When your choices are uncertain, choose yourself
When your choices are uncertain, choose yourself
Supporting teenagers with their life choices has our Happiness Ambassador reflecting on how her own choices brought her to Boo.
Around this time of year one or two members of Team Boo visit Year 10 pupils in a local school to help them with interview skills and just to get them comfortable speaking to a stranger about their own hopes and dreams. For the last two years, it’s been me, which is a little ironic since I can’t recall having any particular hopes and dreams myself in Year 10.
How could I ever have known that I was destined to be a Happiness Ambassador? I do remember completed a computer-based multiple choice questionnaire which generated our ‘likely’ profession. This seemed a sophisticated kind of magic in the mid 1990’s. It told me I was suited to journalism.
How to choose when you don’t know how to choose.
I don’t remember my thought process in picking GCSE options. I DO remember how I chose my degree, an investment of tens of thousands of pounds. Presented with a weighty A-Z of university courses, I began at A. Dismissing American Studies, I turned the page to Ancient History and then Anthropology. Tiring of the process three pages in, I applied for those two courses at two universities I’d never visited. When I was accepted at both, Ancient History at Manchester beat Anthropology at Durham because I figured I could take my washing home on the train.
On my first day I was disgruntled to discover we would not be learning about the Ancient Egyptians, but not as disgruntled as the Archaeology students who switched to our course in droves when they discovered they wouldn’t be raiding tombs. I was so flippant with the choices I made for my future. It’s worked out alright for me but I wouldn’t recommend my methods.
All you can do is what feels right for you in the moment. But for that, you need to know who YOU are.
We can’t imagine the full breadth of jobs there will be in our rapidly changing world in ten or even five years. All we can begin to be certain of is who we are, what we are good at and what we enjoy. When we are grounded in this knowledge, we can decide whether or not to pursue opportunities as they arise.
For some, this certainty is within them early in life. In recent years I’ve supported Manchester University with interviewing applicants for their midwifery programme. It’s my old haunting ground, and yet it isn’t. These young people often have a belief in what they are meant to do with their lives that astounds me in my 40s and would have made 18-year-old me feel lightly panicked about not feeling the same way. It’s convinced me that a vocation is a real thing. I suspect some people are born midwives, nurses, doctors, teachers… as a society we should give them the full force of our support to fulfil their destinies.
I think the careers process in the past – the multiple choice questionnaire, the algorithm, the flow chart – has been created on the assumption that we all have a vocation. For many of us – most of us – this is not the case.
It’s OK not to feel a calling towards your ‘life’s work’. For the rest of us, all we can do is this:
What sparks joy in me?
What to I feel sense of flow doing?
What feels right, what feels uncomfortable?
What fills my cup? What drains it?
What problems do I actually quite enjoy solving?
What am I doing when I feel most like myself?
What makes me forget to check my phone?
Two weeks after interviewing the year 10s, I found myself dressed as a Christmas tree talking to staff at Blackpool Hospital about connecting back with their why. I feel most like myself when I am dressed as an inanimate object. I enjoy having deep and meaningful conversations and although they drain me, they energise me too. I am deeply interested in what makes us happy in work and in life, and I’m keen to learn more about how we can keep our key workers and care givers happy and healthy in particular. I didn’t check my phone for the whole three hours.
My job title is Happiness Ambassador, and believe it or not, that wasn’t one of the outcomes on my multiple choice questionnaire, back in Year 10.
