Mentoring and goals

After talking with another participant tonight, I’ve realized that I’ve gotten off track. In only a month, I’ve started playing a role and hiding behind a façade. This is what I always do. When things get too hard, when people get too close, when things get too real, I retreat to the roles that I am expected to play. Energetic, rational scientist. Steady, unemotional Carina. When Sister Anne told me that one of the reasons that I was chosen for this course was to provide the rational thinking perspective, my façade was set into place. I am the scientist in the group. The problem is that I’m not sure that I want to be a scientist anymore. At least not a career researching scientist. If I decide that’s what I want at the end of the year, I have the ability to do that. My networking skills are good. I can set up a job for myself. I can find the people to help me. What I need are people to help me figure out what I really want. What am I really about? I’m sure that I was meant to be a doctor, but I got off track a long time ago. I took the path that was easiest at the time, and changed the course of my life. I have thought about going to medical school now, but after careful reflection, I don’t think that’s a great idea for many reasons. My main reason for wanting to be a doctor is that I have a need to help people. Personally and immediately…not through research or a far removed idea.

I need to do this without sacrificing my family. I have two young children that still need me. I don’t want to ever feel that I haven’t given them everything that I possibly can. So I need a career that will allow me flexible working hours and time to be with my kids when they aren’t in school.

This year is about learning to stop playing the roles that everyone expects me to play. About lifting the façade that I am so good at putting in place. About finding the emotional component of my career. And learning how to be a better person in this world.

My selfish year begins

I am having a selfish year. Well…as much of a selfish year as the mother of a four year old and a two year old can have. I’m reclaiming some small bits of me before they fly away in the storm of reading lessons, potty training, breast feeding, house tending and meal making. I feel that I am at a crossroads in my life. I need to figure out where I’m going from here. Will I continue to be an academic scientist, as I was before children (and still am on a one day a week, contract basis)? Will I shift my life and do something completely different? What in the world would that thing be if I did it? How can I make my life meaningful? What can I offer to the world that will make it a better place? How do I fill that need within me to help people?

So…my selfish year. This is what I’m doing. I’ve been accepted to the Catherine McAuley Women in Leadership and Service Award. This is run by the Sisters of Mercy (a catholic sect based on women in service to the community), but it is in no way religious…spiritual perhaps…but not religious. The aim of this year is to know myself better, know the people around me better, and know where I fit into it all and how I can be of some use. There won’t be any gluttony fests in Italy (although the nuns do a mean roast dinner), or meditation in India (although we do a fair amount of inner searching, and begin every meeting with a ritual of some sort, including a shared meal), or searching for love in Bali (although we are all searching for some way to make the world better and to connect with our fellow people).

We’ve barely begun, and I can already feel the introspection working wonders in how I deal with the people that I love.

We had our induction, and we were asked to introduce ourselves. Here is the introduction that I gave.

The day the praying mantis eggs hatched in my bedroom and a thousand tiny insects covered the house, my mother said ‘Enough!’ From then on, my collections and discoveries from the natural world were prohibited from entering the house and confined to my cubby. That was two weeks after my sixth birthday.

I was born in a rural town in West Virginia, in the USA. Struggling financially and emotionally, and without electricity or running water, my parents divorced when I was two. Often busy with my two younger sisters, my mother left me to spend my childhood years roaming the woods and exploring nature. I give credit to these early years for nurturing my fascination with all things biological and my career in the natural sciences.

I married my university boyfriend and went off to his home in Australia to do my PhD in evolutionary genetics. I have done research in various areas of the natural world, including paleontology with the WA Museum, cancer genetics, environmental science, and conservation genetics with the Fisheries Department.

I have now been married for nine years and I have two children, L who is three and a half and R who is 18 months old. I have spent the past three and a half years devoted to my children and my home. I obsess over their education and delight in showing them how things work. I focus on eating locally, sustainably and healthily, and helping my children to learn where our food comes from and why some things are good for us and some things are not. I enjoy gardening (more so when my son isn’t pulling out all of my baby plants and calling them weeds!), and my veggie garden is taking shape. I love the fact that my neighbourhood is a true community, and I work hard to make sure that we all have connections with each other, through annual parties, morning teas, and playing outside together.

That is who I have been in the past. But this introduction is meant to be about who I am. At this moment, I have no idea who I am. I’m here to find out. I was a scientist. I am a mother. What else am I? Where do I go from here? How can I make my life as meaningful as possible? I look forward to exploring the possibilities with you all this year.

This past weekend, the other 14 women and I truly started on our year long journey of exploration. We started out with Meyers-Briggs personality type testing (guided by a leadership expert and psychologist named Kate) to find out where we fit in the spectrum of personality. We hashed out the differences between us and discussed how the other sorts of personalities interacted with ours. You can take a variety of these things online, if you're intersted, but a qualified person would tell you that you really need to have someone who knows what they’re doing with you to make real sense out of it. After spending the weekend with Kate, I would tend to agree. However, here is what I learned about myself:

1. I'm an extrovert. Yeah, yeah. I knew that. But that means more than I'm not bothered by social situations. That means that I talk through all my emotions and decisions. And I talk before I know what I think...I'm figuring it out along the way. This can drive introverts (like the one I'm married to...and a lot of my dear friends) absolutely insane. You can't take anything that I say along the way as being exactly what I think...it's just a step in the process.

2. My husband and a lot of my friends are introverts. They drive me crazy. And I drive them crazy. But there are ways to alleviate this crazymaking. I'm taking small steps (like not yelling at DH to "just talk!!!"), and I'm hoping to learn more as this year progresses.

3. I'm a J. Yup. Knew that too. I didn't know that all my planning and listmaking can drive P's nuts though. I figured everybody must want to be organized, and some people just aren't good at it. Now I know that P's feel strangled when I organize them. Oops.

4. I'm a S. I didn't really know that. Perhaps because I want to be the sort of person that has those amazing creative leaps. But in reality...I'm just not. And this was one of the lightbulbs for me this weekend. I'm a good scientist. I do solid research. But I don't have those amazing ideas that win Nobel prizes. My FIL (another scientist) is a definite N. He has incredible vision and creativity. But he doesn't have the methodical, careful research ability that I do (although he's very good at hiring people to do this for him). What does this mean? It means that I'm in the right profession, for a start. And that's a relief...because I haven't been sure lately. But it also means that I need a partner. Someone with vision. An N. And we'll take this place by storm.

5. I'm a T. In fact, I'm the only T in the group. I'm not sure I like being so obviously different from everyone else. But I am. And my T-ness makes me logical and rational. I like being logical and rational. I also want to make sure that there is some room for emotion in there...I don't want to be heartless (or as Kate says "a cold hearted bitch"). And I'm entering the "mid life" (!!!!!) stretch, which for me is all about emotion and feeling and learning to be a little less logical. Part of this stretching is figuring out what my purpose is in this world. I always felt that I was meant to help people in some way. I wanted to be a doctor and join Medicins sans Frontieres. That's not going to happen...so what am I meant to do?

The next step is a series of seminars and small group meetings. The seminars are run by truly inspirational women and men from all sorts of places. We then get together into small groups (structured into four people that will stretch each other as much as possible!), and discuss and wallow in the seminar aftermath.

So that’s my year. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can learn and where it will take me. I’m also committing to a once a week yoga class, and going away for things that I really want to do (like a music weekend).