Vision Board. Year 2022

At the start of this year I came across a concept of a Vision board. The idea behind it was to create a visual representation of what direction you want to go in aspects of your life. I do enjoy an experiment, so I decided to give it a go. I split it into family, fitness, finance and career.

The visions for each of these areas were:

• Family — Move to a bigger house, so our boys could have a bedroom each.
• Finance — Sort my pension out and review finances.
• Fitness — Complete a triathlon.
• Career — this is where I got stuck. I wrote down to find a mentor and not much else.

I then divided these goals into achievable chunks. For example, the first step in the house move process was to declutter and fix our house up. Then put it on the market to sell and so on. Furthermore, the areas had different weightings. So family was my first priority, then fitness, finance and career

So, how did it all go?

Family — I’m pleased to say that we did move house this year! It was a very big journey. We ended up moving at the end of October. So it took 10 months in total. It was a journey because we had people pulling out of buying our house or even taking back an accepted offer to buy a house! It was stressful and took a lot of energy, but we did get there eventually.

Finances — I learnt about investing and how to grow my money. I am definitely still a beginner at this, but it is nice to see my £25 gain I have made in the last few months. I also increased my pension contribution ever so slightly to look after my future self.

Fitness — I completed my first full triathlon. Swim, run and cycle. It felt like such an achievement with a medal to show for it. I feel that I have continued my fitness and eating well throughout the year. There have been weeks where I have not exercised, however, if I compare the weeks that I have exercised, rather than the ones I have not — then I’m feeling proud of the continual habit..

Career — My vision board and goals didn’t all go to plan though. For example, on the career front, I never found a mentor. I did explore some options, but did not find what I was looking for. Thinking about it, I didn’t have a clear reason why I wanted a mentor in the first place. So a learning I have taken away is to think about the why of a goal in more detail.

Even though my career goal was a flop — going with the flow has worked out well. I was accepted to speak at Nordic Testing days in Estonia to do my talk on “Using brain science to build better products”. It was an incredible experience and one that will stay with me for some time. You can read my blog post here on this. https://fishouthebox.medium.com/ntd-part-1-254c157c4934

You can watch the talk here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzOPt25lMMM

Furthermore, I repeated this talk at an online Ministry of Testing Conference, which was wonderful. I am a big advocate of this Testing Community with their friendly and welcoming atmosphere they promote.

My career journey this year went further in that I explored finding a new role. It took many months and self retrospection of what I wanted to do next. However, I’m pleased to say that I was offered a job to be a Quality Engineering Manager at Easyjet. I have now been there for over two months and feel very grateful. I am feeling much happier and more fulfilled. It goes to show to be patient and wait for the right thing to land on your doorstep.

Other achievements for this year

• Wrote 39 blog posts this year. An incredible amount!
• Attended Ministry of Testing TestBashUK in Manchester. It was a huge thing for me to attend my first in person testing conference all on my own. I’m very proud that I did it!
• The connections that I made over this year — so many people to speak of who I met at the two testing conferences and online. I’m going to be reaching out to those individuals in the next few days to say a thank you and a happy new year!
• Did two new talks at Easyjet — Tools for the mindful tester & A Journey of Learning — Onboarding and Creating a Test Strategy.
• Helped 100s of software testers by reviewing their CV and provided constructive feedback. I put a post on LinkedIn to ask if anyone wants any help, such as reviewing their CV and the post went viral. So many people responded! Many incredible individuals helped me review CVs to help as many people as possible. It feels so good looking back at it. A big highlight of the year.
• I collaborated with members from the Test chat community ( Brijesh Deb and Mahesh Mallikarjunaiah) and wrote this CV writing for software testers article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cv-writing-software-testers-melissa-fisher/?trackingId=2l%2BEzPNGT2GWt5I8tmMXRw%3D%3D

Takeaways

In retrospect, this vision board helped me think more broadly of what I wanted to achieve in different areas of my life. Perhaps you would like to try this for 2023?

For me, I feel that it has been a big year for me and trying to create a Vision Board for 2023 that is going to top this year is going to be incredibly difficult. Perhaps I need to think about it from a different perspective. One example is that I would love to read more fiction books. I thoroughly enjoy reading, so this might be a good goal to have.

Time to ponder and think on my vision board.

I would like to thank you if you’ve read all the way to the end of this. I am so grateful to have your support in the content that I share. Wishing you all the best for 2023! :-)