These exercises are most helpful if completed in a spirit of playful creativity. As in all creative endeavors, quantity is the first step toward quality. Separate as far as possible the important creative process of generating material from the equally important creative process of reviewing critically what you have generated. Otherwise, you won't allow yourself the freedom to discover anything you don't already know.
Reframing Failures
As you review your career and identify your accomplishments, you will doubtless also recall some failures. These are as important as your accomplishments because they are equally rich in information about you. Don't try to forget or avoid them. Instead, spend some time with them: think about them and analyze them. In what sense did you fail? Did you fail in your own eyes, someone else's, or both? How did you respond to your failures? You're still alive; apparently none of your failures was fatal how did you cope with them? Did you persist or did you look for alternative means of getting what you wanted? Are there any patterns in your failures do many involve relationships?, Formal education?, Mastery of technology? Working with superiors? Managing others? Managing resources? Acquiring physical skills? Sticking to resolutions? Completing assignments on time?
Like Frank, you may discover that the difference between accomplishments and failures isn't always clear and that failures can often be re framed as achievements. He failed the fifth grade; at the time he was mortified, and so strong was his residual shame that, as an adult, he had never revealed his failure to anyone. After reflecting on it, however, he began to think of the experience as both an accomplishment and a failure.
He realized several things. First, his failure was in large part a protest against a restrictive educational environment. Second, it got him out of that environment: his parents sent him to a different school, in which he thrived. Third, despite his unpromising experience in the fifth grade, he had managed to graduate from college and earn two master's degrees at worst; his failure had been a temporary setback. Last, it had resulted in a lifelong interest in educational practice and philosophy, which had inspired him to teach courses after work at a nearby community college. In all, he concluded, he was pretty proud of what he had accomplished through his failure.
Once you've generated a comprehensive list of accomplishments and failures, your next task will be to take a break. Breaks from directed thinking are as important to creativity as concentrated periods of immersion. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a task or problem for hours or days without making any progress, only to find that insights come to us in the middle of doing something else like taking a shower or doing the dinner dishes. Our minds can work on problems without our conscious, deliberate participation in the process. How they do so is still mysterious, but that they do so is incontestable. Give your mind a chance to work by itself on what you've uncovered, without your conscious intervention and shaping of the results.
From your comprehensive list of accomplishments, you will be selecting your "personal bests" the 10 accomplishments that seem most important to you. As you make your selections, consider not only how significant each accomplishment seems by external or objective standards, but also how significant each feels to you. In your heart, you may feel prouder of having planned a successful fund raising event for your church than of having won the best salesperson award last year, which your head may insist is far more impressive to potential employers. Go with your heart.
For one thing, you may be wrong about what will impress potential employers; for another, what impresses others depends more on presentation than on objective reality. If you speak enthusiastically about your volunteer fund raising work, you will leave a stronger, more positive impression on an interviewer than if you speak unenergetically about the sales award. Last, but emphatically not least, the major goal at this point is still to learn about yourself, but if you won't listen to yourself, you will be a lousy student and a worse teacher.
Fortunately, most people do best those things they most enjoy doing, and they most enjoy doing those things they do best. Thus, through identifying major accomplishments, you will also be identifying both your major vocational assets and your major sources of vocational fulfillment.
