What moves us

is often unseen.

What moves us is often unseen. A current beneath the surface moving us across water, a radio wave carrying a song we love to our ears, our hidden motivations nudging us along paths in our careers.

But what if we want to change direction? 

Well, if the current is moving us towards rocks, we can get oars out and row into clear water. If we don’t like the song, we change the station. 

And if we aren’t enjoying our job, we get a different kind of job. 

Sounds easy but it prompts the question: What other type of job would we enjoy? In my experience, there isn’t always an easy answer to this question, particularly if we haven’t questioned for a while why we've ended up where we have.

Changing course 

Changing course, particularly when we’re well into a career, is challenging. I know, I’ve seemingly done it a few times. I say seemingly because what I’ve discovered is that there were threads running through all of my job choices, they just weren’t always obvious to me (or others) at the time.

My skills paths

I started my career at a time when jobs became available that didn’t exist when I was at school because the opportunities created by technology didn’t exist then.  

It was challenging to prove ability for jobs I’d not been prepared for or to know if I’d enjoy a job that hadn’t existed previously. 

I would find or be offered positions that built on a particular area of my experience and knowledge - and the rest I had to develop through steep learning curves on the job. My curiosity led me to explore cutting edge ideas and technologies and the learning kept me engaged, letting me develop my skill sets in new and interesting ways.

Most of my roles didn’t obviously relate to what I received formal training for, which included a degree in Drama and Theatre Arts, with a focus on the Classics, the purpose of drama in society and naturalistic acting. Quick upskilling in web design and project management allowed me to move from jobs in TV to website design, and then onto educating university staff on best practices in eLearning and eAssessment, to open source tech development, to Open Badges, to skills discovery standards and blueprint development, to delivering leadership masterclasses… with some natural soap and cosmetics manufacturing and sales on the side.

Threads

So what links a drama degree with skills discovery standards and blueprint development? Or natural soap manufacturing with best practices in online learning? Or open source tech development with delivering human-centric leadership masterclasses? 

The threads that ran through and connected each of these roles weren’t obvious to me initially and I realised that the lack of nuanced insight to my motivations made the process of getting a new job often feel like it was somewhat outside of my control. 

If I could identify the unseen motivations nudging me towards certain jobs, I thought I could make more conscious choices about work I’d enjoy. 

I’ll explore some unusual inspiration I found for doing that in my next post, and tease out the threads linking points on my skills path in future posts.

We can’t harness what we aren’t aware of. 

If we don’t know there are oars in the boat, we could end up on the rocks. If we don’t know how to work the radio, we will struggle to change the station. If we don’t understand our motivations, we’ll miss opportunities to do work we’d enjoy. 

A note on the title: I had chosen the title for this post when a poem by one of my favourite poets popped up in my social media feed. I realised that unconsciously I’d chosen a line that features in A Seeming Stillness by

David Whyte

. It’s a shimmering poem and I’d highly recommend you check out David’s work if you’re looking for inspiration on going below the surface on a variety of topics.