The Unrecognized Path

Originally when I began this blog, the premise was specific to understanding the self, not necessarily our connection with God as it later has become. But, today, I wish to revisit this earlier theme as I did something rather fascinating yesterday and want to share how much it's made me truly see the patterns of my path in life. 

 Recently, I've had a new door open up for me - one utterly directed by God that I cannot express how he has entered into every step loud and clear, bestowing on me such grace, mercy, and abundance. But, for the first time in 6 and 1/2 years, I am actively seeking a job position to work for someone other than me. To begin my journey down this frustrating path, I decided to utilize ChatGPT. Now mind you, I believe society today is taking the whole AI thing too far - using it as if it's God - but, just like everything in this world, it can be a useful tool. So, I had it revamp my resume into a format that would be easily readable by AI screening tools. And then I asked it this one question... 

"Based on this resume and [LinkedIn CV] with all the skills and abilities, what job positions do you analyze as being perfect for me? Not ones that are specific to the positions listed but to the skills and abilities that are consistently strong and emphasized. Think outside the box." 

Now, my background varies from industry to industry. You could say I'm a jack-of-all-trades - able to easily adapt to whatever role I'm assuming. But, perhaps because of how vastly different my LinkedIn profile is from my resume (LI focuses on skills & abilities particular to my artistic endeavors and businesses whereas the resume focuses more on practical transferable skills and career position titles), the answer I received was not what I expected. It noticed patterns within the chaos of job titles. Just so you understand what I'm attempting to express here, feel free to read the following excerpt: 

"The pattern I see in you...  Your strongest recurring abilities appear to be: 

1. Translating complex ideas into something people can understand:  You've repeatedly worked with different audiences—students, residents, customers, museum visitors, prospects—and your writing/publication work shows the same tendency intellectually. 

2. Seeing connections other people don't necessarily see:  This is particularly prominent in your creative and research work. You naturally connect symbolism, history, art, psychology, narrative, spirituality, and human behavior. 

3. Creative facilitation:  You don't merely create things yourself. You've repeatedly created environments in which other people participate—classrooms, activities, exhibitions, customer experiences, creative projects. 

4. One-on-one rapport:  This is unusually consistent across your history. Leasing prospects, residents, students, customers, and readers all require a slightly different form of interpersonal connection. 

5. Research + synthesis:  Museum research, art history, writing, symbolic research, publication, and your broader "Unearthing the Sacred" work all point toward a strong ability to collect disparate information and synthesize it into a coherent story. 

6. Adaptability:  This may actually be one of your strongest employability characteristics. You've moved between radically different environments and learned the operating system of each one. 

7. Storytelling:  This one is easy to overlook because it isn't written as a conventional resume skill. But it's everywhere: exhibition development, art, teaching, newsletters, publications, spiritual writing, symbolism, and your creative work. 

8. Making people feel seen:  This is particularly apparent in your activity-coordinator experience, but it also appears in leasing, teaching, and your current creative work. 

9. Independent creation:  Your long-running WaterlilyandVine and Unearthing the Sacred projects demonstrate something your conventional employment history doesn't capture: you initiate things without somebody handing you a job description first. 

10. Interdisciplinary thinking:  This might be the most distinctive characteristic of all. You're not especially well represented by a conventional occupational category."

As much as I knew this list in a scattered sort of way, to see this presented to me as a core ethos of path formation (via career) was rather eye-opening. Proceeding from this list came a list of specific job titles that would reveal and incorporate these 10 strengths of mine to their best ability.

So, here's what I challenge for you to do: Write up a list of every skill, ability, and hobby with absolute specificity. Take that list and add it to the resume into the prompt for ChatGPT as I wrote above. You may have to add an extra prompt, asking it to "analyze any patterns of unrecognized skills or abilities that may lead to a completely different path." It may lead you onto a new, joyful path, or, at the very least, help clarify the direction most beneficial to you. But, imagine... instead of a job, you're seeking a path - God's divine path, not the world's limitations, fears, and imprisonment.