Revisiting past events and decisions

If you completed the exercise in yesterday's post, significant career events may still be on your mind. Too much reflection can be a distraction but revisiting past events is an essential component of the work/life fusion approach to career planning and direction finding.

Thinking about the choices we have made in the past and the lessons they provide is very different to wondering at what might have been. Rather than allowing hindsight to reinforce regret, revisiting a particular past event can often confirm how and why we would act differently today.

Putting this notion into practice immediately, past experiences writing this blog have taught me that we have reached the point where an illustrative example would help. Yesterday I spoke with a former client for the first time in a couple of years. When we last spoke he had turned down a big corporate role but was thorough in his thinking and secure in his reasons for doing so at the time. During yesterday's conversation, we realised that we had both (independently in this case) wondered what life would have been like had this decision gone the other way. At the end of our chat we also knew that if a similar opportunity were to come along in the future, his decision would be different.

In this example and because the feeling is reciprocated, the near future may present the opportunity to re-unite this one-time-potential-employee with his one-time-potential-employer but although that would be a stellar example of the power resident in revisiting past events and decisions, that particular ending is for another story.