Have You Done Any Life/Work Planning Lately?
By Richard Bolles
Life/Work Planning isn't a future activity in our lives: something we will vow to do, when it's time to make our New Year's resolutions. Life/Work Planning is something we already have begun doing, in at least some areas of our life, without ever using that title.
For example, if you got up on a Monday morning recently and you thought: "What am I going to do about Christmas?" then you have already done Life/Work Planning. Or if you thought about your vacation time for next summer, and started out by think-ing of three different ways you could spend your vacation, then you have already done Life/Work Planning. Or if you have been thinking lately that too much of your life is being devoted to work, and you're starting to puzzle how you could build in more time for your family, and for leisure, then you have already done Life/Work Planning.
In other words, the title may be new to some of us, but the activity is something that almost all of us - including the most dedicated dreamer among us - has already experi-enced.
So, the discipline called Life/Work Planning is only a more systematic, thoughtful and thorough way of doing something you already do occasionally, intuitively, and without much agonizing thought.
Thus to decide you want to really do Life/Work Planning in a formal way, is like deciding to take up walking as a discipline. It's not a totally new activity. You already do it. But to choose walking as a discipline is to stop just ambling around the house, or tak-ing short walks to the store, and determining to walk for a longer time, and at a brisker pace, and with some sort of schedule. In any case, you are just expanding something you already do.
If you decide you want to do Life/Work Planning as a discipline,
it is the same kind of decision: you are merely deciding to do, in
a more disciplined way, more regularly, and for a larger block of
time, that which you already do.
Okay, so - speaking historically - how did Life/Work Planning ever
get going, as a discipline or field? Well, one way to think of its
history is to think of it as like a tree-trunk. If we were to saw
horizontally straight through the trunk of a tree, and if it were
old enough and large enough, we would see that the trunk, in
cross-section, is a series of concentric rings.
Likewise, Life/Work Planning's evolution, historically, has its own
concentric rings.
The innermost ring, the oldest, the place where Life/Work Planning began, is: "find-ing people jobs."
Over time that eventually evolved to include the next ring outward, which was: "helping people change careers." And then, over time, it grew to include the next ring outward, which is: "helping people plan for their future careers." And eventually it grew to include the outermost ring, "helping people plan the future of more than just their job, work, or career."
It will dawn on you that the history of the field simply recapitulates our own per-sonal learning history, throughout life. We begin early in life by wanting to find a job that puts bread on the table, clothes on our back, a roof over our heads, and gives us - it may be - an interesting group of people to work with. Voila! In order to do this, we need some help with The Job-Hunt (the innermost ring of our own Life/Work Plan-ning tree).
As time moves on we have to, or want to, change jobs, and eventually we have to change careers. Voila! We need some help with Career Change (the next ring outward).
Often we learn to do this, and learn to do it well, but if we have to keep changing careers as we grow older, we realize we must start planning ahead - - further down the road than just at headlight range. Voila! We need help with Career Planning (the next ring outward).
And then, we may learn to do this well, but in mid-life often our spirit grows rest-less, like a caged tiger pacing back and forth within its cage. Our work is satisfying, but...long forgotten questions from our youth resurface in our minds, such as, "Why am I here on earth? If Life is not just an accident, what was I put here to do? What is it I want to accomplish with my life before I die?" Our interest is no longer just in our work, though it may revolve around our work. But there are larger issues now. We want to look at our whole life - our learning, our leisure, our relationships, and even our faith. And so, we need some help with the outermost ring of our personal tree-trunk: Life/Work Planning.
This evolution in our lives - moving from The Job-Hunt, to Career Change, to Ca-reer Planning, to Life/Work Planning - is not necessarily related to any particular ages (as in "mid-life" crisis). For twenty five years I taught a two-week course every summer in the U.S. on Life/Work Planning, attended by people from all around the world, and our youngest students were 16 years of age (our oldest was 81). And so I learned: the hunger for Life/Work Planning may be found in even the very young, as well as in the ages we would expect. It does not have to wait until we reach a certain time.
And so: Life/Work Planning did not evolve because some career counselor or coach somewhere grew bored with his or her work, and wanted to invent something new, out there - just for the sake of doing inventing new. No, Life/Work Planning evolved be-cause more and more of us evolve, and need help in building a truly holistic, well-rounded life. As we grow older, from 16 on, we seek to find for ourselves a certain full-ness of Life, a Life that is comprised of more of a balance between work, learning, lei-sure, relationships, and faith. Our soul cries out for some disciplined Life/Work Plan-ning.
If that's where you are now, and you want some help in doing
that, "The Flower Ex-ercise" in the back of the new (2005) edition
of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" (pages 313-360) , will offer you
a good place to start.
