Original image by Charlie Mackesy - https://www.charliemackesy.com/
The Next Chapter by Sandy Halpin
I’ve come to think about life and career as a series of chapters, because this approach allows me to be more creative, more full of possibilities, more adventurous and more excited about what lies ahead. It allows me to take what I want from my past to move into the future. I can unburden what no longer serves me and move forward with what does.
Let me break it down…
Traditionally, many of us have thought about life in stages - big chunks of life that could span a generation or more. Think infant/toddler, school, young adult, parenthood, middle aged, old. Early career, mid-career, pre-retirement and retired run in a loose parallel with the latter 4 stages of life.
The challenge with that structure, particularly post school, is that there’s an awful lot of pressure to ‘get it right’. If what happens doesn’t go to plan, or if you don’t have a plan, there’s often a sense of failure associated with it and a sense of doom about how to get it right for the remaining 1 or 2 stages of life.
P R E S S U R E
S T R E S S
So instead I think of life as a series of 5-7 year chapters, each one giving me the opportunity to try something new, build to mastery, plan the next stage and move on.
There are so many things I love about this concept…
1. If I think of my career as a series of 5yr chapters, I get a minimum of 9 chapters in my working life (assuming that’s 20 - 65). That’s a lot of opportunities! And as I approach 50, it means I still have a minimum of 3 career chapters left, and who knows how many life chapters!
2. The chapters don’t have to be linear - meaning they don’t have to be direct progression from one thing to the next. Ok, yes, the parenthood part is linear - but the career part doesn’t have to be.
3. The chapters shouldn’t be the same! Each chapter new characters appear, some leave and others become more or less important - to that chapter. The same goes for locations, adventures, work, skills, experience, story lines.
4. The chapters need a common thread - the main character. That’s me in my story and you in yours. It’s a reminder that this is about our own story, not that of others. Others are with us on the ride and some chapters may feature others in them (just as we feature in the stories of others), at times more than the main character, but ultimately it is about the main character.
5. When a chapter is being written, it builds to the next chapter, but isn’t responsible for every other chapter that comes after it. That gives us the opportunity to think differently about what we’re doing right now and about making our next choices. It’s a part of the story, but it’s not the end.
6. Some chapters, taken alone, make no sense! In the end, however, they do. Their purpose and intent emerges as other chapters are written and the experiences and wisdom from the those chapters inform the characters and choices made.
In reality, some of those chapters are 2 years (or less), others may be more.
What this approach does is allow us to think about our choices from a new perspective. A perspective that looks at the next step; the next choice in a context of possibility, opportunity and growth. It allows us to think about what’s important now as well as what’s important in the future - not one or the other. It’s a less pressured perspective than the one that looks at choice in terms of the “rest of my life”.
This approach is especially useful when you’re at a crossroad. When you don’t know what to do, the best thing to do is to take a ‘next step’. That will start the next chapter, the next paragraph, or next plot line… and if you don’t like it, write a different next step.
If you’d like to know more, get in touch!