Creating Your Personal and Business Road Map to Success as an Author: Creating Situational Awareness of Time and Events Impacting Our Journey
By Pamela Ebel
Article One of this series explored the hurdles faced when we begin the change to writing as a full-time endeavor. We considered why and how to avoid the ‘One Right Answer’ when setting our professional goals.
Article Two examined how new goals may require major changes in our professional and personal lives. Their impact on our families, friends, and co-workers—many of whom will become the first audience for our writings—need to be addressed. To lessen that effect we discussed the need to explain the goals to these groups, include them in the decision-making process, seek their acceptance, and bring them along on the journey.
Now we’ll work to acquire or refine skills that ensure our goals stay relevant and achievable.
Creating Situational Awareness
Situational Awareness is something most of us do every day. We look around carefully as we head to our car in a darkened parking lot; prepare for an important meeting by studying those who will attend and the topic(s) to be covered. The list of things we believe require us to be aware of certain situations is prolific.
Still, when it comes to personal and professional goals, we often struggle to examine them with fresh eyes because, having committed to them early on, we’ve become victims of habit. To avoid this pitfall, let’s start creating situational awareness.
There are three parts to the process:
1. Perception– Start by examining our current writing situation to see what key elements, events and/or individuals have changed since we set the original goals. This requires refreshing memories about what our professional and personal lives were like before beginning the journey.
Next, we look at what changes have occurred. Did we quit the other career completely or did we move to part-time? Were there any major changes in our personal lives such as marriage, births, divorce, death, illnesses, relocation, which changed our plans? The answers may have altered our initial goals and immediate environment.
2. Comprehension– This step is often the hardest for us to tackle. When we delve back into the time, place, events, and the people that existed when we announced, “I’m going to be a writer full time!” what ifs abound.
The results of those original decisions may or may not be satisfying. They are, however, the reality we must work with when deciding if goals need to be changed. Consulting with the people that were and are still a part of our decision-making process will help in comprehending the new situation.
3. Projection– Identifying goals affected by time and events is the challenging part of this exercise.
Looking back, we should note the goals that have been met and are still worth time and effort to pursue because…? Beware of keeping goals based on the ‘One Right Answer’ or on habits that are outdated. List the reasons that justify maintaining and supporting certain goals.
Then take a close look at the goals that don’t appear successful or relevant considering added information. Checking with those individuals who have been with us from the start and other writers on similar journeys will allow us to make predictions of what is likely to happen in the near future.
Wait! This process is asking us to recalibrate our futures based on guesses about known and unknown facts and situations? When would we find ourselves in such a predicament having been so careful at the beginning? What could possibly throw the ‘best laid plans’ into such disarray?
One word that comes to mind – AI!
From Federal Court decisions in search of a way to demand and determine the presence of the ‘Human Hand’ in a work seeking publication and copyright protection under the U.S. Constitution to copyright protection in general being threatened with extinction in the United States, our journeys are now filled with land mines of questions that may have answers or no answers, all of which threaten to blow up the carefully planned journeys.
All of the above information suggests that we need all the help we can get to navigate through uncharted waters. That brings us to the final discussion in this series—what are the Five Questions we need to know and answer to have a successful personal and professional writing career? Join me for the final discussion soon.
