What did you want to be when you grew up?

I bet you had a range of things in mind, yet unless you are lucky enough to have a flexible, portfolio way of working with different income streams of all of them those childhood daydreams can remain locked away.

I love the exercise from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self which encourages the reader to re-visit those childhood aspirations. What is lovely about going back to them is that it gives us grown ups a chance to re-connect with that inner creative child, our real likes, passions and dreams, and to bring them back into play.

I am very, very lucky in that I work across design, writing and editorial, which is actually what I always wanted to do. I found my school Record of Achievement recently, and my statement of what I wanted to be pretty much encapsulates what I do now – I am my own boss I design, write, blog and can work from anywhere. Obviously blogging wasn’t in the mix then back in 1995, but I can honestly say I am doing what I want to do. I am not location based, time restricted, and I can work around and with my lifestyle and chronic illness.

Here is a task  for you – list the 5 ‘alternative life jobs’ that you used to dream of being, or that you wold do if you weren’t living your current life. Then, look at each one and see how you could work elements from that other “dream job” or lifestyle into what you do today.

Here are mine:

So, if I wasn’t a designer, writer and blogger, what would I do?