George
When I was a little girl, I would gather my teddy bears on the sofa and write their names on a list. I would then call their names one by one and tick them off my list. It was my own little game of playing teacher. I suppose you could say this was the first ever time I thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up. The next time I thought about my future career was a few years later when I started to enjoy styling my Mum's hair. I would brush it for hours and fake-cut it with scissors. I found my own little hairdressing game rather enjoyable until the day I accidentally cut a chunk out of my mother's hair. She wasn't best pleased, to say the least.
As young children, we all have an idea of what we want to be when we grow up. This is normally a profession we know like a teacher, firefighter or vet. We often then try and act out that profession as a type of playing. I suppose we do this as at the time the play form of the profession seems fun. We normally do this with varying professionals until we become teenagers. As teenagers we were thinking about professions more in relation to what they involve and if our personality and skills would fit them.
To help us teenagers figure out our future professions and to get a taste of the working world my school got us all to complete work experience at fourteen years old. It was originally meant to help you find your future career, but soon became a way for employers to get a couple of weeks of free labour; maybe that's why the government scrapped it. Sometimes people did get offered paid work at the end of it though. Work experience was good for getting kids to learn about the workday and complete laborious tasks that the grown-ups did not want to do. But completing long and painful tasks also taught the children discipline for longer amounts of time than school lessons took and that you have to do things you don't want to do. For me personally, work experience showed me that I preferred work to school. I preferred focusing on one thing, not having work to do afterwards, and having more flexibility.
Shortly after my work experience finished, work stopped being a playtime activity for me and became a reality. I had started working part-time in a clothing store, whilst finishing off my sixth form education. I found it challenging balancing the two, but I liked it as it felt purposeful like I was contributing to society in my little way. The dreams then became less about the job and more about the life I wanted to live as an adult, which was having a house, husband, an office job and wearing cute little outfits to my nine-to-five. This trend continued through university.
Did I become, a teacher, hairdresser or nine-to-five worker in cute little outfits? No, as you all know I became a writer. So how exactly did that happen? Well, it's simple really what do all the positions above have in common? They all have control over something and are happy. The teacher happily leads her classroom, the hairdresser controls the haircut and happily chats with her clients and the nine-to-five worker in cute clothes controls her cubicle and looks stunning doing it as the clothes bring her happiness. I found my happiness in being free, travelling and constantly expressing myself how I wish. However, this wasn't a radical change for me as when you look back at the past, all of my other career ideas led to the same outcome of me just waiting to be happy when I grew up, but with the context of what would make me happy at the time.
It is interesting though that when I speak to friends and family they all always end up gravitating to one of their best traits to have their career from, which brings them happiness, even if they aren't aware of it. I have friends that love a good argument, so they are lawyers, I have organised friends, so they are account managers, and I have friends who are anal homebodies so they are work-from-home analysts. Anyone happy as an adult seems to have cracked it, find something that makes you happy and build your life and work around that and not the other way around. Chose to be happy when you grow up not a profession.
