THE FIVE YEAR PLAN...

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years time"?
Always nailed onto the end of the painful process of performance reviews. I can deal with all the other stuff like talking about targets and reasons for my under performance, all deftly deflected in an unconscious and practised ramble that  gives them what they want to hear but the 5 year question and it's ilk,  they're different. 


I can't imagine that anyone would overly enjoy the process but for me,  by nature  I am predisposed to seeing what happens if I attempt things without the instructions, the prospect  of being asked what  I've actually done and where I plan to be in a given amount of time it's very unpleasant to say the least.  It's the target thing , being pinned to specifics,grown up office talk and having to tick the boxes of" moving forward with this..." , I feel the same way about this as  butterflies feel about  pins.It brings out the old suspicion as well, the one I have about me  getting away with something for a long time and hiding my incompetence. It's a feeling and doesn't have to make sense.  


I didn't go to University, I got this job through going to college and doing voluntary work. I worked in a completely different world  before and had no frame of reference. Before I knew where I was, I was in a room with 12 teenagers and a new job title "Life Skills Tutor", it all stemmed from there. I wanted to do this to actually help people do something with their lives, see there's the flicker under the cynicism, and now and again I think I still do. Sometimes though, I think  a van will arrive to take me back to the real job I should be doing, the one where I'm chained to a moving belt and working in a factory because that's where I should be. They'll drag me screaming through the doors and bundle me into the back. They'll tell me I got away with it for a long time but it's time to stop now and go back to being,well, me. I suppose it's the difference between doing a job because you have something of the academic about you and wanting to do  something more to make a difference and having to take qualifications to do it.


 So, until I'm finally rumbled, the reviews will continue and I will be asked the same question each time "where do you see yourself in 5 years time"? and I will continue to give the same indirect , non-committal answers instead of the one that's the most probable, 


 " Sitting in this seat being asked this question but by some else".

scratch that itch..

The year starts to race by and the everyday creeps back in. We surround ourselves with the things that make us comfortable and cushion us from what may be around the corner, the real and  the harsh, the upheaval of the things we were born into, the reordering of the world around us. 


I hear different things from different camps and all contradict. When one says something is good, another finds a way to dampen the mood, the word recovery is dashed on the hidden rocks of the the words "WORLD DEPRESSION" 


I was listening to George Carlin the other day and he said something I understand very well. He said that if you scratch a cynic , you'll find an idealist somewhere underneath. I know he's right, because I am one and all of us, somewhere inside us, has that faint flicker of hoping that humanity will eventually stop kicking each other and start holding each other up.




Don't berate us for pointing out the obvious and uncomfortable....scratch us and find the flicker.

Unexpected conversation highlights...

"I can get child care in the week but not at weekends, because my Mother is a borderline schizophrenic with failing eyesight in one eye..so how's she supposed to look after my daughter on Saturdays"?


I had no answer to this...are these things worse at the weekend? Does mental illness somehow let itself go on a Saturday night?

Wake up...

Being asleep but almost awake...


 A sense of watching things from two perspectives, one inside and one from somewhere above as if you're part of it all but somehow standing to one side and looking at yourself doing things and waiting for something to make itself clear, a sign from somewhere of the thing you've been looking for, that one thing that's going to show you what you should really be doing....instead of watching yourself 

I delivered a session this morning on the importance of effective and focused job searching in today's unstable and uncertain climate. 


To make up for the fact that I'm writing this at work, I'm doing the paper work veerrrryyy slowly...

Happy New Us ?






So, 
We start to wake up from the sleep of Christmas. What do we do this year? Decisions  and choices to be made and a winter of discontent that seems never ending.
 Out with the old and in with the new, no point in dwelling on what has been when we have such an uncertain" what could be" to contend with.


Buckle up people, the ride's  just starting and it's going to be a bumpy one.. keep arms and legs in at all times and remain seated.Hold on to each other and tighten belts where needed. Don't believe all the bad things you hear and remember to cherish the good things you do.


 Things are changing,we can't put that off any more. Whether it's for good or bad only the future can tell us but change they will. It's just the time for it and we just happen to be the ones who're seeing this one. 


What we do with the options we're faced with.... is up to us