I did not know where to begin with the ‘Flower Petal Exercise’ from Richard N. Bolles’ book “What Color is Your Parachute?” The book is self-help for people who are about to embark on or searching for the next step in their professional lives. This specific exercise centers around getting a better understanding of a person’s wants and needs for their career path through the metaphor of flower petals. I truly thought the whole exercise would be easy, but I was wrong.
Sadly, I believe we as a society are more integrated to point out the negative aspects of ourselves and one another than the positives. So while I think that logic is one of the main reasons that I hit a wall, it is not the only rationale that hindered my ability to do the exercise. I believe the other reason is because I have spent the last eight years truly developing my skills as a student (I don’t really count middle school or any primary education). I have been selling myself as a student for so long that I have to make the transition to prepare to sell myself as a potential employee or graduate student.
When I finally started the exercise, I tried to go in order of every petal. I am a very linear thinker, so I rarely skip around when there is any numerical work that I have to analyze or answer. With this work, though, I had to jump around because there were some questions that I could not think of answers to right away. As soon as I started to skip around with the petals, I decided to order them from the easiest to answer to the hardest.
My List (From Easiest to Hardest)
- You and Geography
- You and a Workplace
- You and the Knowledges You Already Have
- You and People
- You and Salary/Responsibility
- You and Your Purpose in Life
- You and Skills
The first two, You and Geography along with You and a Workplace, were the easiest, and that makes sense as both prose of these petals describe the ideal setting in which I can see myself doing the most work for my career. I’ve always wanted to head up north after I graduate, so it was very simple to list the characteristics I have always admired about the New England region. For You and a Workplace, while it was simple, it was also much more fun than I was expecting. I basically go to dream up my ideal workplace, and since I want to be a writer of some sort, I basically describe a piece of my dream home.
You and the Knowledges You Already Have was a bit harder than the previous, but not by much. The petal was hard in the sense that I am not good at categorizing things I know much about, as I do not have to think hard about the subjects at hand. It helped when I listed off my hobbies and could see that there are subjects that I know greatly about. At this point, I could already see the exercise’s main purpose already at work, as it made me focus on myself, get in tune with my mind, and know my worth.
You and People was challenging because I tend to work best on my own, but that does not mean I am closed off to the aspect of working with a group of creative collaborators. I love to listen to interesting writing prompts and see where other writers take them, so while it was hard, I basically had to open myself up to the possibility I would be working closely with others in the workplace. You and responsibility go into the same category for me, as I do not know what my ideal salary is at the moment. All I know is that I want a job. But I had to put myself in the mindset of being responsible for others if I could see myself doing that in the future, which is still debatable.
You and Your Purpose in Life, along with You and Your Skills, were the hardest ones to answer, in my opinion. The petal based around my purpose in life was a little easier because I know what I want my purpose to be: to be a figure of inspiration for writing, even just for one person. I want to create characters that speak to people to be able to bring more representation to the LGBTQ+ community while staying true to whichever genre I choose to write in.
To figure that out, I had to push past all my humility and ask myself what I truly wanted to get out of my life. It was a very scary question, but I found myself more at peace after answering it. You and Your Skills was the hardest for me because, like I said in the introduction, I am not very good at pushing past the negatives, but for this I did. I found myself to be an analyzer, an empathetic person, and a great listener. While those skills seem miniscule, I have learned from this class and the Flower Petal Exercise that they are anything but.