That One Piece of Paper: Step 6

 

Step five is all about where I would want to live and work. That particular question is one that needs to be answered as a family, and in order to give us more time to do the exercise, I decided to skip ahead to something that was easy to finish.

Step six is all about your place in the world. It’s about why you’re here. It’s everything existential boiled down into a simple ranking exercise. The question posed says, “What goals or purposes would you most enjoy setting your energies to?”

The book makes an interesting point that we all have our own talents, gifts, and skills. However, it’s a different question as to what we want to accomplish with those skills. Do you use your powers for good? Or evil? (Of course, that’s a matter of perspective.) The book says, “[Your Skills] can be made to serve any goal or value you choose.”

What values do you have in your life? What do you want “the broad outcome of your life” to be? “What kind of footprint do you want to leave on this Earth, after your journey is done?”

The author lists nine, which I think is a pretty complete list:

• Mind. When you are gone, do you want there to be more knowledge, truth, or clarity in the world, because you were here? If so, knowledge, truth, or clarity concerning what, in particular?
• Body. Do you want there to be more fitness? Less physical suffering (i.e. more feeding of the hungry, more clothing of the poor, etc.)? What particular issue concerning the human body do you want to work on?
• Eyes and other senses. Do you want there to be more beauty in the world? What kind of beauty?
• Heart. Do you want there to be more love and compassion in the world?
• The Will or Conscience. When you are gone, do you want there to be more morality, more justice, more righteousness, more honesty in the world, because you were here?
• The Human Spirit. Do you want there to be more spirituality in the world, more love for the human family in all its diversity?
• Entertainment. Do you want to be part of lightening people’s loads, giving perspective, more laughter, and joy? What kind of entertainment?
• Possessions. Is the often false love of possessions your  major concern?
• The Earth. Is the planet on which we stand your major concern? When you are gone, do you want there to be more protection of this fragile planet?

The process to sort them is the same that was used in the working conditions exercise — again, since the chart CLEARLY says copyrighted on it, I’m not going to show the chart or explain the process. But this is how my list turned out:

1. Will/Conscience. I want there to be more justice. More righting of wrongs — there is no reason why someone should be hungry when there is enough.
2. Heart. I want there to be more love, compassion, and acceptance. I think this really goes hand-in-hand with justice above.
3. The Earth. I am convinced that climate change has already occurred, is occurring, and will continue to occur. I think that we are definitely past peak oil. We need to learn to adapt, and pull back. This is important.
4. Mind. I want there to be more truth, knowledge, and clarity. This goes with my analytical side.
5. Spirit. I want there to be more love for the human family. I care less about people worshiping God, and more about people doing the first two things on the list.
6. Entertainment. I want there to be laughter and joy.
7. Eyes/Senses. Beauty is important, sure.
8. Possessions. I want people to be simpler (it’s one of my style statement words), and content with enough, but I dont’ think it’s a major concern.
9. Body. While I care for suffering to end, I think the real task is justice. And while I think caring for our bodies is important, it’s not the broad goal of my life.

The instructions say to put your top three, in your own words, in a way that makes sense to you on your flower. Here’s mine.

 

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That One Piece of Paper: Step 4

Step 4 is called, “What Level (Of Responsibility) do you Most enjoy working at, and at what salary?”

The instructions say:

Salary is something you must think out ahead of time, when you’re contemplating your ideal job or career. Level goes hand in hand with salary, of course.

1. The first question here is at what level you would like to work, in your ideal job? Level is a matter of how much responsibility you want, in an organization:

• Boss or CEO (This may mean you’ll have to form your own business)
• Manager or someone under the boss who carries out orders
• The head of a team
• A member of a team of equal
• One who works in tandem with one other partner
• One who works alone, either as an employee or as a consultant to an organization, or as a one-person business

Enter a two- or three-word summary of your answer, on the Level of Responsibility and Salary petal of your Flower Diagram.

This is easy. Having already noted that working by myself or with one other (occasionally) was miserable enough to end up on my working conditions list, the bottom two options are out. My summary on my flower will be: Manager, team leader, and/or a member of a team of equals.

However, salary is harder.

2. The second question here is what salary would you like to be aiming for?

Here you have to think in terms of minimum or maximum. Minimum is what you would need to make, if you were just barely “getting by.” And you need to know this before you go in for a job interview with anyone (or before you form your own business, and need to know how much profit you must make, just to survive).

Maximum could be any astronomical figure you can think of, but it is more useful here to put down the salary you realistically think you could make, with your present competency and experience, were you working for a real, but generous boss. (If this maximum figure is still depressingly low, then put down the salary you would like to be making five years from now.)

Make out a detailed outline of your estimated expenses now, listing what you need monthly […].

I could type you the list from the book, but that seems a little boring to me, and in my opinion, it wasn’t very complete. I like the list I found here after a little Google digging: Free Sample Monthly Budget Template. I wouldn’t download anything from that site, but I like the list.

I pulled out our YNAB4 budget, I asked Tim to pull out his pay stub, and I opened up our electronic bill pay and accounts to figure out how much we’ve been spending in each category, and filled out my spread sheet.

(Apologies with not sharing the numbers, but I am sensitive to potential comparisons.)

 

Next steps:

Multiply the total amount you need each month by 12, to get the yearly figure. Divide the yearly figure by 2000, and you will be reasonably near the minimum hourly wage that you need. […]

Parenthetically, you may want to prepare two different versions of the above budget: one with the expense you’d ideally like to make, and the other a minimum budget, which will give you what you are looking for, here: the floor, below which you simply cannot go.

My income from this career will be the second income in my family. We live comfortably on my partner’s income, and don’t have any interest in having more stuff, or “increasing” our standard of living (though, my knowledge of economics says that is inevitable). Having a small child, we’re going to incur the expense of child care when I work, which is my major concern with salary. And, it would be nice to lower our debt load, and save for emergencies, vacations, and retirement.

I need to work for personal security reasons — Working now will make sure that I have a good retirement income, either from savings or social security. Working is important, in case of the contingency that my husband dies, because entering the job market is difficult, especially after a long break. Also, knowing these numbers is critically important to valuing my own work. I deserve a salary for skilled, educated and qualified workers.

I decided, using math, and considering above, that my contribution salary would need to be approximately $40,000 per year at the low end. Using a little bit of research (on salary.com and cbsalary.com), I found that the upper quartile of people with “Program Assistant” jobs (which is a title I could have) is probably about $75,000.

[Aside: This is so privileged! I’m talking about making four to seven times the poverty level for one person ON TOP of the salary of my partner. Not only is it a privilege to know how much money you’re going to make in a year (i.e. not have to fight for hours), this is before/including benefits like paid vacation and insurance. We so need to put policies in place for the women who cannot make this choice between staying home and working, because working is an economic necessity.]

Finally, the book talks about an optional exercise in which you think about other rewards, besides money, that you hope for — nontangibles that can’t be converted to cash. These include: Adventure, popularity, intellectual stimulations from the other workers there, a chance to be creative, etc.

Adventure is one of my family values, so I’m going to add that to my flower. Intellectual stimulation from the other workers sounds like a nice benefit. And a chance to help others is important to me.
Now my flower looks like this:

That One Piece of Paper: Step 3

 

Look, my one piece of paper is filling out! Step 3 is entitled, “What working conditions do you like best, because they enable you to do your best work?”

Just an observation before we get into the nitty-gritty. Most of my concerns about the working environment have to do with relationships — both between managers and employees, and also between coworkers. I think this has a lot to do with my work history. But a few physical considerations did appear, like needing to eat whenever I need to, and also ergonomics generally.

The book suggests a chart with four columns. In the first column, you list all the jobs you’ve ever had. In the second column, you list all the distasteful working conditions in those jobs. Here is my list:

 

I decided to eliminate the things I couldn’t control (like rude customers), and tried to come up with broad themes for others (like the idea of a distrusting and disrespectful boss instead of each smaller idea), and listed ten broad distasteful working conditions to prioritize. What Color is Your Parachute has a great way to help you prioritize those ten items, but it very clearly says “copyrighted” on it, so I’m going to skip showing you that step.

After prioritizing, I now have this list:

The last step to identifying the working conditions that allow you to do your best work is to come up with opposites for the distasteful list. Mine looked like this:

Which I further simplified on my “That One Piece of Paper” flower:

I’m actually really excited about this list, because it is going to help me with part of interviewing that I always struggled with. I never know what questions to ask about the company/organization, but now I have some idea. I’m going to ask, “Tell me about the opportunities that your employees have to enrich themselves,” and “What kind of time do your supervisors invest in management and leadership?” Or, “How accessible is your supervisor in this organization?” It also gives me some idea of what to ask during informational interviews at companies or organizations I’m interested in working at. “Please be as honest as you can, I won’t repeat this. Can you trust your coworkers?”

Yay! I am becoming an expert in my own best work, which was one of my goals for the summer.

(Reward time! Uh. Maybe a work blouse? I need to get shopping! Even better, I have PERMISSION to shop for things. :D)

 

That One Piece of Paper: Step 2

 

Step 2 for creating That One Piece of Paper is called “What are your preferred People-Environments that you are most like to work with, or serve and help?” The basic idea is to figure out what kind of people you want to be surrounded by.

What Color is Your Parachute? suggests a scientific categorization and quiz developed by Dr. John L. Holland to describe six different people-environments. These environments are:

Realistic: People who have an athletic or mechanical ability, prefer to work with machines, objects, tools, plants or animals and prefer to be outdoors.
Investigative: People who like to observe, learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate, or solve problems.
Artistic: People who have artistic, innovative, or intuitional abilities and like to work in unstructured settings, using their imagination and creativity.
Social: People who like to work with people — to inform, enlighten, help, train, develop or cure them, or are skilled with words.
Enterprising: People who like to work with people — influencing, persuading, or performing or leading or managing for organizational goals or economic gain.
Conventional: People who like to work with data, have clerical or numerical ability, carrying things out in detail, or following through on others’ instructions.

The author of What Color is Your Parachute put together an exercise that helps people decide what group of people they would like to be with. The book reads:

Below is an aerial view of a room in which a party is taking place. At this party, people with the same or similar interest have (for some reason) all gathered in the same corner of the room.

I redrew it here:

1) Which corner of the room would you instinctively be drawn to, as the group of people you would most enjoy being with for the longest time? (Leave aside any question of shyness, or whether you would have to talk to them.) Write down the letter for that corner.
2) After fifteen minutes, everyone in the corner you have chosen leaves for another party crosstown, except you. Of the groups that still remain now, which corner or group would you be drawn to the most, as the people you would most enjoy being with for the longest time? Write down the letter for that corner.
3) After fifteen minutes, this group too leaves for another party, except you. Of the corners and groups which remain now, which one would you most enjoy being with for the longest time? Write down the letter for that corner.
The three letters you just chose, in the three steps, are called your “Holland Code.”

I have a tendency to cheat on activities like these, and put how I would LIKE to be instead of how I actually am. So, I skipped to using what the internet has to offer based on the suggestions in the book. I took two tests. One was at http://www.self-directed-search.com/, which cost $4.95 and one was at http://careerkey.org/asp/your_personality/take_test.asp, which cost $9.95.

My results for Self-Directed Search looked like this:
R = 10, I = 25, A = 21, S = 37, E = 26, C = 26

My results for the Career Key test looked like this:
Artistic = 9
Conventional = 6
Enterprising = 3
Investigative = 5
Realistic = 5
Social = 16

It was clear, by far and away, that my first letter is “S” for social. But after that, all the scores bunch up. In fact, one of the explanation of scores for SDS said that a difference of less than 8 was negligible. (An aside: Barbara Sher says that her Scanners tend to have high scores in most categories on most aptitude tests. Confirmation bias?)

So I thought about it. And I ended up deciding that at the party, I would definitely like to hang out with the Social crowd. I like helping people. And then, I decided that I would probably like to hang out with the Investigative crowd. I like learning new things and solving problems. And finally, to be honest, I probably would like to hang out with the conventional crowd. I like things that are clear cut and having specific instructions. I put that Artistic is probably a close fourth, considering that one was one I WANTED to put in, perhaps as the second one, and that I do think of myself as a creative.

Now my party looked like this:

Which resulted in writing the following “temporary statement” on my flower: I would like a job or career best if I were surrounded by people who like to work with people and help them (S), like to investigate and analyze things (I), and who work with data and details and instructions (C). (And sometimes people who use imagination and creativity (A).)

Now my flower, my “One Piece of Paper” looks like this:

(I haven’t picked out my reward yet. But I will soon! I’m thinking a shirt for more casual wear.)

 

That One Piece of Paper: Step Zero

I’ll have to admit that before I wrote up the SMARTER goals for this, I had already done most of Step 0 and some of Step 1. I find that I often start projects with the best of intentions, but without putting a SMARTER list together and holding myself accountable, I rarely follow through. But blogging about this is definitely helping me to make sure I will finish all these steps.

I think that putting these exercises onto my blog from What Color is Your Parachute? is permissible because of the concept of “Each One, Teach One” that the book ends on — it says that because not everyone has these skills, it’s important that we who know about them pass them on. If I get a cease and desist letter, I’ll take down the exercises but I think my answers are mine to share.

The first activity is “Who Are You?”

1. Take ten sheets of blank paper. Write, at the top of each one, just these three words: Who Am I?
2. Then write, on each sheet in turn, just one answer to that question. And only one.
3. When you’re done, go back over all ten sheets and expand now upon what you have written on each sheet. Looking at each answer, write it below, why you said that, and what turns you on about that answer.
4. When finished with all ten sheets, go back over them and arrange them in order of priority. That is, which identity is the most important to you? That page goes on top. Then, which is next? That goes immediately underneath the top one. Continue arranging the rest of the sheets in order, until what you think is your least important identity is at the bottom of the pile.
5. Finally, go back over the ten sheets, in order, and look particularly at your answer on each sheet to What turns me on about this? See if there are any common denominators, or themes, among the ten answer you gave. If so, jot them down on a separate piece of paper. Viola! You have begun to put your finger on some things that your dream job or career, vocation, mission, or whatever, needs to give you if you are to feel truly excited, fulfilled, useful, effective, and operating at the height of your powers.

I modified slightly. I used old, out-of-date business cards that I had laying around my internship. This kept the project much more tactile for me, and helped me think I wasn’t wasting paper. But that was about the extent of the modifying.

Who am I? Here’s my top ten list & what turns me on about them:

1. A woman. I am a person! My body is amazing. The cycles, the way I can be active, the ability to gestate and breastfeed and give birth. My nurturing side, my vulnerable side; my dark, my light; my “feminine genius.”

2. An intimate partner. The safety, the companionship. Working as a team. Backing each other up. Friendship. Enjoying the same things. Having someone accept me for who I am.

3. A mother. A chance to teach her. To learn how to be positive and encouraging. To re-do things for the first time. Seeing beauty and wonder in her eyes. Knowing I am important to her.

4. A writer. A chance to create meaning. To create connection. To know about humanity more deeply. It is part of my connection talent.

5. A fangirl/critic (I couldn’t come up with a good one word for this.) I find joy in the creation of others, and also think about what meaning that creation puts forward. The dialogue of culture, the way it is an area of both protest and oppression.

6. A student. Formal studenthood has a goal, a deadline, an arbiter of right and wrong. But more broadly, this is an acknowledgement that there is much to learn from other human beings, my daughter, my partner. I like to reflect and assess and improve. I like to fail and try again.

7. A researcher. There is knowledge out there that needs to be found, understood and interpreted. Finding out the unknown. The joy of discovery, of putting together the puzzle pieces.

8. A Christian. The social justice. The movement towards a kingdom on earth, thy will as in Heaven.

9. An activist seeking justice. Because making the world a better place, through influence and policy and enforcement/administration is the key to meaningful work for me. Because we NEED change.

10. A healer. Tikkam Olam — I am doing the work of repairing the world.

The common denominators seem to be this:

• the creation of meaning (writer, fangirl/critic, researcher, healer)
• the want of or forging of connections with others (partner, mother, writing, fangirl/critic, Christian, healer)
• wanting to be present and mindful and joyful where I am (woman, partner, mother)
• wanting to make the world a better place (writer, fangirl/critic, researcher, christian, activist, healer)
• being willing to fail and try again (mother, writer, student activist, healer)
• creation and collection of knowledge (writer, student, researcher)
• want of structure (student, Christian)

This is the page that’s going in my “permanent” file that will become my One Piece of Paper:

This doesn’t help me figure out how to network or search for the right job for me. It only has broad principles. Time to keep going!

What does your top ten list look like?

( PS: I’m rewarding myself with a new dress for my internship. It’s going to be this wrap dress in purple!)

#reverb10 Day 5: Let Go

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley; reverb10.com)

In the early days of the new year, I had something akin to a panic attack — my anxiety spiked to near epic levels, and I was filled with dread and indecision for the new year. I hadn’t reflected and planned as #reverb10 seems to be allowing me to do, and so I was driving myself crazy trying to do everything, be everything, be independent and part of a community, to figure out how everything goes together.
I filled up the white board in our office with everything that was on my mind:

The pressure I was putting myself under ended up with me in counseling, talking to a woman I didn’t quite like, but was good enough. At one of the first meetings with her, she said to me, “It seems like you’re a perfectionist.”

What?

You see, I had spent some time fighting perfectionism already — one of my personal philosophies was that perfect is the enemy of good, perfect is the enemy of done, and perfect was not something to be striving for. I didn’t want to perfect my writing in this sense, and I had given up being a perfect housekeeper, and forcing Tim to make it so that together we would be perfect housekeepers.

But still, as Laurie the not-so-great therapist pointed out to me, I was expecting a lot out of myself. I was expecting to get up the same time every day, despite being depressed. I was expecting myself to be perfectly efficient at work, despite the fact that I was getting good reviews and everyone goofs off a little, I was expecting myself to regiment my free time and never relax and always be achieving…

So, one thing that I have let go of is perfectionism in 2010. It isn’t a perfect process, but it is a process of doing exactly what I don’t want to do (overloading my schedule, thinking I have to do it all) and then slowly backing down from it (Promised to do a book drive, but don’t stress about writing a novel.) and providing self care (Buy yourself the clothes you want. Relax in the evening).

I don’t want to do it all, anymore, despite the fact that there is a lot that still is worth doing. I want to do what I can. One of my resolutions for 2010 was to declutter our home. Rather than do a half hour each day, I try to do one project in about a 4 hour block, from identifying the clutter to buying the containers to organize, to putting everything back together. It’s certainly not finished, but making it a goal, and continually persuing it — Tim and I have accomplished a lot this year. Perfectionism would demand I be angry or sad that I didn’t do it in the first three months of the year that I wanted, or that I haven’t finished by the end of the year, but when it comes down to it? I have done a lot.

I’ve tried, slowly, to get rid of perfectionism. It isn’t perfect — and if it were, it would defeat the point.

Maybe We Got Off on the Wrong Foot, part 1

Dear Blog:

I am thinking that maybe we got off on the wrong foot. I am thinking that I wanted to contribute something new and awesome to the blogosphere, that I wanted to be profound and maybe even (someday) start a little side business with my blog, or even promote myself as a writer if I ever got a book published. In short, I am thinking that I perhaps over-thought this blog. I got ahead of myself at the same time that I was trying to start with the basics.

The basics are figuring out what your passion is, who your audience is, and how you want to reach them.

I first thought that maybe this could be a marriage blog. But I didn’t want to make it an advice blog, like Simple Marriage or Project Happily Ever After. I’ve been married all of 8 months, and I didn’t want to offer advice. I thought I could offer a perspective on marriage for newly married couples, who were wondering if they were “doing it right” — a perspective about fights and resolutions and working to make a household work. I thought I could offer a perspective about making (or at least striving to make) a feminist marriage, one where equality is a highly held value, and that we submit to each other, not just wife to husband.

I didn’t think I could write a political blog. Even though I have a degree in Social Relations, I have a very complicated relationship with politics and policy. I love policy, which I would define as the laws we make, how we carry them out, and how it effects people. I hate politics, which I would describe as the process of cooperation and friction that mutates good policy and worsens bad policy. I didn’t want to commit to writing about politics, for all that I love writing and thinking about policy.

I already have a personal blog, one that I have been writing in for nearly 10 years. I do not need to rant about personal things on this blog — I didn’t need to post about the fraternity talking about baby names, I do not need to discuss my conflict with my mom with the wider internet. I have a place for that kind of purely personal, “This is what I ate for breakfast” kind of stuff.

I thought about maybe doing a consumer blog — even though I dislike consumerism. A sort of frugality blog, where I talked about decluttering, and living simply, and work-life balance. Maybe I would join the compact, maybe I would become like The Non-Consumer Advocate. Marriage comes back into the picture here, again, because I share my household, and therefore my decisions to decomercialize, declutter, be frugal — they effect other people.

A cooking blog is out; I love to cook, but it isn’t a passion.

I thought about making a blog on philosophy, talking about why I think that stories are so essential to who we are as people. Related to this, I thought that maybe I could blog about religion, too, talking about my question to come to grips with the idea of God or the lack thereof, about the intersections of my Catholicism and my feminism, about my search for community.

I thought I would write a blog about stories of things that happen to me. I thought that maybe Tim could write some of the posts, thereby going back to the Marriage Blog idea. It’s why I posted the personal stories. So, while I have a strong voice — I am not sure it is a particularly unique voice. I’m no Dooce, I’m not the next great humorist. And while I would love to be writing the blog-equivalent of This American Life, part of the beauty of TAL is that it has a diversity of voices. I could maybe get up to two, if I included Tim — and more, if I started teaching my theoretical infants how to write.

So, my dear blog, what are you going to be? That’s a long, complicated list of all the things that you aren’t — but definitions are always better if they’re framed in the positive rather than the negative.

So, I’ll write about my passions. That is the first step to a successful blog, a successful business, right? Figure out what you can offer the world. From there, blog, we’ll figure out how we can do it together.

With all my love, and lots of luck,

Kate

Hello, World.

My name is Kate. I’m a 23-year-old white woman living in Michigan, working in the nonprofit sector. I’m a college graduate with a BA in Social Relations and Policy. I’m married, and have been for about 7 months now. If there is anything that I can say about who I am, to the core of my being, it is this: I am a writer, and I am an activist.

But I’m a writer in search of a story. And I am an activist in search of a cause. I am striving to be a part of something much bigger and larger than I am. I am on a journey, a pilgrimage, and this blog is the story of that pilgrimage.

Where I’m Going

When I was in middle school I wrote this in a notebook:

Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Our lives have a birth, a life, and a death. But, did you ever notice, while we live our lives in a straight line, our story comes to us muddled and anything but straight? I guess this is an autobiography, but I won’t start in the obvious place.

The story I was writing in middle school was the story of one of the many cross-country moves I endured as a military child. But the sentiment feels fresh and real to this blog: Our stories are muddled and anything but straight. They come to us in fits and starts, and sometimes while we’re in the middle of something, we don’t understand the significance. Sometimes we look for help, for sign-posts, for mentors. Sometimes we’re just stuck.

Right now, I am very stuck.

I am sorry if my little introduction up there gave you the appearance of a young adult with it all together. I’m not. I am a writer without a story. I’m an activist without a cause! I’m a wife, my husband’s partner, but am I doing this right? I’m legally an adult, but what does the mean? I’m a daughter, my parent’s adult child, but what rights and responsibilities does that entitle me? What if I want to become a parent? I’m a cradle Roman Catholic, but I’m attracted to all sorts of different expressions of belief and spirituality. I am finding fulfillment working in non-profits, but I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was a very young girl — so what is my real calling?

And why am I stuck?

In Conclusion

This blog is self-exploration. I’m a type-A personality, searching for meaning. It’s going to be cataloged.

This blog is the self-exploration of a 23-year-old woman, and will contain the following: personal stories, book reviews and reactions, philosophical meanderings, research, infomercial-like “It worked for me!” statements, and a thorough bibliography of the material referenced and recommended.