Life is busy.
Being a high school or post-secondary student is especially busy.
A full slate of academic courses takes up a major chunk of every day. Add any of these to the picture: hockey, volleyball, basketball, football, dancing, guitar-playing, the school band, musical theatre, drama productions, a Junior Achievement Company Program, a United Way Youth Ambassador Program, volunteer work in a local church, community club, or seniors’ home. What about the Chess Club or the Minecraft Group? What about playing video games?
Add a favourite activity to the list.
These experiences are all good. And necessary. They develop skills, confidence, and mindsets for future learning, skill development, decisions, and career pathing.
In the rush to engage and complete the activities, however, we often don’t reflect about them.
That’s why the LEAN Career Design Canvas is so darn useful.
The Canvas is a thoughtful space where you can pause, take a deep breath, and see the big picture of all you do – the experiences, activities, insights, curiosities, decisions, and questions in one place. No working through a book and flitting between pages. One big picture.
Life can become a messy hodge-podge of experiences scattered between the past and present without thoughtful reflection about those swirling patterns and themes.
Looking at the big picture helps to connect the dots of life. The proverbial light goes one with thoughtful reflection in a big picture context: writing leads to communication skills and a future job in journalism; a math problem builds problem-solving skills needed on an engineering floor; physical education builds the mental resilience to pursue a fast-paced job in the IT industry. That important decision about ‘what should I do after high school?’ needs reflection, but it needs to purposeful in a big picture context.
School helps students collect a lotta dots. Seeing the BIG PICTURE with the LEAN Career Design Canvas connects those dots and ignites thoughtful decisions about life, education, and career paths.