What Color Is Your Parachute? (42 page)

Let’s do an inventory of all that you know, and then pick your favorite subjects.

In order for you to do this, it is helpful to fill out the following chart
here
;
you may first copy it onto a larger piece of paper, if you wish, in order to have more room to write.

Please note that this chart is asking you what subjects you know
anything
about, not whether you
like
the subject or not. (
Later
, you will ask yourself which of these you like or even
love
.) For now, the task facing you is merely
inventory
. That is a task similar to inventorying what clothes you’ve got in your closet, before you decide which ones to give
away. Only, here,
the closet is your head
, and you’re inventorying all the stuff that’s in
there
. Don’t try to evaluate your degree of mastery of a particular subject. Put down something you’ve only read a few articles about (
if it interests you
) side by side with a subject you studied for three semesters in school.

Throwaway comes later (
though, obviously, if there’s a subject you hate so much you can barely stand to write it down, then…don’t…write…it…down
).

Click
here
to view a PDF version of The Subjects Chart.

When you’re done, you may want to let this chart just sit around for a few days, to see if any other items occur to you. But when you’re sure you’ve listed all you want to, then draw the matrix below on a large sheet of paper, and sort the knowledges on the chart into these four boxes:

Click
here
to view a PDF version of Your Favorite Subjects Matrix.

Then, choose your three favorite knowledges, from any of these boxes. You want to pay particular attention to the knowledges you put in box 1 above. And next, those you put in box 2. Last of all, those in box 3.

Let us say it turns out your three favorite knowledges are gardening and carpentry in box 1, and your knowledge of psychiatry in box 2.

What you want to be able to do is to use all three expertises, not just one of them—if you possibly can.

So, put your three favorite knowledges on a series of overlapping circles, as follows:

Now, to figure out how to combine these three, imagine that each circle is a person; that is, in this case, Psychiatrist, Carpenter, and Gardener.

You ask yourself which person took the longest to get trained in their specialty. The answer, here, is the psychiatrist. The reason you ask yourself this question, is that the person with the longest training is most likely to have the largest overview of things. So, you go to see a psychiatrist, either at a private clinic or at a university or hospital. You ask for fifteen minutes of his or her time, and pay them if necessary.

Then you ask the psychiatrist if he or she knows how to combine psychiatry with
one
—just one, initially—of your other two favorite knowledges. Let’s say you choose gardening, here. “Doctor, do you know anyone who combines a knowledge of psychiatry with a knowledge of gardening or plants?”

Since I’m talking about a true story here, I can tell you what the psychiatrist said: “Yes, in working with catatonic patients, we often give them a plant to take care of, so they know there is something that is depending on them for its future, and its survival.”

“And how would I also employ a knowledge of carpentry?”

“Well, in building the planters, wouldn’t you?”

(Parenthetically, healers also use pets as they do plants. See
www.sniksnak.com/therapy.html
.)

This is the way you explore how to combine your three favorite knowledges, all at once, no matter what those three may be. The Internet can also be useful in this regard.

Put these three on your Knowledges petal of the Flower,
here
.

You are looking here for what you may think of as the basic building-blocks of your work. So, if you’re going to identify your dream job, and/or attempt a thorough career-change, you should begin by first of all identifying your functional, transferable skills. And while you may think you know what your best and favorite skills are, in most cases your self-knowledge could probably use a little work.

A weekend should do it! In a weekend, you can inventory your
past
sufficiently so that you have a good picture of the
kind
of work you would love to be doing
in the future
.
(You can, of course, stretch the inventory over a number of weeks, maybe doing an hour or two one night a week, if you prefer. It’s up to you as to how fast you do it.)

Many people just “freeze” when they hear the word “skills.”

It begins with high school job-hunters: “I haven’t really got any skills,” they say.

It continues with college students: “I’ve spent four years in college. I haven’t had time to pick up any skills.”

And it lasts through the middle years, especially when a person is thinking of changing his or her career: “I’ll have to go back to college, and get retrained, because otherwise I won’t have any skills in my new field.” Or: “Well, if I claim any skills, I’ll start at a very entry kind of level.”

All of this fright about the word “skills” is very common, and stems from a total misunderstanding of what the word means. A misunderstanding that is shared, we might add, by altogether too many employers, or human resources departments, and other so-called “vocational experts.”

By understanding the word, you will automatically put yourself way ahead of most job-hunters. And, especially if you are weighing a change of career, you can save yourself much waste of time on the adult folly called “I must go back to school.” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
maybe
you need some further schooling, but very often it is possible to make a dramatic career-change without any retraining. It all depends. And you won’t really
know
whether or not you need further schooling, until you have finished all the exercises in this section of the book.