Well, the word ‘forced’ may be an exaggeration.
A couple of months ago, Coursera released a few courses that were free to the public and because I figured Coursera could be a resource that I could use to upskill myself, I signed up for one of them.
It seemed fitting for me to choose Wesleyan University’s Career Decisions: From Insight to Impact course because I just started this new job. Little did I know that I would be forced to dig deep in this course and as of this writing, I only have one more paper to hand in and then I’ll be done with it. So far, I can say that it’s an interesting course and very effective in gathering insight. I didn’t think that I’d enjoy it that much because I’m mostly inclined to learn about tangible stuff (think MS Excel) but after this, I’ll definitely sign up for more personal development courses.
Here’s one of the papers that I wrote for the course, the prompt was:
Write a 500-word essay on the course material from this week. How do you define success for yourself? What do you see as the primary scripts influencing your decision-making?
Success and Identity
I found this week’s modules to be eye-opening and extremely interesting.
I did the Six Lives exercise and found myself struggling to choose between the tennis player and the wealthy investor. I come from a third-world country, so I guess it makes sense that even though the investor sounds like a total douche, his version of success is still the one that I aspire to have. Apparently, I gravitate towards Power, Independence, Glamour, and Variety, which, yeah, I can’t argue with that outcome. I’ve always made my career decisions mostly based on the pay and benefits.
According to the test results, because I chose the life of the tennis player next, I value Individual Excellence. “Family is a priority but excelling at your chosen work is first.” And it makes total sense because I come from a family that had both parents working, so I only ever got to see them during the evenings and the weekend (if at all). There’s no angst there though because I know that my parents only worked that hard to provide a good life for me and my brother.
Even though the test reiterates that there are “no wrong answers” I feel like they were subtly pushing the stone mason’s life as the “correct” choice. However, I cannot, for the life of me, relate to somebody who would choose to pursue his own interests at the expense of having financial troubles for the family. That just sounds selfish to me, so I did put him at the bottom of my list.
The “Navigating New Identities” is a timely module for me to come across because just yesterday I was experiencing a mini breakdown as I am struggling to find direction in my new role in the company that I am working for.
I have been with the company for almost seven years but mostly stuck to independent contributor roles in operations where everything is measured by output. While I consider myself very thankful to have even landed this specific role, I am struggling to shed my habitus, the identity of myself as a non-manager in a non-customer facing role. It’s definitely dissonance and a negative one at that.
I keep telling myself that it’s only been a month and the change happened pretty quickly so hopefully after a meeting with my line manager at the end of this week or early next, things can become clearer. Right now, I’m struggling to grasp the idea of doing a job that’s measured so differently from what I was used to. I want to do the best job I can do in this role, but I don’t know what that even looks like. It’s just really bad timing that my line manager went off on a three-week leave to get married just as soon as I was onboarded.
So yeah, so far, I’m enjoying this course because the topic this week feels relevant to what I’m going through at work. It helps to know that what I’m going through is so normal that there’s even a name for it. I thought I was just having a meltdown.
