What Color Is Your Parachute? Read Online Free PDF Page B

Conventional. By naming whom you’d prefer to talk with at a party, you’ve identified your favorite people environment.
(Actually, the Party exercise gives only an approximation of your Holland Code. If you want to take a longer test to more accurately determine your Holland Code, go to www.self-directed-search.com .)
Now, turn to My Parachute and write your Holland Code in the section entitled My Favorite Types of People. You may also want to write a short sentence or two about these types of people. For example, if your Holland Code is IAS, you might write: “I will enjoy my work most if I am surrounded by people who are very curious and like to investigate or analyze things (I), who are also very innovative and creative (A), and who really want to help or serve people (S).”

    Now, look over the traits described for each of the three groups of people you chose and see how much of this is also true of you. We often see ourselves best by looking at others. We call this theMirror Theory. When we describe the people we would most like to be with, in many cases we have also described ourselves. As the old saying goes, “Birds of a feather flock together.” What do you think? Do you see yourself in your favorite types of people?

BOSSES AND CLIENTS
Many young adults find it helpful to describe their idea of a good boss. A good boss can be a great mentor. Teachers are very much like bosses. Some of them make you work very hard, but they manage to pull good work out of you, and you learn a lot from them. When you are just starting out, you want a boss you can learn from. Make a list of characteristics of a good boss for you. Prioritize the list.
If you envision yourself in a job where you have customers, clients, or patients, list what kind of people you’d want them to be. For example, let’s say you want to be a speech pathologist working with children and teens. Your patients would be “children and teens.” Prioritize this list, as well. Once you’ve figured out your top two or three descriptors from both prioritized lists, write them into the Favorite Types of People section of your Parachute diagram (or if there’s no room, draw a line and write it along the bottom of the page).

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    Where You Love to Be
    YOUR IDEAL WORK ENVIRONMENT
    Your heart has its own geography, where it prefers to be. That may be by a mountain stream. It may be in the Alps. It may be in the hustle and bustle of the streets of Shanghai or New York. It may be on an Oregon farm. It may be a beach town. Or it might be right where you are now—in your own hometown, in your own backyard, at your high school. Maybe what you’d really love to do is return there someday as a teacher.
    Your heart knows the places that it loves. That’s what we’ll be exploring in this chapter, because finding where you love to be is connected with doing what you love to do and who you want to do it with. It’s an important part of being happy with your whole life, not just a small part of it. It’s living your whole dream, not just half (or less) of it.
    There are lots of ways to consider where you want to be. We’ll explore two: your ideal work environment and your ideal community (which includes geographical location). We’ll be asking you a lot of questions. You may have answers to some of them and none to others. Maybe you won’t even have answers to most of the questions. That’s OK. Answer what you can—we’recertain you’ll have some answers—and just keep the rest of the questions in the back of your mind. Questions, even when you don’t know the answer, can help you notice new things or think about things in a way you hadn’t thought about them before. For example, if we ask, “Would you rather work outside or indoors?” and you aren’t sure, you may start to notice what types of jobs are done indoors or outdoors, or jobs that combine both indoor and outdoor work. Maybe you’d be fine working indoors all the time, but you’d want to live