What do I want to do when I grow up?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the question we always ask kids,
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
And thinking about how that question really sets us up for such a strange relationship with our lives.
My answer, memorialized in a first grade notebook that my Mother kept for years, was that I wanted to live on a beach with my dog and be an artist!
I’ve asked kids this myself and been rewarded with a variety of answers from the stock standard response of “fireman” to “Ninja with fairy wings”.
We place so much importance on that question, and of course the intention behind it is to ask people, what kind of JOB do you intend to do when you’re an adult?
But I often find myself wondering about the pressure to figure out what job you want, rather than encourage an exploration of who you want to be.
Because they are drastically different things.
We have a cultural problem of measuring the value of a person's life by what activity they do in exchange for money.
We have a cultural problem of equating our LIFE with our JOB.
Given that we spend a significant part of our lives working it’s easy to see why, but I feel like we really should stop equating “what job do you want to do” with “what do you want to do with your life”.
If for no other reason than it seriously limits the ways in which you get to explore who you are and what your life could be.
It tricks us into thinking that the job = the life.
And that my darling is a recipe for disaster. We are so so much more than the job we do.
So many people come to coaching with questions like;
“What would be the ideal job for me?”
“How can I be more confident at work so I can get promoted?”
“I hate my boss so much, how can I get out?”
But find that what would REALLY change their lives is finding answers to questions like,
“If I look past my job, what I DO and the stuff I have, who AM I?”
“How can I build the confidence to be able to face any challenge that comes my way?”
“How can I create inner resilience that will help me change how I deal with conflict?”
These kinds of questions lead you to answers that show you who you ARE and what you're capable of.
Those kinds of questions have nothing to do with what your job is, but who you choose to be in this life.
Which leads to my favorite thing to ask myself.
