Career

Dear team,

I am new, and would be grateful for some help with an Unintentional Model – I haven’t yet attempted an Intentional Model, but that is my aim!

This is what I have so far:

C: burnt out professionally (and personally) leading to unemployment (voluntary, to ‘recharge’)
T: This is a pattern
F: Grief
A: take time to resource (see friends, reconnect with activities that build me up), Analyse why I burnt out, Introspection, build a job description that will help me avoid a burnout, apply for advertised jobs (with no success)
R: ‘Fall’ into work that comes my way, which typically is out of my depth, and leads to more burnout.

For context, I have gone through periods of intense work & burnout for the past 25 yrs (since adolescence). I grew up moving between different coutries, cultures and languages – I expect the need to quickly adapt & immerse myself into new communities is a strong survival skill that I’ve translated professionally.

I became an accidental designer, I couldn’t afford to train formally but have learned on the job and worked cross-disciplinarily designing spaces for theatre first, then interiors, then gardens. I have a haphazard skill set. I have also throughout applied for more ‘stable professional’ jobs (which I aspire to). I have succeeded in so far as my work has been good and even if just barely I have kept myself afloat, however the cost of re-inventing myself was/is too high.

I have learnt from each experience and built new boundaries into the next job – so it’s a pattern in evolution maybe. =) Even so, I yearn to build in more long term relationships (professionally and in terms of subject knowledge) and have an opportunity now to move more intentionally, so I would be grateful for any insight.

 

Answer:

Good work on your unintentional model and your awareness around some patterns. In coaching, we use this as  information but never something that limits us. Starting today, you have every option in front of you that you want.

For your circumstance it needs to be facts only and nothing is subjective. Try writing down your exact employment situation today. For example C: I resigned from “x job” on “date”. Once you have your circumstance very neutral, then you can write down all the thoughts you have about it. There will be many. Each one brings up different emotions and that’s what you can plug into models.

Make sure that your action line matches up with your feeling line.  Sometime we do something called “jumping models” where there is another thought and feeling we are coming from in our action line.  This might be the case with yours. When you are feeling grief, what do you do or not do? What result does that create for you?

Look at your unintentional models again and bring them back to ask a coach. There’s no rush to get to intentional models yet. This is really important work to be doing. Once you can clearly see what’s happening, then you can start creating what you want moving forward.