Take time out to reflect

The holidays offer a chance to reassess your career

At the end of last year, I was in a bad way career-wise," says Hilary, an Auckland accountant who doesn't want her full name known.

"The previous year I had decided to go corporate. I was made one of those offers that are difficult to refuse - the money was really good.

"Well, it was a terrible year for me. I found I had difficulty fitting into the culture of the place, I was angry all the time, didn't seem to be able to get on with people and, yes, my work suffered."

Hilary says she ended the year feeling dispirited. "I had had such high hopes for my career - and now I felt I was at a dead end. I dreaded going back after the Christmas break as I also half-expected to get the pink slip some time soon.

"This is when I decided to take some action - to really look at my life and at my work. Was the place just a wrong fit for me or could I change my attitude towards it - focus on what was good and deal with what was not?"

Hilary says she had read the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron years before. In the book, Cameron suggests people write three foolscap pages as soon as they wake up in the morning - morning pages. They are to write anything that comes to mind.

"The idea is to get rid of the rubbish before you start your day. I used morning pages that Christmas holiday to reflect on the year.

"What could I have done differently to fit in? Why had I taken the job in the first place? What had I learned? And mostly: Did I want to stay in the same working environment and do it better or did I need to move out and go back to working with smaller companies?"

Hilary said it wasn't only the morning pages that helped. "I went up to the Bay of Islands that year to stay with friends in Paihia. We did lots of fun things - some of them very touristy. But all the time I was doing things, I was doing some serious inner work.

"I reflected on my job, on the relationships I had with colleagues and bosses - all the stuff that was worrying me. The good thing was I was with friends and I was relaxed so I could look at these things in a relaxed way. I was removed from the situation, so I could look at it from a distance."

When she came back to work at the start of this year, Hilary had a completely different attitude. "I had realised that I had gone corporate in a grudging way. I was critical of the environment and, yes, had a bad attitude from the start.

"Through my reflection, I decided to give this job a real try - to take it seriously, to not sneer at my colleagues who bought designer outfits and cared about fancy cars. To simply accept that that's what they cared about and that I cared about other things - and that was fine. So in short - I decided to take my work seriously.