. I wasn’t challenged by it. I guess I was good, but the things I did at the piano seemed obvious and I sure the heck missed playing outdoors on summer weekends. Besides, I didn’t like practicing, and I hated that metronome!

2. I didn’t like performing. Everyone around me forgot to ask me one simple question: “Do you like playing for people?” I hated it. The stage nerves, the inevitable one-note mistake, my mother’ chilling gasp when she heard it, being forced to play for my parents’ friends at parties – and knowing it bored them – added up to anger and boredom with the whole thing.

Those two things killed my desire for music. I quit as soon as I had the chance. And I still don’t play – unless the spirit moves me to play (badly) the few things I still like. (It’s ok – there’s no one else in the house but the cats.)

Thus the importance of identifying the things you do well that you like. Besides, if you like doing it, you’ll do it more, and pretty soon you’ll be better at it than anyone else, and someone is going to have to hire you!

So – first list this time: the things you like to do/do well.


Identify what you want to work

Somehow in listing all these things – favorites, skills, interests, things I liked – an important question came up. Whatever happened to all my childhood dreams? Like most little kids, I “grew up” and forgot about them.

I sat for a while and remembered, way down the road I had already traveled, back to those auspicious (or arrogant!) moments when I declared what I was going to be “when I grew up”: a jockey! (that died when I hit 5’7”); the first woman rider at the Spanish Riding School! (no horse); a model! (the American Everygirl dream); a writer! (that one actually worked).

Remembering was fun. But I wasn’t a child anymore, and besides, I had a lot more dreams to add to the list. So I answered the big question:

“I’ve always wanted to…”

I listed the first things that came to mind – then the second, and the third. I wrote it all down – without editing.


Your potentialities

Now I had two more lists: 1) Things I like to do/do well. 2) “I’ve always wanted to…”

I put the two lists side by side. They definitely pointed down a number of roads I could imagine from this point. But something in me was rebelling.

First, there were too many roads – my Board of Directors would have to help with that. However, I didn’t want to waste my Board’s time, so I decided to close off all of the roads that I knew were not going to be fun. That’s the subject of the next exercise.