Dreams appear to be a particularly valuable source of information for your career development; in some cases, they may even be the best compass. This is evident from the 35 years that I have been working on this subject matter with thousands of clients. Would you like to know how that works and how you can apply it for yourself? Check out this article and be surprised by the intelligence of your own hidden ‘psyche’, or that of your clients.
Who hasn’t had some of the feelings described below at some point in their career:
You no longer see any challenges and your work is just a routine. You simply don’t know which direction you want your career to take. You have lost your job or are in danger of losing it. You are fed up with your manager and he isn’t going anywhere any time soon. You have come into conflict with your manager or supervisory board. You just want something completely different, something that you can excel at. You are in a toxic work environment.. In short, your compass is (temporarily) off kilter and you’re really just wandering around aimlessly.
How do you find a new direction in your career?
To figure out what a good next step is for you, you want to find something that really suits you. It turns out that you structurally have the most fun and come into your own in your job if, that what you have to do:
To see what you can do, you can take a broad look at three aspects: the current knowledge that is required for your position, and the required task-oriented, and behavioral, competencies. In order to find the most ‘suitable’ job, you need enough chutzpah, courage and self-confidence to take your career step. Or maybe not yet: You may have to develop something ‘extra’ or learn how to deal with your obstacles more effectively.
To get a good idea of what you can do, can do, there are various adequate assessment tools, such as required diplomas, questionnaires (which map out aspects of your personality, for example), selection interviews; assessment exercises, such as role-playing exercises or answering practical cases, etc.
“But does what you are good at and dare to do really suit you?”
This may be one of the biggest pitfalls that is sometimes glossed over in career paths. Suppose you are going to do something new, something that you are good at and have had good experiences with in the past. Your résumé bears witness to this. Before you know it, you are again doing more of the same and something remains unfulfilled in you that will eventually rear its head again. You just ran over another essential voice of yourself: your soul.
In order to see what you are naturally good at and what you are longing for, we have to dig a lot deeper than our ego (and personality) qualities tell you, to look at what really inspires you. One of the ways to gain insight into what inspires you is through your dreams. Why?
In essence, everything is connected to everything (on a spirit level), as you can read in my book ‘Spirited Personal Leadership’. Disembodied souls are connected to embodied souls; humans to animals, plants and earth; ebb to flow; exertion to relaxation; and daytime to nightlife. Our psyche is so intelligent that it provides keys in symbolic language in dreams, that open new doors in your career. They are a gateway to your subconscious which can help you.
“Our psyche is so intelligent that it provides keys in symbolic language in dreams, that open new doors in your career.”
However, you may not always want to take the time to tap into the richness of your dreams if you cannot immediately give them a place.
Carl Gustav Jung did groundbreaking work in the field of dreams and their meaning. You can have all kinds of dreams, some of which have more meaning to you than others. In many ancient cultures, dreams have been viewed as valuable information carriers for centuries, while modern western societies have largely cut themselves off from this. For example, there are ‘daily processing dreams’, in which you see yourself in situations that are related to what you were doing during the day.
You could have anxiety dreams/nightmares, in which you may experience threats, such as being chased or falling into a hole, or the surfacing of old, unresolved issues.
There are also wishful dreams, which give form to what you would like to experience in your life or work.There are ‘predictive dreams’, where you may recognize elements from your dream later on in everyday reality.
Then there are ‘repetitive dreams’, which return periodically, and ‘big dreams’ that mark or announce a turning point, in your life or work, at a fundamental level. Below you can read an example of this type of dream. And some people experience their dream as a gateway to another dimension, or suddenly feel a connection with a ‘deceased’ loved one. Combinations of different types of dreams are also possible.
In short, not all dreams will give you information related to your career. Chances are, however, that when you have been thinking about career development for a while, meaningful dreams will present themselves.
Let's look at three examples of how dreams can help you in concrete ways.
James is a manager at a large company. He does his job well, works hard and has a heart for the business. He just finds it difficult to delegate things to
his employees. In addition, he takes little time for himself and his family and the home front regularly confront him about this. He often sleeps only five hours a night, has been very tired for a long time and suffers from Repetitive Stress Injury. Yet he wants to take another step up in his career, despite all the signals.
James' goal in one of my 'Self-management/Personal Leadership' training courses was: to create more balance between work and private life. He tells us about a repetitive dream that he has had for eleven years and that comes back about every three months. And now it has happened again, during the workshop. In the dream he is in an airplane high in the air.
He is behind the controls himself. One of the engines of the airplane is on fire. The fuel is leaking and it is getting hotter and hotter in the plane. He tries with all his might to still fly it properly. He wakes up bathing in a pool of sweat.
He talked about the dream with sweat on his forehead and I asked him what had happened eleven years ago in his life when these dreams started. So what did it turn out to be?
Eleven years ago, he had taken on a demanding job and in fact his workload had always remained (too) high in the years that followed. His ‘pusher’ had been putting in lots of overtime, for years. As a high flyer with only one engine working he could easily crash and he had now entered that danger zone. His fuel (energy) was running out not just in his dream, but also in reality. Especially when he retold the dream from the perspective of the plane, which was actually a part of him. He had been flying too high in his job for years, which caused him a lot of stress.
This realization, which felt like a deeper truth, hit him so hard that he decided that things could no longer go on like this. He then invited his relaxed side to be a part of his work and life. Weeks later I saw him and he told me he had chosen a different position that came with less pressure. He was beaming again, as usual.
Chantal is a young, talented and ambitious woman who is quickly making great strides as a government trainee within a ministry. However, she notices that she is drained by the toxic work environment in which she finds herself: many colleagues are complaining among themselves in the office gardens; her boss, who mainly thinks of her own skin, keeps changing directions; and, projects that she has worked hard on are simply swept off the table for political reasons. Because she felt that she was in danger of having a burn-out at a young age, she came to me for coaching.
Mark, a colleague, had already said goodbye and left earlier. She noticed that she was somewhat jealous of that and that it partly mirrored her own desire. And then she dreamed.
She stood nexttoto her colleague Mark, looking out of the 11th floor window of her office building. All they could see was a very large ocean. When she zoomed in, she saw three whales swimming along, swaying so gracefully in the waves and yet following their own course in the flow. For a moment she thought: ‘I wish I could be like that’.
At the protest site in front of her office building (where protests against policy commonly take place) there appeared to be a production machine of some kind, which captured the three whales and proceeded to grind them up.
When she retold the dream from the perspective of the whales, she became very sad. She realized more strongly now than ever before that her soul just couldn’t flow as long as she was in her current position and work environment. This was an important push and it gave her energy to look for something new where she can ‘swim’ in a focused way.
John has been walking around at loose ends at work for a while now. He has been unhappy for over two years: too much work pressure, too few challenges and too little growth, plus a demotivating manager. He has received a wonderful and unique offer from a friend to come work elsewhere. Except that means thirty minutes more travel, the idea of which he rather dislikes. However, at the very moment when he deciding to choose certainty and travel convenience, he is scolded once again by his manager. He keeps doubting himself, until one day he wants to enter his office but his door is locked, something that has never happened before in all those years. To make matters worse, the notepad he brought with him falls from his hands onto the floor by the door. A page falls out with the word ‘end’ written at the bottom. How much clearer of a wink can you get from the cosmos!
The next day John is busy working as usual. He is actually planning to skip his lunch break to be able to finish all his work for the day. But something inside him tells him that he has to go out for a while. On his lunch break, without even thinking about it, he automatically walks into his favorite bookstore which is located next door to his office. His eyes, also automatically, go to a book that is directly in front of him, entitled ‘Zonder einde’ (Without End), by a gentleman named Hans Korteweg. Now he has an epiphany as the thought immediately flashes through his mind: is my current job without end?
That same evening he muses about everything that has happened and he lets his feelings simmer. Should he really quit his job now? Suddenly he realizes
that he has lost a lot of himself in his current job, but he has been trivializing that fact until now. New, interesting challenges that were promised to him have been taken away in the past two years. He has been increasingly constrained to tasks that his heart really wasn’t into. On top of that, there was the structural snarling of his boss and the increased workload.
The next morning he wakes up in a sweat from a dream in which he was chained inside a prison, with his boss as the guard. In his cell he did the usual every day occupational therapy: sorting screws and craft supplies.
He realizes that this image reflected exactly how he has felt at work for the past year: as a slave to his boss. He shares all his findings
and feelings with his partner, who asks him what he really wants, right now, ‘deep down’, which suddenly makes him burst with sadness. He decides now he’s really going to quit his job and take the new one. A yoke of burden falls from his shoulders. After six months in his new job, he goes to work whistling again like In the old days.
All three dreams were turning points for my clients to take a new career step that basically gave them more pleasure, energy, balance and effectiveness.
If you want to see for yourself what a dream is trying to tell you, do your best to remember it and investigate it further. Here are some practical tips:
(This exercise is from the book 'Spirited Personal Leadership - M. Thoolen).
Go tohttps://martinthoolen.com/en/service/loopbaancoaching/
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