Your Life and Work Experiences

 

The fifth fac­tor to con­sider when design­ing your Authen­tic Life is the explo­ration of your past life and work experiences.

Past life and work expe­ri­ences focuses on access­ing areas in your life that you have expe­ri­ence in, and com­bin­ing these expe­ri­ences with your tal­ents and skills to help design your Authen­tic Life. For exam­ple, if you trav­eled a lot for busi­ness, and trav­el­ing is some­thing you enjoy doing, then you could look at ways to incor­po­rate trav­el­ing into your life.

The expe­ri­ences that you iden­tify don’t have to involve activ­i­ties that you are highly skilled at. They do, how­ever, need to involve activ­i­ties that you enjoy doing. Even though we have a tal­ent for spe­cific activ­i­ties, expe­ri­ence can often show us that these activ­i­ties are ones that we don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to design our lives around. On the other hand, our expe­ri­ences can iden­tify activ­i­ties that we really enjoy doing, despite the fact that we don’t yet have the skills and tal­ents to excel at these activities.

The exer­cise for explor­ing this key ele­ment is fairly straight forward:

1. Make a list of all the life and work expe­ri­ences you have had that you are either very proud of (are there spe­cific suc­cesses you have had, or things you have accom­plished in your life that you are proud of?), or that you really enjoyed doing. These could be related to leisure activ­i­ties, work activ­i­ties, vol­un­teer activ­i­ties, etc.
2. For each experience/activity iden­tify if this is some­thing you would pur­sue to earn an income from, or if it is some­thing you would do as a vol­un­teer, or some­thing you would like to do as a hobby.
3. For each experience/activity iden­tify if this is some­thing you cur­rently have the skills to do, or if this is some­thing you would like to develop your skills and tal­ents in, or if this is some­thing you have no inter­est in devel­op­ing your skills and tal­ents in.
4. You should end up with a list that looks some­thing like the one below.

A .pdf file of this form can be down­loaded by click­ing here ~~~> Life and Work Expe­ri­ences Form

From this list, you can now iden­tify past life and work expe­ri­ences that you have an inter­est in either incor­po­rat­ing into your life, or in devel­op­ing your skills and tal­ents in.

The next step is to gather all this infor­ma­tion you have been col­lect­ing from the exer­cises asso­ci­ated with the first 5 key ele­ments together so that you can begin design­ing your Authen­tic Life.

The next post will focus on Key Ele­ment Num­ber 6: Desired Activ­i­ties and will draw on the infor­ma­tion you have col­lected to help you iden­tify the types of activ­i­ties you want to incor­po­rate into your new Authen­tic Life.
.