Loss of Dreams? Design New Dreams!
Has your dream job dissolved?
Has your dream of finding a new job in your field become fainter with each passing day?
Has your resiliency to live your dream been weakened by the economic crisis?
It’s time to design new dreams. To envision how you can take what you do have—skills, talents, commitment—and take advantage of new opportunities.
The first step in doing that is to mourn your loss of dreams. I recently picked up a book I read a few years ago, Ted Bowman’s, Loss of Dreams: A Special Kind of Grief, because it articulates what I’ve been feeling. What I thought was there simply isn’t. Something intangible has been taken away. The dream of the future I had constructed for myself is gone.
Have you experienced a loss of dreams?
Think about it: job loss. That’s a loss not just of income. It’s a loss of a place to go each day, to continue relationships with colleagues you’ve grown to know—and hopefully—enjoy being with during the work day. It’s a loss of self-esteem. Now when you are asked what you do for a living, do you say, “In transition,” and feel a loss of identification with an employer or location where you worked. It’s loss of the potential you may have dreamed about at the company, that move up to a leadership role that gave you more responsibility but also a bigger title and lots of challenging projects you knew you could manage.
Loss of dreams is real. Acknowledge your loss, mourn your loss, grieve for the loss of what you had.
Now it’s time for the second step: to design new dreams. Don’t give up hope or faith in realizing your dreams. Just put them in perspective, rearrange priorities, or readjust your attitude. That’s right. An attitude adjustment. What you said you would never do again, just might be your solution to success.
My ego told me that I didn’t want to be a secretary or even a temporary secretary. I had a master’s degree and didn’t want to sit at a desk answering phones for someone else. Yet, many times when my financial situation told me I had to get a job, being a temporary secretary was a successful way to earn income—and more!
Temping helped me survive recessions and tough financial times, learn about business, and understand the nuances of leadership. The longest I ever temped—or worked for one company—was from 1989 to 1994. That’s when I sat at the right hands of the gods of Wall Street within the quiet giant of global finance, Lazard Freres & Co.
My hourly rate paid the bills, overtime helped pay my mortgage, and a bonus the last two years I was there validated the extra effort I put into each assignment at the firm.
The flexibility of temping also worked to give me time to design new dreams. “Temp by day, professor at night!” a permanent secretary called me. And I was.
During one long-term assignment at Lazard, I took every Tuesday off to teach a college course at the School of New Resources in the South Bronx. Two evenings a week, I taught “Public Relations,” and “Business Math,” at New York City Technical College, and also writing for Continuing and Professional Studies at Baruch College. Both schools are part of the City University of New York (CUNY).
It was a few months after I started temping at Lazard that I formulated part of my dream career: to train leaders how to be more effective. Like a student at the business school I could afford, I made lists of effective and ineffective behaviors that leaders demonstrated, devised my own 360 assessments of how partners performed, and, by moving around from department to department, achieved an understanding of organizational behavior.
Today, I’m an Adjunct Instructor teaching “Employee Development and Training,” for Human Resources majors in the Management Department at the Zicklin School of Business, part of Baruch College. My company, Leadership Training Room, helps leaders level their playing fields of obstacles blocking optimum performance and career advancement with coaching and consulting services. And I write level playing field special reports to educate professionals with ways to enhance their competencies.
I love what I do. I can’t say that I loved every day of temping. What I can say is that my attitude adjustment that led to and kept me temping, helped me survive so that today I can thrive.
When designing your new dreams, make certain that your attitude toward what you won’t do doesn’t keep you from doing something that will foster your career development.