#13. Confessions of a Job Seeker – Oct. 2012
This series is based on a design journal that I kept between 09/12 – 02/13. New? Start here.

As I pulled together my job search materials, I was thinking a lot about language and storytelling. A friend had just shared an exercise where you ask different people in your life to send you the top three words that come to mind when they think of you. This exercise was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I understood that the people around us can sometimes know us in ways that we might not know ourselves. I decided to go for it and sent out an email to ~ 45 people from different areas and phases of my life. I heard back from most of them almost immediately and their responses were informative.

In order to learn more I put each word on a post-it note and then clustered them into buckets. This enabled me to identify my top three words: Adventurous, Creative, and Thoughtful. It also prompted me to ask questions, like which of the words were most reflective of how I was currently living and which of the words did I maybe want to be embodying more. It was revealing to see which words came from people in different parts of my life and surprising to see how certain words showed up more strongly than I realized I was conveying. Overall, the exercise was simple, easy and fun and I’d definitely recommend it to others.