Career, Executive MBA

Design Your Life Webinar: A Recap

Executive Career Coach Sarita Soldz recently hosted a webinar detailing how to use Design Thinking principles to ideate potential career paths for yourself. Did you know there are potentially many different versions of you? Indeed. Life design is all about identifying, sketching and then engaging with these potential pathways, and we wanted to share a few key takeaways from the webinar. 

Watch the Design Your Life Webinar

Prototype, Prototype, Prototype

During the session, Sarita discussed the important role “prototyping” plays in career exploration. What is prototyping? It’s a way of taking small steps — experimenting, if you will — to evaluate a potential career path.

Prototyping is all about creating actions, engaging in those actions, assessing your experiences and then adjusting your plan accordingly. There are a variety of activities that could qualify as prototyping. Here are a few popular examples:

  • Informational networking (i.e. meeting people)
  • Volunteering
  • Creating a blog (I mean, who doesn’t love a blog?) 
  • Participating in a class visit (if you are, say, considering an Executive MBA!) 

Much of this approach is about taking what’s in your head and translating it to (small) actions. This active approach allows you to create important feedback for yourself, so you can fail early and succeed sooner. And, who doesn’t like the sound of that? 

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with an…Odyssey Plan

Webinar participants also received a little homework in the form of “Odyssey Planning.” What’s an Odyssey Plan? It’s just a sketch of a possible version of your future self.

Here’s how it works: 

Across a five year time horizon (see linked worksheet above), detail a path to a version of you – including what you hope to accomplish both personally and professionally during this time. You also ask (and answer) key questions like: What resources will you need? What might you learn along the way? How do you feel about this plan? Do think you can pull it off? And, perhaps most importantly, how well does this plan align with your work-view and life-view? 

When Odyssey planning, Sarita encouraged webinar participants to consider three different life versions: Your current life (aka Life One), the thing you would do if that plan were suddenly gone (Life Two) and the life you would lead if money and/or image were of no concern (Life Three). In case you were wondering, our Life Three would be running an Admissions blog.

Of course, this webinar is just an introduction to what is a much deeper, reflective process, but the session served as a nice complement to our earlier skills-related sessions. We feel so strongly about the impact of these exercises that we will be offering a Design Your Life workshop for our incoming Executive MBA students in May. 

Interested in being there? We still have a number of upcoming deadlines for our class starting this August: 10 April, 10 May, 10 June and 25 June. Review our section by section guide to our Executive MBA application and work on your application. 

Join Us for Upcoming Webinars

Due to the popularity of our earlier career sessions, we have added additional webinars that will keep the series running into the summer months. Yes! 

Our next webinar Your Personal Brand with Executive Career Coach Jim Collins hits the world wide web next Tuesday, 17 March at 12:30 pm ET. Be there. But even if you can’t, we encourage you to register anyway. All registrants will be emailed a link to a recording of the session. 

Register for one of our upcoming sessions: 

Career Webinar: Your Personal Brand
Tuesday, 17 March | 12:30 pm ET
Register

Career Webinar: World Class Resumes
Wednesday, 29 April | 12:30 pm ET
Register

Career Webinar: Three Key Tips for Career Switchers
Wednesday, 13 May | 12:30 pm ET
Register

Career Webinar: Three Key Tips for Climbers
Wednesday, 2 June | 12:30 pm ET
Register

Or, catch up on a recording of one of our recent career webinars.

Check out faculty thought leadership published on Ideas to Action. And stay connected with us via social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, WeChat