Page 90 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

78 COACH YOURSELF TO A NEW CAREER

a more modest house. His wife supported him in doing this, and
they are all happier now that he isn’t so stressed and has time to
spend with his kids. The kids didn’t care about the big house, they
just wanted to play with their father. The things that often matter
most to people are usually free.

Make a Collage

Still struggling? Take a tip from interior designers. Flip through
an assortment of magazines and cut out anything that jumps out
at you as something that would be part of your ideal life. You can
paste these images up on a poster board or whiteboard with some
glue or rubber cement. Make a collage, and hang it up so you see it
every day as a visual reminder of what you are working to create.
Visual reminders are powerful tools!

Write the Ideal Job Description

Now that you’ve come up with your ideal life, let’s start getting
clearer on your actual job description. It is important that you
write down your ideal job, career, or work in as much detail as you
possibly can. Imagine that you are composing the ultimate classi-
fied ad, one that would leap off the paper and grab you—the very
description should set your heart racing as you read it. You may be
thinking, “This job doesn’t even exist!” Don’t fret: that may well
be the case, and you may just be the person to invent it.
My profession, life coaching, has been around for just a little
more than a decade, although sport coaching has been around
much longer. When I started coaching and told people I was a
coach, they always asked what sport. Now people say, “Oh, yeah, I
know a life coach. Her name is . . . ” —almost everyone these days
has heard of or even knows a life coach. It didn’t take long for this
still relatively new profession to grow in leaps and bounds. As the