Banks going bankrupt, multi-billion dollar government bailouts, the nosedive in the housing market, high gas prices, political uncertainty: It might feel like the worst time in history to think about leaving your job.
But if your job’s on shaky ground, or you wake up disappointed that it’s any day not starting in “S,” or you harbor a vague sense that your career is hobbling along aimlessly, you’ve probably fantasized about jumping ship anyway.
And if you’re like a lot of folks, you wonder if you might be the one at the wheel of the new ship. So we’ve put together a self-assessment tool, based on the structure of the horoscope chart, to help you figure it out.
Why the Horoscope Chart?
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It’s a daring act that, like parenthood or intimate partnership, can only be described as a complete change in lifestyle. Your resources, outlook, relationships, feelings about money, motivations, sense of time, sense of self — and much more — go through dramatic changes when you leave a regular job and start working for yourself.
So it only makes sense that we take stock of our whole lives — not just our skills, assets and price point — when we ponder jumping into the wild winds of self-employment. And any way you cut it, the horoscope chart is a useful metaphor for comprehensively assessing your life.
Developed over thousands of years through keen observation of the human psyche, the horoscope chart gives us an organized and systematic way to think about the different areas of our lives and consider how each one impacts the other. Its basic structure is a circle divided into 12 houses. The themes and arrangement of these houses alone — even without planets and signs — can spur valuable thinking about your strengths, challenges and ways of operating in different spheres of life. It also shows how different parts of life relate, so you can easily become aware of how acting in one area might affect a completely different function in your life. No other tool does that as quickly, easily and organically as the horoscope chart.
The horoscope chart brings a new perspective that’s not well captured in the typical “Do I have what it takes?” questionnaires for aspiring entrepreneurs. That’s because the chart structure gives space and consideration to all areas of life, not just your business acumen and bank account. It suggests critical questions that don’t come naturally with a narrower focus and visually shows relationships between, for example, drudgery and creativity, or assets and aspirations. It also reveals your core strengths, hang-ups and places where you might be better advised to hire out or recruit some help.
And, perhaps most importantly, it asks questions about your most closely held — even unconscious — values, assumptions and beliefs: things you might not consider before jumping off the cliff into the wild winds of self-employment. It shows you where you risk sabotaging yourself without even realizing it.
Using the horoscope chart structure as a model for self-reflection, we’ve developed Px6: Self-Assessment for Aspiring Entrepreneurs, an illuminating way for you to:
- Reflect on how your values, beliefs and assumptions will affect the way you do business.
- Measure the divergence between what you put out into the world and what you get back from it.
- Identify your best assets and biggest challenges — both tangible and not — for self-employment success.
- Figure out how you might unconsciously sabotage your business’s growth.
- Discover what you need to do to traverse the darker side of self-employment.
We’ve published the first section of Px6 on the new Tools page of our website. We’ll roll out a new section every few days until the full first edition is up.
We’d love some feedback on how you’re using it and how we might improve it — just drop us a note in the Comments section below!
Recent Comments