Module 5 - You Are More Than A Job
Module 5 is when you will discover how your Professional YOU fits into your Whole YOU. The Whole YOU is about how you define success. You’ll think about where you want to live, the people you want to be around, the importance of your bank account and other factors that matter to you. Click on each section below to jump down the page. What Will Be Covered:
Complete the downloadable activity sheets available and use these as your journal throughout the Designing You modules. You can choose to download all activity sheets with the button below or choose to download them individually under each section.
Value in this Module:
Explore your broader values and life goals.
Integrate your professional mission with your larger goals to define your Whole YOU mission.
In Module 4, you developed your professional mission statement. If the Whole YOU were defined solely by your career, you could stop here; but few of us are defined by a paycheque.
It’s time to transform the Professional YOU into the Whole YOU. To do this, you will reflect on a very abstract (and contentious) concept: success. There’s no generic definition of success. It’s difficult to define because it’s unique to you and considers many factors in your life. Your definition of success is rooted in your experiences, your personality, your values, and your relationships, and it will continuously evolve with you.
Success is about understanding and juggling your values and priorities in life. When you think of success, what values do you think about?
Money? Family? Friends? Career? Wellness? Community? Social justice?
Reflecting on your values is a critical dimension of designing you, as your values guide the things in life that are important to you and filter out what aren’t. Your values tell you what’s right and wrong; they’re your moral compass. And because they are yours, there is no right or wrong answer when you’re asked what your values are.
REFLECTION 5.1
It is the Year 2100
Before we dig deep, we’re going to do a little time travelling and allow you to reflect on your definition of success. To envision your future, we need you to enter our Designing YOU time machine and fast-forward 80 or so years…
It’s somewhere around the year 2100 and your family is excited about your upcoming 100th birthday celebration. You’re going to be giving a speech in which you reflect on your life’s successes.
What has made you most proud?
Is it your family?
Is it your career accomplishments?
Did you change your world through creativity?
Did you change your world by making your friends and family laugh?
Did you change your world through the work you did in your church community?
Did you leave a tremendous amount of money to your children and the community?
Only you can reflect on what success means to you.
Like today, in 80 years from now people don’t want to sit through a long speech, so get to the point and keep it under 500 words. Reflect on 100 years and your proudest successes in life. Here’s a sample:
My First 100 Years
“As I reflect over the past 100 years of my life, I find that I am overwhelmed with pride, gratitude and of course, amazement. I am fortunate to have lived an inspired life alongside an incredibly supportive and loving partner, travelled to every continent in our beautiful world, surrounded myself with fulfilling relationships with family and friends, and, through my work, had a profound impact on my community.
I’m honoured to be considered a community builder and have devoted my life’s work to providing opportunities to as many people as I can. The ability to end my career as a respected teacher is a true blessing. The connections today with my past students, fellow colleagues and late mentors will be cherished to my dying days.
Throughout this journey, I could not have asked for a better co-pilot than my loving partner. Together we have raised a beautiful family, travelled the world, and placed our efforts, to the best of our abilities, toward bringing haves to those who have not. In the 75 years we’ve been in one another’s company, we have consistently challenged ourselves and our families, all while feeding our undying love for adventure, laughter, and of course, delicious food. We’re so fortunate now to live part-time here in Canada amongst our loved ones where we’re able to commit our undivided attention to their support and growth—and back in our second home, in France, when the blasted winter comes again, where we’re able to write and soak in the azure sea.
Today, on the centennial of my birth, I am humbled to say that I have lived a life with an abundance of love, inspiration, and growth—and for me that is success.
”
The point of writing your 100th birthday speech is to allow you to distance yourself from today and step back and look at life more holistically.
ACTIVITY 5.1
What do you Value?
The goal of this exercise is to build on your speech and explore your values further. To do this, review the list of statements below for you to score yourself on; remember, it’s important to be honest with yourself and to score what you really think today (as opposed to how you think others would want you to respond).
For these statements, score yourself on whether you agree with this statement using a scale of 1 to 5, with a 1 being “Never” agree with it and 5 being “Always” agree. Go slow and feel free to make changes as you work through the list. At the end, find your total for each factor.
Now that you’ve totaled up each success factor, let’s see what questions they raise.
Relationships (Factor A): What role do relationships play in your life? Are they central to you or are they secondary to other factors?
Health & Leisure (Factor B): How important is your leisure time and your physical and mental wellbeing to you? Would you trade this for other factors, such as professional or financial success?
Professional (Factor C): What role do professional, or career goals play in defining your success? Are they paramount to your view of success or are they simply a means to achieving goals that are more important?
Place (Factor D): How important is the city or region in which you live? For some, they could never see themselves moving away from their home; but for others, where they live is secondary to pursuing other opportunities in life.
Spiritual (Factor E): What role do spiritual factors play in your life? How may this priority influence your future life decisions?
Financial (Factor F): Are you a person with very expensive goals in life and will you do whatever you need to do to see them through?
Now reflect on the results of your assessment. What factor was the highest? Which was the lowest? What are some examples of how these factors influence your decisions today?
ACTIVITY 5.2
Whole YOU meets the Professional YOU
It’s time to test whether the Professional YOU is consistent with this definition of success. For example, if the Professional YOU requires you to move to New York City and work on Wall Street, does that conflict with your success factors of Place and Relationships? If the Professional YOU imagines you working for a non-profit in a developing country, does that conflict with your Financial or Place factors? If the Professional YOU draws you away from your mountain home, does that conflict with skiing as the key to your Health & Leisure?
As an exercise, create a table in your journal like the one that follows. For each success factor, record whether it’s “very important,” “important” or “not important” based on the assessment you just did. Then identify how the Professional YOU helps you achieve success for each factor. Finally, identify how the Professional YOU might conflict with each success factor.
Once you’ve filled in the table, it’s time to reflect. In your journal, consider the following scenarios:
Does the Professional YOU allow you to achieve your broader definition of success?
Or is it in such conflict with how you want to define success on your 100th birthday that you must go back to the exploration stage and look for another Professional YOU?
If the second point is your conclusion, don’t be disappointed! While you may feel like you’ve wasted a few weeks or even months pursuing a Professional YOU that didn’t match your view of success, many of your peers would’ve gone decades before realizing they had sacrificed most of the success factors in their life. It’s better that you try again now than lead a life of regret.
Designing you is difficult because it involves so many different and often moving parts. In the remainder of this guide, we focus a disproportionate amount of time on one part of your life—your professional life. In doing so, we aren’t suggesting that your success must be driven by the Professional YOU. Rather, we find that at the life stage of a young adult, professional success emerges as either an important input or an important output to other success factors. For example, if you define living in a ski town (“Place”) as your highest priority, this will have significant implications on your profession as a surfing instructor or an accountant. Similarly, if you define making a million dollars a year as your highest priority, it’ll narrow down the professional paths that’ll support this priority. Remember, recognizing how these different parts of the Whole YOU are interconnected is what separates a systems thinker from everyone else. This is particularly critical when you move forward defining your journey in Module 6.
ACTIVITY 5.3
Your 5-Year Mission
The final exercise in Module 5 is articulating the Whole YOU in a mission statement. A Whole YOU mission statement is core to product design because it offers a simple and concise description of your future product. This ensures that you are spending your precious limited resources (time and money) on a meaningful purpose. The Whole YOU mission statement is the litmus test for all future decisions. That is the power of a mission statement
Here’s the trick to crafting an effective Whole YOU mission statement: It shouldn’t be constrained by history and the status quo (nor your comfort zone and your current identity). A Whole YOU mission statement is about defining a new identity that will anchor the future Whole YOU. It’s a point on the horizon that provides you guidance and a destination. At this stage, you don't have to understand how to achieve your purpose. The Whole YOU mission statement simply provides guidance on how you should spend your limited time and money.
In Designing YOU, we suggest you focus on a 5-year mission. We have found that 5 years offers a guiding light on the horizon without being as far off as a 100th birthday party. A 5-year mission should incorporate all your success factors. Your 5-year mission should be an ambitious goal that is not constrained by the Current YOU. This is the time to dream big and think about the Whole YOU! To kick-start your thinking, here are some sample Whole YOU mission statements:
Sample 1:
““In 10 years, I will be a vice-president of sales for an NHL team and a respected leader in professional sports marketing. I will be a leader in my community and actively engaged in my commitment to youth sport. I will complete an Iron Man triathlon every year as a commitment to my health and wellness.” ”
Sample 2:
““My 5-year mission is being a medical doctor, conducting cutting-edge research, and helping improve the lives of others around the country, and around the world. I will complete multiple residencies around the world and learn from the leading experts on health issues. I will form deep relationships with colleagues, have empathy for patients and always keep the greater good as my guiding light.””
Sample 3:
““In 10 years, I will be the CEO of a software company. Against all odds, I will do this while spending most nights with my kids and continue to deepen my relationship with my spouse. I will pursue an MBA, which is critical to my professional goal, and stay active to manage stress and my health. I understand that my personal friendships might have to take a backseat for a while to achieve my 5-year mission, but I’m willing to sacrifice some financial success to achieve success in my relationships.” ”
To develop your 5-year mission statement, build it from the bottom up. Start by completing mini mission statements for each of your success factors as illustrated in the table below, which you can replicate in your journal. Your 5-year mission is like a house of cards. When the cards/success factors are aligned it’s remarkable, but if you disrupt one card, you risk the integrity of the entire house.
Since changing one card can completely alter the house, we encourage you to map out at least three different mini mission statements for each success factor based on three distinct “what if” scenarios in the table below. The complexity of your definition of success means there are several possible paths to achieving your 5-year mission.
When you’re considering the possibilities for your “what ifs,” be aspirational. For example, “what if” in one of your scenarios you stay in your hometown but in another scenario, you move to Australia? How could this ripple across your plan? “What if” in one of your scenarios you pursue your passion for social justice and join a non-profit agency, but in another scenario, you follow this passion in your leisure and volunteer time?
The system-wide implications of one “what if” may be massive or small, but through “what if” planning you can start to understand life’s trade-offs as you frame these mini purposes.
As part of the “what if” reflection, engage your design team for input. Everyone on your team has made decisions in life based on what might happen if they took (or avoided) a certain path. This is an opportunity to benefit from their hindsight.
Following consultation and reflection, it’s time to choose which scenario energizes you. At the end of the day, only you can choose which path to take. Following a journey map is important, just be open to the fact that there will be off-ramps worth exploring as you discover the world personally and professionally.
The next step is to transform these individual success factors into a preliminary 5-year mission statement around 200 words long. This Whole YOU mission statement should be aspirational in tone and reflect what you want to become in 5 years. It’s a critical guiding light for the Whole YOU that is the ultimate outcome of Designing YOU. This 5-year Whole YOU mission statement gives shape and direction to your future and your future identity. It’ll also act as a yardstick to measure your progress and allow you to reflect on your identity.
Finally, your 5-year mission evolves with you. Five years is a long time and during this time the world will change and so will you. For this reason, consider your 5-year mission statement as only a hypothesis that you keep testing and refining.
The final stage in the 5-year mission journey is to go “live” with your preliminary 5-year mission statement by discussing it with your design team. If you aren’t comfortable with sharing your 5-year mission statement, it’s probably because you’re not fully comfortable with it. Sharing and reflecting is a critical aspect of this journey. You’ll go through multiple revisions and refinements of your 5-year mission statement. Once you’re confident in it, it’s time to go to Module 6, where we focus on getting you from where you are now to where you want to go tomorrow.
