Building your own Guidance System

At various points of time from early stages of our career to post -retirement we all feel the need for some counsel, some guidance, some help. This is sometimes easily available to the fortunate and sometimes hard to come by for many of us. We seek help with career choices, personal choices, business choices - a range of challenges and opportunities that life throws at us where we feel we could do with some sage advice or help. This is more so today in the career space than elsewhere perhaps. (The fashion statement in organizations today is "coaching & mentoring") When I was seeking to abandon my Junior Research Fellowship for an M Phil / PhD and jump into a job, I felt that need ; when I wanted to get into Training and Development but was stuck in an Industrial Relations job, I felt that need. I even feel the need today  when I think of opportunities to move from HR (where I have spent 35 years ) to running a business!

I am sure many of us have felt or do feel the way I have described above. I have tried to put my thoughts together to pull out what I have learned from my life experiences to build a framework to help provide this for ourselves. I think this is important as it empowers us to take charge of our support structure for such situations in our ongoing lives.

What is my Guidance System? Simple - a few "trusted" individuals to whom I can turn when I need help in navigating the challenges and dilemmas of my life especially my career choices.

What do we look for in such persons from whom we could get this kind of help? The most important aspect of such help lies in the "trustworthiness" of the person or persons we engage with and seek help from. Getting help, in terms of what we would feel is sage counsel cannot be without the comfort of trustworthiness of such "helpers". This trustworthiness is predicated on three anchors and these are:

1. Their awareness and experience in the field or subject we seek help on.
2. Their forthrightness and candor in "saying it like it is " to us.
3. and their having a significant empathy - looking at it all from "my side"

The presence of only two of these three creates interesting dynamics which actually are not quite helpful!

for example in the picture above we have three combinations:

1. Support and Candour = this is what we get from our spouse ! We know they are  undisputedly on our side and will tell us  the blunt stuff but may not know much about the subject! May not be very helpful where we need some awareness of the subject at issue.
2. Domain & Subject and Candour = this will get us the hard evaluation of an "unconcerned" realistic nature but again may not be presented, articulated or thought of in a way that is helpful to us. Actually it may put us off or demotivate us more than help us.
3. Subject & Domain and Supportive = will get us a knowledgeable champion - but we may miss the realistic mirror that tells us to stop daydreaming and face the reality of our constraints, weaknesses or gaps.

It also means that from our side we must respond to Support with affection; to candour with listening and humility; and to Subject awareness with transparency & information. ( how to get the most by way of our responses may be the next page we can look at when I get to writing it!)

So building our support structure requires identifying and cultivating individuals who can help us by all three attributes. I say this not in a manipulative way but in a genuine sense of seeking such friends, philosophers and guides as a part of the journey of life and the collection of relationships we enjoy and nurture, not just because we are comfortable with them, but also because we like,value and respect them as human beings and co-travellers.

I have been fortunate in having (serendipitously perhaps!) been blessed with a few such and feel that perhaps if I had consciously sought them out and built my "personal guidance system" - a constellation of such individuals early in life, I would perhaps have benefited enormously more! 

But then would I have had the humility and wisdom to listen.....

The tentative 1st steps.....

Testing this new space !
New for me but tried and tested form lots of people - as i venture here i hesitate, but move forward with trepidation wondering why ? seeking affirmation? not really ! seeking expression?  perhaps! seeking seeking passing ships in the night that will blink their lights as a nod and smile and pass on into the darkness beyond? maybe?
so let me try ? let me see what it means and let me feel the sense of a pebble tossed in a still pool to see if the pool resonates with a ripple? a splash and a sound followed by silence or .....

as the tiger cub ventures forth into untested terrain and driven by curiosity but tempered with trepidation - lives , tries and learns - so do I.