Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Career confusion / Head in the Clouds

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I'm a bit bored again at work. I have plenty to be done (well, a bit, not exactly plenty) but I am waiting on stuff before I can get on with it. I find that very irritating.

Its left me with too much time on my hands to think about things.

I'm thinking about life, my "career" and what I want to do.

Life

Life at the moment, in a nutshell, is me working full time, husband working from home (apart from when away), kids in full time childcare (which includes family).

Life as I imagine or dream it would be: slower paced, less stressed, involving lots of pottering.

Career

I have never been very "into" having a career. I came out of university (after doing a degree in Spanish & Economics) and fell into a sequence of jobs that eventually lead to a 10 year long career as a PA (personal assistant, executive assistant, slave, lacky, whatever you want to call it). I'm very good at organising things and I am pretty damn hot on IT - spreadsheets and stuff like that. I'm currently working as a Project Management Administrator in Reading and, as you can tell from this and previous posts, I'm not particularly busy.

I have decided that I want to persue a career as project manager. I have previously expressed my doubts about this plan here. Its not that I don't think I can do it. I know that I have the skills. I'm just wondering if really, deep down, I want to. See my reasons below:

What I want to do

I'm going to start by talking from my heart and not considering the issue of needing to earn a living. What do I love doing? Writing. Being creative. Making and selling things. I have wanted to run my own business for years and I have flitted from idea to idea. Going from hot to cold (when I realise that really its not going to be practical to actually do it as a main job/business). These are the ideas I have had/things I have done:
  • Card-making - I got quite popular with this little business idea. I even sold to some gift shops. 
  • Bath bomb making - I did this for a couple of years around the times that I had my kids and was on maternity leave. I loved the idea/feeling of getting praise for making something pretty (similar theme to the card-making in that respect). I have in fact started doing this again - only really as a way of earning a bit of extra money - I have no illusions about starting my own bathbomb factory with lots of little bathbomb-making minions.
  • Organising - this started by me taking pictures and putting them on facebook of little things that I would organise. Someone then said I should start a blog. Which I did. You can see it here if you like: Organising the Chaos. I'm no longer writing it as when I started working full time I found it, unsurprisingly, hard to find the time to organise, let alone blog about it. However, before this idea fell on its feet, I got pretty serious about it. I organised someone's play room for them - as a kind of portfolio piece, I designed and made an organising box for someone, I researched becoming a professional organiser. I even paid for someone to create the header for my blog and would have gone on and had her make me a website too if I hadn't just run out of steam. 
  • Party Planning - this idea I had around Christmas. Again I got all worked up about this idea. Did a load of research but then, the same as all my ideas and plans, as soon as I realised that I wasn't going to be able to drop everything and throw my all into the idea, I lost interest. 
So what should I do? I don't know. Am I being unrealistic? My urge to be creative and be my own boss... is it, well, stupid? Maybe I should just give up on my dreams and ideas and "embrace" (if its possible to embrase something so dull) a normal working life where I actually PLAN to do something with this career of mine that I never really wanted anyway.

I feel a little deflated just thinking about that.

7 comments:

  1. I want to say follow your dreams and creative talents (bathbomb minions...ha ha) because for someone so organised, I'd imagine it would be no problem organising yourself to achieve a dream. Me on the other hand, I float in and out of my 'career' dreams and usually just get scared by a fear of no money! Sorry, I'm waffling and no help whatsoever!!!

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    1. Yeah I guess it shouldn't be but I get scared away by: chance of failure, not being able to make enough money, ppl not taking me seriously.... etc etc.

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  2. FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS - I've said this before and I'll say it again. However hard it will be to put into practice, you'll always feel regret if you dont.

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  3. Absolutely agree with the above posters - follow your dreams. Life is just too short. I know it's easier said than done but fingers crossed you are able to sometime soon. Keep writing as I love reading x

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  4. Ps, I'm Pressies by Pebbles but I wasn't able to log in as that!

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