Introduction: Knowing what you do best and most enjoy doing is important both to charting your vocational future and presenting yourself persuasively to potential employers. Most of us, however, are unaccustomed to thinking of our lives as a series of accomplishments, and few of us can rattle off our 10 major achievements. This exercise is designed to help you identify your personal bests, most of which should eventually find their way into your resume. If most of your major accomplishments seem inappropriate for your resume because unrelated to the positions you are seeking, it's probably time for serious rethinking of your vocational direction.
Objective: To isolate the 10 accomplishments in which you take most pride. These will figure prominently in later exercises aimed at identifying your major vocational assets and clarifying your values.
Materials: Two sheets of paper and your complete list of career Chronology.
Approximate time to complete: 30 to 90 minutes.
Method:
- Write "Accomplishments" at the top of a sheet of paper. Then, using your completed career chronology as your basic source, list 20 to 30 accomplishments. The more the merrier, so if you reach 30 before you reach the latest phase of your career, just keep going.
- Under no circumstances, however, stop before you reach 15. If necessary, remind yourself that at some point in your life you learned to do several, if not all, of the following: walk, use the toilet, read, ride a bicycle, fill out income tax forms, open a checking account, get a credit card, buy a major appliance, write essays, take a picture, program a VCR, cook an egg, drive a car, make a bed, use a telephone, consult a phone book, vote in an election, and change a tire. No one is born knowing how to do a single one of these things (of which there are more than 15), and we haven't even touched on anything directly or exclusively related to doing a job.
- Title your second sheet of paper, "Personal Bests," and select from your comprehensive list of accomplishments the 10 that you consider the most significant.
Introduction: Your accomplishments reveal a great deal about you, but before you can mine these rich sources of self information, you must examine them in greater detail. In this exercise you will describe your accomplishments in terms that will help you identify skills, values, preferences, and personal characteristics.
Objective: To create detailed descriptions of your accomplishments, which you will use in the next exercises to create an inventory of assets, explore your values, and describe the perfect next move in your career.
Materials: 10 sheets of paper and your list of personal bests.
Approximate time to complete: 1 to 5 hours.
Method: At the top of each sheet of paper, write one of your top 10 accomplishments. Now, pick any one of the sheets and give yourself 15 to 30 minutes to write about that accomplishment. Use the technique of "free writing" to describe the accomplishment more fully: write as quickly as you can without rushing, don't pause to reread or correct any thing you've written, and stop when you've used the time you originally budgeted. Put the sheet aside and move on to the next, proceeding in the same fashion with each major accomplishment.
Use the following questions to stimulate your thinking:
- What makes you proudest about the accomplishment?
- What obstacles did you have to overcome?
- Did you have to enlist the aid of others? If so, how did you win their cooperation?
- Describe the accomplishment as a recipe: what ingredients did it require and how did you assemble them?
- What attitudes, knowledge, personal attributes, and skills did the accomplishment require or exemplify?
- Did you compete with others striving to accomplish something similar?
- Did the accomplishment require you to take any risks?
- How much and what kind of coaching or supervision did you have as you worked toward this accomplishment? Did it seem helpful or intrusive to you? Why?
- How were you rewarded for the accomplishment?
- What did you learn from the experience?
- Describe some of the feelings you experienced along the way to this accomplishment. Were you ever fearful? Did your motivation flag at times? Did you feel euphoric at times? Did you ever despair of reaching your goal?
- How did these feelings affect your performance?
- What does this particular accomplishment demonstrate about you?
