As I set out to embark on the journey of goal setting I immediately hit a road block - um, since I'm actually doing this "for real" (as opposed to for some assignment), how do I start?
I sunk to the level of Googling it - how pathetic it seemed when I was typing "how to set goals" into the search bar. After filtering through a few sites, however, I was glad I did. There were a few useful outlines and processes that I otherwise may have missed, starting with brainstorming. I started jotting down what I enjoyed, what I was good at, what I wanted out of life - you know, things most people have figured out a good 10 years earlier in their life. This process proved to be extremely useful as it helped eliminate a lot of the "floundering" that I felt like I was doing.
So, after a couple weeks of going through these processes, I landed on my goal - in 10 years, I want to run my own event planning business. Which industry (corporate, wedding, tradeshow, etc) I'm leaving a little in the open, but wedding planning appeals to my artistic side...but that's not a decision that needs to be made right now. Next step was breaking down that long term goal and coming up with how I was going to get there. I broke this down into year by year, and sometimes monthly, goals starting from now until then.
After all of that was down on paper, I felt far more focused. I know what I want to do, and I have an idea of what I need to do to get there. Step 1: find a job that will utilize and grow the skills (organization, scheduling, filling in the details, etc) that I will need to be an event planner. This narrowed my job search to just a few fields, but since it's a total career change, I'm finding this to be a little more difficult than I would like. But then again, i guess nothing good comes too easily, but my on-going job hunt will be the subject of a future post.
Step 2: begin planning smaller events. I already found one - planning the Bike Nights at the Cycle Gear where I'm working part time. I'm also going to be hitting up my network of friends to find other smaller events/parties/etc that I can plan or help with the planning of. The only issue right this minute is that I'm pretty much going to be doing this for free or nearly free until I have a few references and a little experience under my belt to justify charging someone. The main hold up for that comes from the simple fact that right now I'm already working two jobs just to make ends meet - which leaves basically no time for side events.
SO, with that realization, I came to the conclusion that finding a job that pays what I'm worth AND can help me get where I'm going is priority number one.
No comments:
Post a Comment