One Apple A Day #383
Due to bureaucratic requirements, yesterday I had to write my Curriculum Vitae. The one I had was so old that I had to rewrite it from scratch.
I took me a few hours to put together all the info from my past.
A few hours that I didn’t enjoy.
So, this morning I decided to reflect on this.
What would make writing my CV less of a burden for me?
I identified three elements.
Past vs Future
A CV is all about the past.
What I have learned, what I have done, where I have worked and so on.
It shows with plenty of details where I’m coming from.
But it doesn’t say anything about where I want to go.
Nothing about my potential.
I did many different things in my life, and I never allow for the past to define my future.
There is a famous book by Marshall Goldsmith titled “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There”.
The CV tells how do I get where I am.
It may tell what I can probably do well in the future.
However, it doesn’t highlight the possibilities.
They hide between the lines.
Maybe a good question should be: what have you learned about your potential from this experience?
I will update my resumé and add to each working experience what I’ve learned about myself that will help me to get where I want to go.
Doing vs Being
The CV is all about the doing.
It tells everything I have done, but it’s hard to understand who I have become.
It’s not easy to easy to answer to the question “who am I?”.
Probably, the only way for you to know who I am is to spend some time with me.
Anyway, I would love for whoever holds my CV to understand who I am more than what I do.
Because in the being there is all my power.
If I tell you what I do, you will put me in a box and limit my possibilities.
If you focus on who I am, everything is possible.
I will update my CV to give more space to the who.
Information vs Stories
The last thing that I want to change is the format.
The CV is full of information and data, but there is no story.
As Dave Gray says in his book, Liminal Thinking: “Give people facts without a story, and they will create a story to make sense of the facts”.
Whoever reads my CV will create a story to make sense of the information I gave. I have no control over that story.
I want for the CV to tell my story.
So, I will update my CV to become my story instead of a stream of information.