What Color Is Your Parachute? for College

Thought Organizers and How to Use This Book

This book is about you: your ideas, your vision, your creativity, your thoughts. And it s a book, so the first step is to read it. You can just read it through if you wish, but you ll get much more out of it if you do the exercises. Writing everything down greatly increases the likelihood that you will remember all your brilliant insights and ideas.

Many of the exercises are called Thought Organizers because that s just what they do. They help you take your random ideas and thoughts and put them in a format that makes them easy to see. They not only organize your thoughts, they help clarify your plans, simplify the job search, and save you time. They will also help you remember what s important about yourself and the future you re seeking.

These Thought Organizers are simple shapes (lines, lists, squares, circles, etc.) you can easily re-create anywhere on your computer or even on a napkin at your favorite coffee shop. What s important is that you do them, and you have a place to store them. Set up a system on your computer as well as in a notebook or another paper filing system. That way you can use whatever works best at a given moment. Consider using an app, like Trello, to organize your search process. Some quick suggestions for powering through this system:

 Consider everything you write a possibility. But not a rule or a requirement, the goals you set might not work. Reset them. You might change your mind. Keep your plans flexible and update them regularly. The job search can be a fast-moving process; even when you think you know what is going to happen, you might be surprised.

Adopt the GPS tracker as your metaphor. When you make a wrong turn or an unexpected stop, what does it do? It recalibrates with no judgment. You can recalibrate, too, any time you want.

 Bring a friend along. Richard Bolles had a great philosophy about the job search. He called it

Katharine Brooks, EdD, is an award-winning, nationally certified counselor and career coach who is currently the Evans Family Executive Director of the Career Center for Vanderbilt university. She has also directed career centers at The University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest university, and Dickinson College. She is the author of You Majored in What? Designing Your Path From College to Career and co-author of What Color Is Your Parachute? 2021. She writes a blog, Career Transitions, for Psychology Today.