My world career: Lessons learned following our dreams in unpredictable times
As a child I dreamed of an adventurous world-career. In grade school, without traveling far away from our then relatively remote Blue Ridge mountains, I somehow imagined in my lifetime becoming a global traveler, diplomat, and foreign correspondent.
We are told to follow our dreams. Sometimes we abandon or lose them. How do we proceed to concretize our good dreams, especially in stressful, unpredictable times, as we’re now living?
Birthdays are ideal for a focused examination of one’s life and future plans. For me, my summertime date is the time for contemplating lessons learned and reinvigorating hopeful dreams.
This year in August is special for my reviewing and re-imagining. My birthday occurs again during a deeply challenging, fearful time for the world in our shared history. I was born only days after a second world war ended. Yet then, as now, nothing was certain.
My Cold War childhood dreams were clear goals to travel and work worldwide, including at the young United Nations. I knew but ignored my realization these vocations then were rarely open to women.
In high school from the moment President Kennedy established the Peace Corps in 1961, I decided as a career-starter I would when eligible volunteer and serve my country somehow in an exotic place. Then also, working as teenage reporter at the Asheville Citizen Times, I continued dreaming of covering world news someday.
Later, during my undergraduate senior year, the college’s vocational guidance office placed in the main corridor a map showing the U.S. with small portions of Atlantic and Pacific oceans and Gulf of Mexico and neighboring Canada and Mexico at borders. Little paper flags were pinned on locations with names of seniors with known future jobs or academic fellowships.
That spring, remembering my previous year of overseas travel adventures while at Glasgow University in Scotland, I kept hoping in vain someone would call offering me a job working in some far-flung place on the globe. One morning a little paper flag with handwritten words “LizColtonWorld” appeared pinned at earth-ocean’s edge of the limited map. Some friendly sophomores claimed the rebellious action as the vocational counselor removed it, noting, “Until she has definite plans, there won’t be a marker for her on the map.”
Since then, I’ve worked around the world as an educator, journalist, diplomat, anthropologist. Following my dreams was never easy. I learned lessons I still remind myself and offer here:
Pay attention to your childhood dreams and any strong new one showing up later, but recognize that the trajectory of fulfilling these dreams won’t be straight.
Go with your dream, and overcome any fear by doing, living with it.
Listen for significant messages everywhere, coming in many ways through various messengers — and be willing to adjust your course if necessary.
Persevere if your dream is worth it, but be ready to try other routes when blocked —and be ready ultimately to give up some aspects of a dream.
Recognize that all ventures may not end ‘successfully’ or ‘happily,’ but learn to see their value, often in retrospect.
Consider always the implications of choices and decisions — as in Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken" last lines: "I took the one less traveled by/ And that has made all the difference."
Soon after college graduation but too late, too far to get a pennant on the truncated map, I joined the Peace Corps as a volunteer teacher in Africa. That did make a valuable difference.
Yes, I’ve had an amazing life of adventures following, often zig-zaggedly, and never easily, my childhood dreams of a world-career. Having worked and lived globally in many countries, I’m still working worldwide daily, now often virtually teaching diplomacy, journalism and news.
Here I’ll add a seventh lesson: “In life experiences, if you can have a positive influence on even a few people, you should be pleased.” (Advice in an encouraging letter from my father, Henry E. Colton, in Asheville to me as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching on Mt. Kenya.)
Today I’m offering these my lessons learned as my birthday gift to caring readers to encourage you all worldwide, regardless of place or age, to keep pursuing your own good dreams.
Elizabeth (Liz) Colton, Ph.D., author, diplomat, Emmy Award winning journalist and professor, currently teaches diplomacy and the media worldwide for UNITAR and partner international universities. Some of her lessons cited in this article were part of her 2021inaugural lecture for Warren Wilson College’s endowed Ian Robertson Distinguished Lecture in Inspired Work series.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Life lessons: following dreams to Peace Corps can help others