A WorkLife Lesson: Éimhear’s Story: If I Change Nothing, How Will My WorkLife Be One Year From Now? How Does This Make Me Feel?
London had been good to Éimhear. She had lived in the city for fifteen years. But of late, she was growing tired of it. There’s a saying by Samuel Johnson, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” But this wasn’t true for Éimhear. In fact, the opposite was true. She yearned for more adventure in her WorkLife. She wanted to travel more. She wanted to work and live somewhere new and different.
Éimhear had recently turned sixty. The milestone birthday had brought with it a sense of unease. She felt she wasn’t living her WorkLife fully. She felt her WorkLife had been on hold for too long. She felt that somehow, somewhere along the road of her WorkLife path, she had lost her sense of adventure. She had always loved travel, exploring and discovering new places and cultures, but for so long now, she wasn’t doing this.
There were a few reasons for this.
When Éimhear had travelled, she had been in a contractor role in investment banking. The contracts were on a rollover basis, which meant it was as close to being employed as you could get. It didn’t have benefits such as health cover, learning programmes or holiday pay, but the rate of pay more than compensated for that and allowed her to do what she needed to do to cover those areas. It also meant at the end of each three-month rolling contract, she could take time out to travel, if she chose to, before recommencing the rollover contract. These were usually one week to one-month breaks, after which she would come back to London energised, ready to take on a new chapter of her WorkLife.
Then Éimhear left investment banking. The industry had gone through an economic downturn, and the bank decided to end all contract work to safeguard jobs for employees. She was offered a full-time role, but she declined. The reason she had always worked as a contractor was that she didn’t want to follow a career in finance. She had also become restless of late. She had been working in banking for fifteen years. She had been spinning the wheels at work. She felt it was time to move on. This was the push she needed to do that and to do something different.
In this lesson, you will learn the questions Éimhear journaled on to help her envision her future.
You will learn how this enabled her to make changes in her day-to-day WorkLife to begin to make this happen.
In this lesson’s WorkLife Learning Assignment, you will learn the art of self-reflection, self-questioning, self-feedback and self-awareness through the power of journalling to help you live your WorkLife fully.
In this lesson’s Continuous WorkLife Learning Assignment, you will fine-tune your self-awareness to be observant of what tires and what energises you.