Some thoughts on a Wednesday afternoon…

I have a calendar from last year hanging above my desk. I made it myself to plan out the holiday that I took. A year ago today I was travelling from Los Angeles to Pismo Beach along the Pacific Coast Highway. I remember it well… And although that was a year ago and I started as a self-employed trainer nearly two years ago, the two are very much connected.

Let me explain.

Two years ago I was finishing up my PhD corrections. I didn’t have something lined up for work afterwards. I had some ideas, and I also had dreams. Despite going down an academic route up to that point, I had always liked the idea of working for myself, of being my own boss. And I had been involved in skills training during my PhD working as a course administrator on some local GRADschools, which had seemed really fulfilling. What I didn’t have was the spark that would make the connection between those two ideas.

Enter my friend Dave.

Hanging out at Ragged Point, California

Hanging out at Ragged Point, California

Dave worked overseas at the time, and we sat down as summer 2008 was winding down to think about the year. Neither of us had had a break, and we started talking about the possibility of going on a holiday together in summer 2009. Very quickly, over the space of one pint and half an hour, this germ of an idea bloomed into a plan to go on a five week road trip across the USA. There were many more details to fill in of course, and there are many stories that I could tell you about the subsequent road trip that we went on – but instead I want to mention how it lead me here.

You see, as we were scheming I got to thinking, “Who’s going to give me a job, knowing that I’m either going to take five weeks off, or that I’m going to leave at the end of next June?” And that’s when it hit me: I would be a freelance skills trainer. It seemed really, desperately obvious that that is what I should do, and so I didn’t question it, I just started looking around for opportunities. In the short term I wanted to know if being freelance agreed with me, and finding small projects to work on and workshops to facilitate seemed like the best way to go about doing that. And in the long run this has helped me build up other skills to take on bigger and bigger challenges.

I was lucky in having several supportive people around me, people who gave me opportunities and who looked out for opportunities for me. I think often we have all these dreams and goals that we have, but a lot of the time they are just “one day” goals. “One day I’m going to go on that big holiday.” “One day I’m going to write that novel.” All it takes sometimes, as it did in my case, is getting just that little bit of pressure, a little push to help you see what is right in front of you.

I have a suspicion that it shouldn’t really be like that, that we should be able to step back more easily and see what it is that we want from life. But it is difficult. It can be uncomfortable to take a look in the mirror, or to look back over what we’ve done professionally (or personally) and see where that leads us or could lead us, because it might mean that we have to make changes.

I’m not sure where these thoughts this afternoon are leading me; one thing I know for certain, is that we need to take those “one day” dreams and goals that we have seriously. We need to learn to not shy away from them; we need to seriously explore where they might take us – and, more importantly, how we might achieve them.