Epic Views
How long to budget: 2 hours, uninterrupted
Assigned on: Thursday, September 5, 2019
When it’s due: Your first Cohort Meeting (September 8, 9, 10, or 11)
What to post: Three anchor statements (instructions below) to the Discussion section (also below).
At this point you should have read through the syllabus and signed our pact. Now it’s time for Epic Views, the first deep dive of the workshop. A chance to think broadly about what you want to accomplish, the kind of life you want to live, how you want to spend your time - not just in this program, but in your life. An opportunity to lay the groundwork for the next 10 weeks, and hopefully to fine tune your vision of your career in a way that will inform you in an ongoing way.
In this Exercise, be very detailed. Be extremely personal. Use your five senses. You’ll only be sharing a small portion of it with your Cohort, so the main purpose of this document is for you to hold it sacred and revisit it regularly, daily if that’s helpful.
So take a quick walk, clear your head, grab a cup of tea, turn your phone on airplane mode. When you’re ready, press play on the audio file and we’ll walk you through a guided visualization that is about 15 minutes long, but asks you to start and stop to give you plenty of time to dream. We expect this process to take you about two hours, and suggest that you do it without interruption.
At the end of the Exercise, please post three anchor statements (instructions below) to the Discussion section also below.
Instructions For Anchor Statements: You’re going to go back through your writing and think about what you wrote in three categories: Work, Relationships, and Self. You’re going to create an Anchor Statement for each category, a summary sentence that is simple, bold, and direct.
These statements will help crystallize your vision for each of these categories over the next 5 years, and inform and ground the next Exercise, when you start looking at specific goals, and uncovering the projects that will support them.
Think about the categories like this:
Self: The things you’ll do for you, for your own sense of self or personal improvement.
Relationships: The connections you have to others: not just your romantic partner, but also your friends, family, and your community.
Work: Think about your career, what kind of work you hope to be doing, what kind of impact you hope to be making.
It helps some people to go back to the document and take a highlighter and a pen, to bold and underline. Go back through your writing and look for the patterns you see. We suggest rereading the document once looking for these patterns, and then go back through one more time looking for more specifics.
In the next Exercise we’re going to get into the nitty gritty, the granular, to think about our goals and then drill into them to find the projects you want to tackle over the next ten weeks.
But today it's about uncovering the big broad strokes of your life, because having those in mind, is going to be really powerful, and really help inform your decision making process to help ensure we’re choosing the right projects, at the right time, that will really propel us on a self directed path forward.
Example of Helena’s Anchor Statements:
Self: I’ll be physically active, artistically engaged, traveling often and living in a beautiful home.
Relationships: I’ll be in a strong loving relationship my partner, starting to build a family and much more actively engaged in community and volunteer work.
Work: I’ll be extremely comfortable financially, working collaboratively and in a way that is balanced between strategic thinking and tangibly making things.
PS - If you’re stuck and need any help, view the pdf link below as an example.
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