With all the hard work that you have done to define the portable career of your choice, it’s time to turn dreams into reality by inspiring you into action. My wish for you for the year ahead is:

A portable career and a life that is a result of your design – and not coincidence
A portable career and a life that reflects what you want for yourself, and less of what other people want for you
A feeling of fulfillment and passion for what you do in life, instead of a sense of discontent and a feeling of something lacking in your life!

I’d like to share with you some ideas on how you can create a portable career by design. There are three phases to creating such a career: creating a vision; setting SMART goals and following through with action steps.

Vision

The first step, of course is creating a vision that is based on your values which serves as the foundation to your long and short term goals. Stephen Covey, in his timeless book, 7 Habits of Effective People describes this visioning process very succinctly:

Begin With The End In Mind.

There are several critical elements to those 6 words:
#1 is begin – the starting point
#2 is the end – where you want to finish
#3 (often overlooked) – in mind. The mind is the place where any vision is created.
(Furthermore, for you to own the vision, it must be a creation of your own mind – and not someone else’s.

So let’s start creating your vision (while tapping back into the work you’ve done around exploring your passion and exploring what you can do)! I won’t expect you to write this down overnight, this may take you several days, weeks or longer. I just want you to make a start and from here you can keep on adding and tweaking.

Imagine yourself a year from now! You’re packing up for a nice holiday and you’re talking to your best friend who asks you about your biggest successes of the last year. How would you answer this question?

Elements to include (amongst others) are:
– Your Portable Career (activities done, people worked with, money made, difference made)
– Your Life experiences (family, travel, fun things done, cultural experiences, hobbies, friends etc.)
– Opportunities you had to grow
– Lessons learned
– Valuable skills you acquired
– Your most cherished accomplishments
– Challenges you faced but were able to overcome
– The most important things you are taking away from the year behind you

Take 10-20 minutes to write down all the ideas that come to mind without taking your pen off the paper…. you can jot down, words, short sentences, paragraphs…. however it comes to mind. Don’t change anything, correct your spelling, or over-think your ideas. The purpose is to let your thoughts flow and to listen to your heart.

Goal setting

The second step towards implementing your Portable Career is to develop the strategies that you will need to put into place in order to reach your vision. Strategies — or goals as they are sometimes called — are broad action statements that help you reach your vision.

Your list of goals can answer some of the following questions*:

How will you achieve this?
- What are the sub-steps of this?
How and what will you need to research? What pieces of information are you missing at this point?
Who do I want to meet and add to my network?
Where can you find your clients/potential employers?
Where can you network?
Where will you advertise/post your CV?
What will you do for free to reach this goal?
What will you need to do/produce first?
How will you find out what to charge/what salary to ask?

*from A Career in Your Suitcase by Jo Parfitt and Colleen Reichrath-Smith

For you to be the most successful in fulfilling your goals, you want to make sure that they are:

Specific (clear and well defined), Measurable (how you will know if you are on or off track), Achievable, Realistic (may exceed your reach but not your grasp) and Timely (benchmarks to achieve that confirm you are on track).

With this in mind, look at the vision you have created with the thoughts you have written down. What SMART goals can you define that will get you closer to actually living this ideal vision?

So here you are, ready to take action! What ONE thing will you do for EACH goal in the next month? This is the FIRST STEP. Break the action down into a smaller step or action until you can commit 100%. If you want to do more than one action, great, but there must be a minimum of ONE.

You are now well on your way towards a launching a portable career of your choice. Don’t feel that you need to do all this alone, having an accountability partner will increase your chances to success even more, be that a coach, your partner, a friend or colleague! And most of all HAVE FUN making your dreams happen!