Viewing your career as a body of work can help you become more resilient, resourceful and reach more of your potential, despite today’s uncertain work environment. That’s the core message of Pamela Slim’s excellent new book, Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Work Together.
This practical guide is filled with a wealth of actionable advice for taking control of your career, learning and creating new things and leaving a legacy. Seen within this broad perspective, your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect and impact:
“For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all the tangible and intangible things you have created. Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work,” she explains.
“Focusing on building a body of work will give you more freedom and clarity to choose different work options throughout the course of your life, and you’ll be able to connect your diverse accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and relaunch your brand.”
Helping you connect the dots
If you’re like many professionals, you probably feel like your career is a collection of unrelated dots. Making a career change feels like you must throw away everything you’ve done before. Not so, says Slim. All of your life experiences, skills, values and other aspects of your life can be connected into a rich body of work, from which you can draw strength, passion and a new sense of opportunities and possibilities.
A key part of the framework Slim describes in Body of Work is defining the “ingredients” that make up your career and life. She recommends that you focus on six aspects of your life: roles, skills, strengths, experiences, values and scars. In the book, she provides an exercise with questions and examples that help you to get a clearer picture of your own ingredients.
My new career ingredients mind map template
I liked this powerful life planning tool so much that I converted it into a mind map, which is available for free to Mind Mapping Insider members and for a modest investment for those of you who haven’t joined this group.
This career ingredients template includes:
- Questions from the book to spur your thinking
- Examples to help you better understand what types of information you should add to each section of the map
- A place for you to record ideas for next steps and new skills you want to learn
- Step-by-step instructions
It is available in 6 mind map formats plus PDF
- MindManager
- MindView
- MindGenius
- NovaMind
- iMindMap
- XMind
- MindMaple
Benefits of analyzing your life in this format
I’ve never been more excited about a mind map template. It takes a marvelous exercise, created by a very smart author, and elevates it to a new level of effectiveness. If you walked through Slim’s exercise with a legal pad or a notebook, you would end up with many pages of notes and ideas – but not necessarily a clear overall picture of your life’s all-important ingredients. This mind map:
- Summarizes a wealth of information about you in a single view. That gives you a sense of clarity that just isn’t possible with a set of hand-written notes.
- You can better see what’s missing and what’s related.
- You can color code your information using guidelines I provide to add meaning and context to your ingredients
- You can see new opportunities that weren’t visible by poring over pages of hand-written notes or a lengthy Word document.
In short, this template is a very powerful tool!
The link to download this report is accessible to members of the Mind Mapping Insiders group.
Become a Mind Mapping Insider member to access this valuable template and instructions today. You will also get access to over 100 other tutorials, interviews, templates, mind map analyses and other valuable resources designed to improve your mind mapping skills. Become an expert mind mapper today – join the Mind Mapping Insider membership program!
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