I hope your new year is going well. In this post, I want to share a few things
about some of my life research the past couple years, in particular related to
thoughts on world views and diet, and then connect the dots a little bit on
where I’m coming from. I hope it provides
a little bit of grounding to where I’m coming from, especially as this blog in
general is a bit of a self-discovery experiment in some ways with my writing,
and sharing perspectives which I think/feel have been helpful to me and may be
to others.
So for about the past year I’ve been in a significant state
of self-reflection, it’s not just mid-life seriously kicking in… I’ve always
been pretty introspective, done some journaling off and on (not as much as I
should), and I highly recommend journaling to everyone as an important
activity. I’ve recently picked it back
up as part of this blogging effort/process, in trying to find the important
themes which have colored and are coloring my life. So some of the past year’s efforts have been a sort of culmination
to reading and research over the years on different themes.
First, I’ve been re-evaluating my work, as I’ve been kind of
in a funk with the work that I do in the IT, information technolgy
industry. I’ve been working in this
area for about the past 18 years… a long time.
It’s been good, stable work (knock on wood)… but all I can say is that,
honestly, it’s never been truly, deeply fulfilling.
It is far different from the roots of my undergraduate education which
were in the liberal arts, primarily religious studies, philosophy and
literature. So, honestly, the reason I got into IT in
the first place was because my original plans, more along the lines of ministry and social work at the time, turned out to not be the path for me… and practically I
had to retrain to get work. I tried looking at social work and legal work and did both
classes, part-time jobs and internships in these areas, but these also didn’t
fully seem to work out right. In any
case, with the emerging areas of technology in the 90’s, and some advice from
friends getting their education in related fields, I changed my course
essentially on a dime, jumped into a graduate program with both feet, and ended
up making a career out of it.
Fast
forward 18 years… now after a heavy, 16-month stretch of project work and
associated stress, I noticed some of the classic symptoms of burnout
appearing. So for better or worse, here
I am, at a point where I know that I need to rediscover my passion for work,
which hopefully is more in line with my real personality. So I’ve been looking at a number of
different avenues, one of them trying to rediscover what and where my strengths
and talents are, and potentially how I can potentially re-direct my career.
OK, so enough background for one post, I’d like to spend the
rest giving some perspective on what I’ve been finding recently and connect the
dots some on some topics that I hope to write on creatively, and that may set
the tone for some of this year’s efforts.
I think I’ve mentioned previously the excellent site, Zen Habits, which
is written by Leo Babauta. He’s a
really talented person / blogger. He
had a really nice post last month which touched me, on finding / re-finding
work that is based on your passions:
In the post is a really inspirational TED talk by Scott
Dinsmore. In watching the video, Scott
mentions the book StrengthsFinder 2.0, so
yesterday I picked it up, read the initial chapter and took the online
assessment test. In a nutshell, the
book
points out that we are far better off if the work we do is in alignment
with our key strengths, aka talents, rather than spending too much of our time
(wasting energy) trying to improve ourselves and build on our weaknesses. I’m down with that concept. Know thyself they say, and leverage
that. Always easier said than done,
even after all these years. So after
reviewing the results of the test, it is clear that I’m not using my main
strengths/talents as much as I should in my work, which by far occupies the
vast majority of my productive hours each day.
So from the assessment test, I found I have the following 5 Key Strengths: Input, Learner,
Intellection, Harmony, Empathy. Interesting, but actually not any surprises here... yet still enlightening and revealing reminders for what are truly strengths to be best developed and leveraged. Well, not
sure yet how but I plan to actively use the new knowledge, but I'll be actively reading the book, and we’ll see how it
affects me as consultant and project manager in information technology… through
plenty of reflection, there is likely to be significant changes on the horizon
as the main components of my job are not set up to allow me to leverage these
talents in the best ways.
In any case, so far I can highly recommend the book, and
also these two of Leo’s Zen Habits posts on this topic:
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