When I finally quit my job in the City in 2010, it was after two years of soul searching. Two years of wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn’t settle in this job that provided me with all the material things I wanted. Two years of wondering if I was just really a bit lazy and didn’t really want to grow up and work hard.
This decision was the hardest I’ve ever made. And when I first started thinking about it, I couldn’t tell anyone. Not my working class family who had financially supported me through years of University and who thought I had everything I could ever want. Not my friends who were all working hard on their own careers, all trying to get to somewhere while I wondered why I didn’t know where I wanted to go.
So instead I used some of that money I worked so hard for to hire a life coach and I told her. One of the first exercises she had me do was to create a vision board. If you don’t know what a vision board is, Christine Kane has a great free guide to creating one for the first time on her website.
A vision board is a kind of roadmap of your life, either the life you want or the life you don’t. In my case, I had to look through magazines and pick out the images that I had a strong reaction to, and then try to place them into a kind of collage of my life. I absolutely loved doing this and at the time I had no idea why. I had kept scrapbooks as a child and hadn’t done anything like that for years, but for some reason it felt like a really intuitive way of expressing my feelings about my life. And far easier than writing anything down.
My vision board ended up being a transition from my old life to something new. In the top left corner of the collage there was a picture of banker sitting head in hands after the fall of Lehman Brothers, and in the bottom right hand corner there was a picture of a girl standing on a balcony, looking out over a huge canyon. She looked peaceful, calm and adventurous. She looked like she was having one of those days that make you feel joyful to be alive. I wanted to be her.
Now, although it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what I was trying to say here, what is interesting is that even though I knew nothing about composition at that point, I had created a board where the very composition implied a story, a journey, a movement forward, towards the girl on the balcony and then onwards. Through this medium, I was able to communicate very clearly what it was that I wanted.
When I showed it to my coach, she asked me which image spoke to me the most and I said that it was the girl on the balcony. It was an image from the Portuguese tourist board. It never made me want to visit Portugal but it did change my life. The girl was positioned in the bottom right corner and was looking out into the canyon. At the edge of the frame, her journey went on and out into the unknown.
Months and months later I finally felt ready to take the plunge and hand in my notice, despite having no real idea what I was going to do next. It was surprising how quickly the end came, after all the agonising. One day I just woke up and thought “I think I’m ready to go now.” I decided to hand in my two months notice the next Monday.
On that morning I got on the tube as usual and stood in my usual spot, so I’d be closest to the exit at the other end. I was pretty apprehensive and already starting to second guess myself. I turned the corner towards the exit of the station and, there at the top of the stairs, so large that I couldn’t possibly miss it, was the girl on the balcony. It was a huge billboard featuring the very image that represented everything I was moving towards. She hadn’t been there the day before and two days later when I went back to take a photograph, she had already been replaced with an advert for a chocolate bar.
I wish I knew who the photographer is so I could write to them to tell them how strongly their image affected me, although perhaps they wouldn’t be happy to know that it didn’t make me want to visit Portugal. I can’t even find a copy of the image online so that I can show you all. I think perhaps she was just meant to come in to my life for those few months to act as a signpost to show me the way.