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Photo by Ashley Lysaght

Make Mindful Decisions 🤔 - a read for all when it comes to making career choices.

Leaving School —

Perhaps if I had been more attune to my inner passions

If you stopped and compared the global backdrop of our senior high school experiences, you would find they were vastly different. My school leaver year was guided by tunnel vision and a dream to enter medical school. 

I studied, I danced, I pored over university guidebooks and I studied some more. The Afghanistan war and London train bombings dominated the headlines that year, but I have to stop and really concentrate to bring those memories alive. Global events passively took a backseat to my young ambitions. 

Compare that to now. 

You have been navigating high school and determining the direction of your future in the midst of New Zealand’s most fatal terror attacks, climate change and a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. 

Events that have commanded attention across every facet of life. I take my hat off to you all. You’ve had no choice but to map out your path forward in parallel with the world stage. I think this will bring both benefits and challenges. 

You’ll enter the adult world more worldly than my peers at that age, hold conscious empathy for others’ struggles, have developed critical thinking skills and probably have a better idea of your values. 

The time where you can live easily in the moment, dream widely about your future, believe the best in people, hold grand optimism, travel and experientially discover your values. 

My advice is to take time to make mindful decisions about your future, there is no rush. Have fun alongside the study, make the most of young adult life and your friends.

The challenge, though, is not missing out on the period of your life that should be more carefree than adulthood. 

Global context is important but so too is your individual life; they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. On reflection, I set too narrow a focus for my future from a young age. In my final year I studied English, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Calculus because they’d help me ‘become a doctor’ and not because I was passionate about them. I wish I had studied History and Classics.

Perhaps if I had been more attune to my inner passions, I would have taken myself off to journalism school rather than study health science. Hindsight is always 20/20. Fast-forward to the present day, and I love my career. 

I became a clinical psychologist, and spend my time translating scientific evidence into practical theory and strategies to help New Zealanders thrive. I’ve managed to wind the science of helping others and communicating together. 

And if you’re searching for some direction, you might find reflecting on the following questions helpful: 

  1. What do you do that sparks joy? 
  2. When do you feel most satisfied? 
  3. What are you good at? 
  4. What do you believe is important for the world? 
  5. How can you wind those together to make a living? 


Food for thought.  

Careers Expo team with credit to www.leavingschool.co.nz