testdrive your dream job in paris (4)
TRANSCRIPT
Testdrive Your Dream Job in Paris (4) By Peter de Kuster Why Travel with Role Models? A Walk along the Seine This travel guide will tell you how to test-‐drive your dream job by creating a Midnight in Paris of your own (or by daylight). It will tell you how to find a mentor, how to prepare for the testdrive, and, most important, what to do once the Testdrive Your Dream Job is over. It will map out the small steps you can take to move from where you are now to where you really want to be. Along the way you’ll meet lots of people who have done it – in the past and present of Paris. You’ll hear from them and many others about the fears and challenges, the mistakes and lucky breaks, the surprises and accomplishments they experienced as they moved into their dream careers.
You’ll see that few of these heroes and heroines of Paris consider themselves reisk takers. Most are still amazed to find they have taken this road. But after years of working in jobs that didn’t feed their passions they reached a point when they felt they had no choice: they had to push past
their fears and make the switch. I got to the point where I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try, they say. If I tried and failed, well, at least, I’d know I’d tried. Not trying at all would have been failure.
What helped many of these people was realizing that the risks they needed to take were not as overwhelming as the ones they had imagined. The
scariest moments – quitting their jobs, purchasing property, signing a bank loan, moving crosscountry – didn’t occur until they were already far along in their planning, or even until after their new career was already up and running. It was still scary; it was still a risk; but it was a calculated risk. By the time they took it, they felt they were likely to succeed.
What if you don’t know what your dream job is? What if you’re itchy and unsatisfied in your current job but when you think about what’s next you draw a total blank? Well, you’re not alone. There’s very little in our society that encourages us to know what we really want to do. When we’re children people ask us what we want to be when we grow up, but once we’re teenagers we’re taught what we should be. We are channeled into a narrow range of careers based on security and stability rather than on passion.
The notion that we could follow our hearts when it comes to work is pretty much trained out of us by the time we graduate from school. So who can blame us if, by the time we realize that our ‘practical ‘ jobs don’t fulfill us, we’ve already forgotten how to find our passions inside?
They may be another reason to consider making a Testdrive in Your Dream Job. It enables you to experiment, to test out all sorts of jobs that might be appealing. You could have a dream job and not even know it if you don’t give one or two a try.