Regardless of how you approach this evaluation, you will want to adopt some type of standard measure that you can use throughout your career. Unlike the organizational snapshot assessment of your skills and attributes, this process should launch you into a mode of continuous evaluation. During the searching period, you will be processing an unusually large amount of information and getting to know yourself on a deep level. It is therefore a good idea to practice and evaluate these exercises on a daily basis; but at a very minimum, you should do them at least once a week, and keep track of the shifts that occur as time goes by. What will emerge is a clearer picture of how best to apply your core skills in a self-directed manner.
Assessing Your Attributes and Capabilities
Divide a piece of paper into two columns and list on one side your attributes-those things that come naturally to you and which you like to do-and on the other side your capabilities- the skills that you have acquired. Do not restrict the items on these lists to attributes and capabilities employed in work situations, but rather broaden it to include your entire life. We are all born with certain inherent attributes that we do not always recognize as having value and thus may have never applied them in our work lives. After he took early retirement from Xerox, Bob Kane identified the deep desire to serve others that had been instilled in him from his early Jesuit training. "After a mix of community assignments and volunteer work," says Kane, "I recognized my deep desire to serve mankind." He combined his natural attribute of wanting to serve mankind with his business capabilities, and took on an assignment in the Third World for the International Executive Services Corps.
Over the course of a lifetime, we acquire certain capabilities that make us "expert" in certain areas, but we may not necessarily have taken advantage of all of these attributes. The result of Bob Kane's search was a better attribute-capability match that offered him greater personal fulfillment than he initially had after early retirement.
Perhaps the most important part of this exercise is to focus considerable attention on those areas that you have underutilized or never employed in a formal work situation, as these attributes and capabilities often yield fresh clues as to the direction your career could take. As we saw with Manny Elkind, after working in production and manufacturing at Polaroid for the majority of his career and making only limited use of his skills as a teacher, his new business sprang from a decision to follow, as he put it:
My own instinct about where my satisfaction was. That's when I changed careers and in effect made my avocation my vocation.
Elkind took his previously untapped talent for teaching others, coupled it with his new found passion for understanding how people take a disciplined activity results in measurable change. Observe the number of choices you make during a given time period, such as half a day, and then consider any patterns that emerge, such as a tendency to tackle the hard things first or a tendency to procrastinate. By acknowledging the ways in which you make choices, you will come to understand how you deal with difficult, and easy, situations.
Envisioning Portability
Some of your time during the searching period should be spent envisioning what life will be like as a portable executive. Try imagining what you will look like as a portable executive, then create visions of what you need to do to get there. It is much like playing tennis or golf, in which you consciously or unconsciously envision what the perfect shot or serve will look like as the benchmark for your actual performance. Obviously, when the perfect shot is made, you get a tremendous feeling of fulfillment, but even if it isn't perfect, you benefit from a sense of how close you were and what improvements can be made to accomplish it.
You should set aside time on a regular basis for envisioning sessions. Sit down, close your eyes, and imagine what you would like to be doing and what you would accomplish doing it. This should be done for a set period of time, like half an hour or forty-five minutes, during which you let your imagination decide what the results might be. If you like, put down what you see in your vision in a drawing or in writing in your journal, or simply keep it in your mind's eye. As you continue envisioning, you will also become aware of the factors that prevent you from achieving this vision. For example, you may envision yourself as a consultant and an individual practitioner but encounter resistance in taking the financial risk of not having a paycheck. This type of information gives you the opportunity to examine your tolerance for financial risk during your searching period and may lead you to a type of job where, for example, you join a larger consulting firm that gives you a moderate amount of working independence and the consistency of a paycheck.
