Does your past equal your future?

Yesterday, we gave yet another Ideal Career workshop to a group of women who were motivated to discover and pursue their dream career.

Above are the two diagrams I used to illustrate a point: We all have to decide whether our past will equal our future.

When it comes to career management or job searching, most people make the mistake of just working on and looking at their resume. The resume IS the past. Working on the resume is like staring at the rear-view mirror. Sure, it's good to know where you've been, but it is CRITICAL to look at where you're going and where you WANT to go.

If the future is just a replication of the past, why live? Why work if it's just more of the same? It's in our human nature to want to learn and grow and realize our full potential. One author put it this way: "Life is to be understood backward and lived forward."

The diagram with the black windshield shows the case where a person is continually repeating the past and has no idea of what his/her future is like.

The other diagram shows a person who is beginning to question his/her life and where it is going. This is a good sort of questioning as it leads to discoveries about ourselves, our interests, goals and priorities in life.