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.

Life and Work Experiences Form

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.
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I have gathered enough resources together so that I have an understanding of what I need to do to create an online business .… if only I knew what business I wanted to create!!

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New Developments:

Becoming an online entrepreneur and working from home is an extremely appealing idea for many people of all ages — if only they could figure out what they wanted their business to be about!

I waffled for years. I knew that I really wanted to have my own business and then would get sooooo frustrated trying to decide what to develop a business on that I would eventually give up. Only to come back to the idea of being self-employed and go through the whole frustrating process again.……and again.

Selecting just one is sooooo difficult!!

My big issue seems to be that I am a scanner, or a renaissance soul — someone who needs to continually explore new things, new topics, and has difficulties remaining focused on one topic for too long. Not great for developing a business — or so I used to think!

In my scannings, I discovered 3 methods that can be used to help individuals select topics for online businesses:

1. The Technology Method: this is where you select keywords that describe the business or service you want to develop, and then do Keyword Analysis on them to see which ones are strong keywords (are often being used in online searches) and which keywords are experiencing a growth in usage. See my post on Selecting Keywords for more information on keyword analysis. The problem with this method for me, was that although this might give me a business topic that was popular (at least for now), it wouldn’t necessarily be a topic that I would want to work on for the next 10 or 20 years.
2. The ‘Find Your Passion’ Method: this method is used by a lot of career coaches and school councilors. Through various methods of personal analysis, a person can determine a topic that they are passionate about and focus a business around that topic. This is how I discovered that I am a scanner — that there is no one topic that I feel really passionate about or would want to spend the rest of my life working on.
3. The Template Method: I sent a big “Thank you!!” to Lea Woodward from Location Independent Living and Cath Duncan from Mine Your Resources who put together a Location Independent Lifestyle Beginners Guide, for this suggestion. Both Lea and Cath are scanners. The model that Lea developed to suit her scanner personality was to focus on developing a template involving a core set of technical and entrepreneurial skills that could be used to develop an online business on any topic that was holding her interest at the time.

The Template Method is the model that I am using to develop my online business with, and this blog/website is a ‘How-to guide’ that follows the step-by-step process I have taken to develop this business template.

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Next Step:

With topic and resources in hand, its time to develop my on-line business blog/website.

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