Growing beyond your own archetypes: your powerful new path for career development

(Check my website to see when my next Archetypes Workshop is running - click here)

Would you consistently agree with any of the following statements? 

• I don’t feel properly valued at work
• I don’t get excited on Sunday evening about the prospect of the working week ahead
• I don’t really know what job or profession I’d be best at
• I feel my learning-curve at work has flattened out
• I have more energy and talents than my job needs
• If I won the Lottery tomorrow I would give up my job
• I don’t feel I have a life/work balance

The vital question is whether you’d agree consistently with any of the above statements rather than occasionally. If you would agree with any of them consistently, it may be time to take a good hard look at yourself and what you are doing with your life. After all, you’re going to be spending about eight hours of every day working; you ideally want to enjoy those hours and get the most you can from them, and not just financially.

Everyone - even people who believe they are doing exactly the job they want to do - have negative feelings about their job sometimes. Besides, the increasingly discussed matter of ‘work/life balance’ is in effect an acknowledgement that even people who really love their jobs are only too aware of the danger of devoting too little time to personal life and family life, though exactly what ‘too little’ means here will itself be a highly personal matter.

We live in an age when people feel more entitled to personal satisfaction from their working lives and from their careers than has ever been the case before. Our grand-parents - and indeed sometimes perhaps our parents - didn’t usually see working life in that way. Most of the time - sadly - they didn’t think in terms of how much fulfilment they were getting from their jobs, but rather whether they’d make a living from them and how to avoid getting the sack.

Today, in times that are more enlightened and more affluent, and in a culture where personal happiness is, thankfully, regarded as a right rather than a privilege, people see work in a different way. It’s true that many people would probably still regard themselves as working to live rather than vice versa, but in fact that’s often simply because old attitudes, possibly inherited from one’s forebears, die hard. The truth is that it’s increasingly unnecessary for people to take such a limited, and limiting, perspective on work.

And besides, people who maintain they only work for the money may be deluding themselves anyway. For one thing, most people would, for example, probably think twice about adding two hours to their working day every day even for significant hike in their wages. And in any case, what would most people really do if they won the Lottery? Would they really want to remove themselves forever from the world of work once they’d gone on their World Cruise and realised that there’s actually more to life than just twenty-four hour dining and indulgence? After all, a World Cruise is only possible because loads of people are working to make it happen, and basically what you do is tour interesting parts of the world and - in essence - watch people working in those places.

There must come a time for most people when doing this would not only become rather boring, but make one realise that one would actually prefer to be working oneself. The truth is that people usually prefer to have some work in their lives. As a species, we have achieved massive success and world domination by working and struggling: that’s what we’re programmed to do, and while we’re doing it we’re at our best, which is why revolutionaries tend to make a better job of running the revolution than of actually running the country after they’ve won.

Today, the more enlightened of us quite rightly focus on our personal career development as a major - if not the major - part of our lives. Another sign of the times is unless we are working for a major corporation and are building a long-term career there, we usually see our personal career development as something separate from our current employer. We see it, indeed, rather as we see our personal life: something that is immensely precious to us but not necessarily bound up with one ‘provider’ for ever. This trend is partly, I think, because of the culture of self-reliance in which we increasingly live, and also because - in fact - there is a finite, ‘project-based’ feel and actuality to more and more jobs, including ones with major corporations.

Even so, many people adopt a surprisingly lacklustre approach to planning their personal career development; just ‘letting things happen’ in an unplanned and even positively irresponsible way.

The situation is hardly helped by many corporations telling employees that their personal career development is their own responsibility, but then not actually giving employees any real help or guidance with it. It isn’t easy to find much help elsewhere with this either. Nor is popular culture very helpful. If you fall head over heels in love there are numerous songs and movies to tell you what it’s going to be like and what might happen. But there aren’t, as far as I know, any pop songs that focus on the anguish and problems of career development, and the only movie I can think of that does, Working Girl (1988), while highly entertaining, is to a large extent simply an urban fairy story.

In real working life, though, there aren’t many fairy stories: you need to plan your career development very consciously if you want it to happen according to your own wishes. The world of work can be like a swollen river; if you just ‘go with the flow’ you may drown and even if you don’t, you’re unlikely to end up where you really want to be.

I believe, from about twenty years of helping people with their personal career development, that in fact about two-thirds of people are actually in the wrong job or else have actually put their career development on hold and are ‘just doing a job’ which they are not enjoying. That’s not only an unfortunate statistic but also indicates the wastage of lots of human resources. Yet it’s not a statistic that will really surprise us when we reflect just how difficult planning and implementing one’s own career development actually is.

Why is it difficult? Well, firstly, unquestionably a major problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t, in other words, really know about the multiplicity of niches that are available out there.

This problem, though, can to a large extent be solved by research and by getting to know the industry in which one is working; it tends to be a bigger problem for new entrants to a particular private or public sector.

Secondly, and this is a major problem for all of us that very likely never really ever goes away: we don’t know exactly what we can be.

In other words, we don’t ever really know what we can do, what we’re really good at, what we’d really like: we just arrive at approximations - guesses really - on the subject and go with them until some other, more apparently precise - approximation comes along. We are all too likely to go with the flow, pursue a job or profession that feel about right, and just get on with the job we’ve got.

This represents a problem, definitely, but it represents an opportunity, too. Why? Because if we handle it properly we can keep on developing ourselves and getting better at what we do. After all, as a matter of logic, if we don’t know exactly what we can be, we also don’t know exactly what we can’t be, so why not see if we can be it?

In fact, maybe we shouldn’t just be getting on with the job. Maybe we should be doing the job we really want to do. Maybe we shouldn’t accept compromise. Remember the movie Jerry Maguire (1996)? Remember Tom Cruise as Jerry recalling his father’s less-than-great career and the sad fact that on the day his dad retired, Mr Maguire Senior lamented that he wished they’d given him a more comfortable chair? We all owe it to ourselves to ensure that when we retire, we don’t - literally or figuratively - bemoan our uncomfortable chair.

How can we avoid that happening?

Part of the solution is to be determined not to accept failure and frustration in our working life, and to be prepared to look at other possibilities if we find ourselves confronted with failure and frustration.

Another big part of the solution, though, is to know more about ourselves. And this is where the powerful, intriguing and fascinating personal development tool of Archetype Analysis comes in.

Archetype Analysis is a tool designed to help you avoid unsatisfactory, ‘not you’, compromises in your life generally and in your working life in particular: the kind of compromises that will seem all the more unsatisfactory on a winter morning when you don’t manage to get a seat on the train.

The everyday meaning of the word ‘archetype’ is a pattern or mould from which copies are made. However, in the work of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875 - 1961), the word ‘archetype’ means something rather different: an attitude, belief or approach that tends not to be developed by you or me, but rather inherited from the past. Jung even went so far as to see archetypes as belonging to the collective unconscious and inherited by us all. At a practical level, though, it’s more useful to see them as inherited attitudes that may be supportive to us but which can also be extremely restrictive.

The fascinating and powerful intervention of Archetype Analysis, developed during the past thirty years by the American personal development specialist Dr Carol Pearson based on Jung’s work, is an inspired, proven and successful way of in effect saying to people: you are more hidebound by your inherited attitudes, approaches and ideas than you ever imagined; indeed, you may not even be fully aware of what your inherited attitudes, approaches and ideas really are.  By understanding what they are and how they restrict you, you can get fully in touch with yourself and liberate yourself from the negative sides of your inherited hidebound ‘story’: that is, your ‘version’ of yourself that you have - possibly inadvertently - brought to every aspect of your life so far.

Archetype Analysis, which looks at a person’s inherited attitudes, approaches and ideas and at their taken-for-granted stories, is particularly adept at helping people through significant life quandaries, such as those relating to their career development.

The theory of Archetype Analysis holds that people cling to their stories because the stories are comforting. Yet Archetype Analysis is a revolutionary but sensitive approach to life-fulfilment. It doesn’t insist that people throw away their story in brutal fashion; instead what it does is explore how the story can be enhanced, modified and seasoned with other archetypes that may ultimately suit your true needs and goals better than your unadorned story does.

How does Archetype Analysis work? Essentially it postulates twelve archetypes, or types of personality, and has developed self-assessment tools that help people to understand which archetypes most represent the way they think, feel and behave now and then encourages people to look at how adopting on occasion or all the time other archetypes may help them make big strides in their lives.

The actual names of the archetypes have been developed by Dr Carol Pearson. The archetypes are not set in stone; some people need to have other archetypes defined for them, but experience shows that the twelve are particularly useful.

A good way to be introduced to the archetypes is to look at how we might use them in our lives to confront or deal with a particular problem. The following account of the twelve archetypes shows the kind of thinking or approach in each of the different archetypes. I’m not implying that you will personally bring every archetype to bear in every situation (indeed, the problem is that in practice people are, at least to start with, innately limited in which archetypes they bring to bear in situations), but rather that the array of archetypes presented in this way gives a clear idea of how they can help us in practice.

When we first encounter a problem we may at first not wish to look at the problem but prefer to feel optimistic that it will be all right. Viewing the problem in this way involves using the Innocent archetype. We may then become realistic about the outcome and may even ask for help (the Orphan archetype); we pull our resources together and develop a decisive and determined plan to sort it out (Warrior); as we implement our plan we ensure that others affected by the problem are okay and will be all right (Caregiver); we gather more information and see what is and can be different (Seeker); we make new commitments to change and re-build a relationship (Lover); we let go of any illusions we may have and false hopes (Destroyer); we come up with a new solution (Creator); we take responsibility for sorting it out (Ruler); and we change our thinking and behaviour to fit with our solution (Magician); we check what lesson we have learned (Sage) and finally start enjoying ourselves again (Jester) and trusting that everything will be all right (Innocent). We therefore, in fact, come full circle.

On the face of it, these archetypes may seem quite straightforward and unassuming. But what makes them so fascinating, powerful and useful is how adroitly they allow us to identify aspects of human personality and, in a fun, free, illuminating and inherently energising way, identify the dominant archetypes in our own make-up and explore the benefits we might gain by giving other archetypes a chance to come to the fore.

Archetypes also provide an extremely potent way of understanding the human personality. Stern, inflexible, businesspeople will be strong on Warrior - very likely too strong - but short on Caregiver and Jester, and positively terrified of Orphan: which would have involved them asking for help and admitting they didn’t know everything. In fact, the ironmasters even deployed Warrior in a negative way; being stern, nasty and indifferent to people’s feelings isn’t leadership.

Bill Gates, one of the most successful businesspeople of all time, freely admits that he recruits people who know more than he does. Many highly successful businesspeople today will admit this, which suggests that Orphan is a necessary element of the array of archetypes for people who want to create and run world-beating corporations.

To take another example: creative people are, by definition, usually high on Creator but may not be too good at getting properly paid for their work: they may need more Warrior. And very likely anyone who is too serious in their personal and professional life could benefit from being more of a Jester.

In business, billions of pounds are spent every year around the world on all types of management training and personal development that, essentially, encourage people to explore other aspects of themselves, or in the terminology of Archetype Analysis, other archetypes. The trouble is, if the Archetype Analysis is not explicit, it is far too easy, back in the usual working environment, to resume the old ways of thinking and doing things and to lapse back into the old archetype rut.

Instead, the powerful and thought-provoking technique of Archetype Analysis, implemented by a trainer with experience in the field, can be an extremely exciting and liberating intervention, helping you find yourself in the broadest sense, connecting you to every possible aspect of yourself and helping you achieve your full potential.

The reason Archetype Analysis can be so powerful for your personal career development is that it helps you to:

• explore potential aspects of your personality you may have never explored before
• get to know yourself much better
• identify what kind of person you really are
• get to know what you really like doing
• get to know what you would be best at doing.

Generally, the type of job that people will be best at doing is the one that will bring them the most money.

It’s true that there will be instances where this isn’t the case. To take a very concrete example, a business executive who discovers that what he or she is best at is acting and performing may not, in fact, want to exchange his or her executive job for the financially risky life of a professional actor: a profession notorious, anyway, for its high rate of unemployment that does not give one the opportunity to act.

Instead, the executive may find that the insights provided by Archetype Analysis lead to him or her devoting more time to corporate functions that involve an element of performance: presenting key reports to an audience, for example, or playing a vital role in a high-powered sales team.

Overall, Archetype Analysis helps you be more ‘you’ at work and in all you do. The benefits to you may certainly be financial, but ultimately the real benefits are that you can have the opportunity to break the mould of who you always thought you were and - while never losing sight of who you really are - go on to become everything else that you can be. 

(Check my website to see when my next Archetypes Workshop is running - click here)

Best wishes

Colleen 

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