Introduction
In this section, you will explore your ideal future and how to get it. You will be invited to envision your ideal day and lifestyle, how your personal life and identity may intersect with your work life, and how your current opportunities may be leveraged into strategies for the future. Knowing who you are, how you thrive, and what your goals are will help you construct an attainable future with realistic goals.
Once you have gained an understanding of your ideals and your goals, you'll develop milestones in key areas of your academic life to help you measure your progress toward attaining those goals.
This section will take you through the following topics:
You now have a pretty good idea of who you are, your strengths, and what you’re currently doing.
In this section, we’ll explore your ideal future based on a past experience. We'll apply what you've learned in the past two sections -- your cognitive & emotional investments, your fire, your values & identity, and your strengths -- to evaluate that past experience so you can see what works for you and then envision a long-term intention.
Reflect
Remember a time in your life when you were happy, productive, and fulfilled. Describe this time in your workbook. Include details such as:
what strengths you were using and how often you were in 'flow' state.
how this time aligned with your core values and identity, as you discovered in Section 2.
your cognitive and emotional investments during this time, and how much return you were getting on those investments.
Use this past experience to help inform a picture of your future ideal day or week ten years from now. This will be your creation; a vision of how you'd like your life to be. Include things like:
your morning routine, from waking to when you start work.
your work day. Consider both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of your ideal; note both the time you dedicate to a task and the method in which you engage in that task.
your evening and personal time. Consider your family's situation and how this may shape your ideal day or week.
Go to page 11 in your workbook and answer questions 26 - 27.
You now have a vision of how you could thrive in the future by incorporating your core values, strengths, and getting a good return on your cognitive and emotional investments.
In this section, we’ll start to unpack this vision and make some attainable or SMART goals. These goals will be crafted into measurable milestones that you can use to inform life and career decisions and help strategize in your Tenure & Promotion process.
Reflect
Sketch out some more details from your ideal future, as you envisioned above.
List the things you need to accomplish to achieve the ‘ideal’ future you reflected upon. Consider any collaborations, teaching, research projects, dissemination, and service accomplishments and any personal accomplishments that may impact your professional future.
Break down this list of accomplishments into achievable tasks or SMART goals, as outlined in the video.
Go through this list and approximate how long it would take for you to achieve your 'ideal' future.
Go to page 12 in your workbook and answer questions 28 - 30.
With the list of anticipated accomplishments and SMART goals from above, we’ll explore how you can integrate these into a timeline and strategize for your Tenure & Promotion process. You'll develop milestones in key areas of your academic life to help you measure your progress toward attaining those goals.
Use the 'Reflect' exercise below with your workbook to develop milestones in the key areas of your academic life.
Reflect
In your workbook, divide the list of accomplishments from above into the following categories.
Collaborations
Teaching
Research Projects
Dissemination
Service Opportunities
These are the academic things you'd like to accomplish in the next ten years while taking into account your core values, strengths, identity, and what helps you thrive. Remember that these things need not be exclusive. For instance, you can integrate research into teaching activities.
You will then use this information to break down your list of accomplishments into three-year and five-year plans that will help you achieve your ten-year goal. There is space in your workbook to do this.
You can use the three-year and five-year goals to help inform your Tenure & Promotion strategy going forward.
Go to pages 13, 14 & 15 in your workbook and complete the activities there.
In this section, you explored your ideal future and what you need to accomplish to get that future. With the knowledge you've gained so far in this workshop, you were invited to envision your ideal day based on a previous fulfilling experience. You have used information about who you are and how you thrive to identify milestones that will help you reach that ideal future. You have broken these accomplishments down into attainable SMART goals and then sorted these anticipated accomplishments and goals into categories that can be found in your Tenure & Promotion criteria. You now have personally tailored goals to address your Tenure & Promotion criteria while you thrive on your journey toward your ideal future.
What's Next
When you're ready, navigate to the Conclusion