going up the country

The country we are going up - the journey referred to a couple of posts ago - is an internal one. One of a great many late realisations that I've made is that it is possible, indeed desirable and perhaps even necessary, to continually look inward and reinvent yourself. As I hinted, for a substantial period of my life I drifted through what I was doing. I was moderately successful, defined in work terms, which seems to be how we define ourselves far too frequently. Not outstanding but certainly comfortable would be how I'd put it.

I was fortunate a few years ago to get onto a personal development course. It was without a doubt the most intense example of such activities that I've seen and, almost without exception, those of us who experienced it got a lot out of it. While the immediate effects may wear off, it left a substantial legacy including the continuing desire to change, as well as some of the tools you need to do so.

It was that course, along with a few things that have happened in the meantime, that led to me getting Working Identity (from Amazon, no-one in Brisbane seemed to have it including the Australian Institute of Management whose computer system showed one in stock, but it was nowhere to be found).

Working Identity relates a number of strategies for bring about a career change that are wholly consistent with the general approach taken on the course: finding oneself first; becoming much more comfortable with ambiguity; looking for new sources of inspiration; and, particularly in the context of job change, trying out new versions of yourself in new situations.

Because I've never learnt the lesson of "never a borrower nor a lender be", I'll be lending it to a couple of people to see what they make of it.





The picture shows one of the many walking paths we enjoyed while in Tassie. This one is on the Freycinet Peninsula, heading back to Coles Bay from Hazards Beach. I love paths like this - every corner you approach promises something new. I feel the picture accurately captures the nature of following a path where the journey is the destination, where the things you discover along the way represent the most value.




Comments on the day's proceedings? Radio CommunistNational, which I was listening to on the way back from the waste recycling centre (oh how I yearn for the days of going to "the dump") had a quite insightful program on Howard's repositioning of the Liberal Party, including interviews with a number of the 'wets' who were unceremoniously dumped along the way. There was one wonderful snippet (couldn't pick up from whom) about Maggie Thatcher being wheeled in a few times to provide her particular view on how the world should work. The speaker described the rapturous reception she received, and the content of her speeches as "stupidly offensive". Or it may have been "offensively stupid", I thought at the time that it could have been interchangeable.