What Career Do You Want?

Working with people with big brains and with amazing skills is a joy. For the individuals themselves however, having widespread talents can be a real challenge. Firstly, very capable people don’t get a lot of sympathy from those who have had less opportunities. But when you cannot recognise & own yourown professional potential, then it can be frustrating to say the least, when people say ‘but you could do anything’.
Secondly when you have a big brain, and can apply yourself to a lot of different things, how on earth do you decide what that ‘thing’ will be? 
It’s seems there is a huge pressure for people of all ages to ‘know what they want to be’. I feel challenged when I overhear adoring grandparents saying ‘Oooh he’s going to be a footballer’ and I catch myself thinking ‘leave the poor mite alone’.
At schools we are measured and tested to make sure we can tick other’s boxes. At 13 we choose the best configuration of subjects in order to become an XYZ. The pressure really Ramps up post-16. Whether you were pre or post university fees, there may have been huge pressure to get the degree, to honour your parents support and to justify the finances involved…. And then we must go out Into the world and justify the time and money invested by meeting the agenda’s of organisations in order to get a good job…..
And in all this process, rarely to I hear the question, “what do you enjoy…..?”
And after 30 years of never having asked what we enjoy, and never being encouraged to ask this of ourselves, we may not even recognise what we enjoy, even when we fall over it. We have learnt not to listen to or honour what we enjoy, we have been trained to identify and do what others want from us…..
This is why it is difficult to decide what you want to do, because you may never have been encouraged or even allowed to engage with the experimentation and refining process that enables us to know when we like something. That is a difficult place to make any decision from…. We cannot be an ‘end product’ at 13, 21 or even 46 years old because we are always in the process of choosing and refining what it is that we like or feel passionate about….. We have to learn to ask these questions of ourselves, regularly, to quit doing what we should and instead learn how to recognise and honour what it is that we want. Rant over… 

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