This book is not about how to quit your job and go live on the beach and sell souvenir seashells. It’s about meeting a much more real and pressing need to not just work, but to be happier and more fulfilled while doing it.
I’m lucky. In my work, I am privileged to have the chance to travel around the country, helping new leaders build skills, helping teams strengthen, and helping organizations plan. Lots of times, all of this seems to begin to look like therapy. Why? Because the challenges I encounter and the stories I hear can rarely be solved by fixing the organization—but more often by strengthening and renewing the people who work in them.
No matter what their age, lots of people don’t seem to really know what they want to be when they grow up. They’re still searching, not to figure out what they love to do, but how to make it a part of their working life.
This book is for all those people I’ve known in my thirty-plus years spent working in libraries who have confided in me that, whether they’re happy in their current job or they hate it, something else just seems to be missing. There’s something inside them that they really, really want to do—to accomplish or to contribute, but they just don’t know for sure what it is and they certainly don’t have any idea how to go about finding out.
Hopefully, this book and its six-step process will help to resolve that problem.
This book isn’t meant to be therapy. It’s meant to be fun . . . and meaningful.
All the people I’m talking about have something in common—and you probably do too. They’re filled with passion, skills, experience and drive—they’re just lacking direction.
We all know that this isn’t a dress rehearsal. We’re on the clock . . . all of us . . . which is likely why you are reading this book in the first place. Have you ever said, “I just don’t know what I really want to do!”? If so, I hope this book will help you to figure that out. You might find the answer by adding something special to what you do now. Or you may end up realizing you need a more significant change. Maybe, it’s just a new department or title that you need—or perhaps it’s something more significant than that.
The point is to really stop, read, and think about what you love the most and how you can use that to energize and renew yourself and your future. This book is a pathway to help you do just that. Or maybe you only want to figure out, once and for all, how to spend your time, talents, and energy. This book will help you do that, too.
What this book will not do is provide all the answers for you. You will do that yourself, by completing the reflections and exercises and developing your own, unique Renewal Plan. (The plan is in the back of this book, so you can go ahead and take a look at it, but don’t be tempted to jump to filling it in on your own. Let this process do its work and help you spend the time you need to figure out just who you really are.)
If someone told you that by reading just a few pages and completing a six-step plan, you could find a way to feel more useful, more engaged, and just plain happier about getting up every morning, would you do it? I hope so. I can guarantee only one thing . . . you’re worth it. We all are.