By design, short- and long-term career plans are useful because they force us to look ahead, mapping out goals for the future. But what if we spent some time looking back? What if we plotted our current situation on a map and moved backward to 2007, taking a thorough and honest review of how we arrived at this point?

"You have to realize that there's a chance it's not going to be pretty, especially if you aren't satisfied with where you are in the present," says Aaron Crenshaw, a job-productivity consultant based in San Jose, California. "But it's an important exercise. It forces you to go back and look at that six-month period you decided to take a break from working, or those years you hated your boss and, as a result, did the absolute minimum while you were at work."

But a 10-year review does more than look at the negatives. A trek back to where you were a decade ago can help you realize the reasons behind those periods of time that resulted in the most success. Crenshaw says either way, it's an exercise worth the effort. "You can look at how a promotion -- or being passed over for one -- sparked your best work," he says. "You see more than the successes and the failures. You see how you arrived at each one and where you went from there."

Collecting the data

As you begin creating your timeline to the past, you need to realize that the most difficult part of summarizing an honest backstory is being truthful about your previous experiences and consequences. "It's all about cause and effect," says Isabelle Egan, a 43-year-old pharmaceutical sales representative from Arlington, Texas, who agreed to create her own career history. "I took a narrative approach, which is what my husband Josh, who is a writer, suggested," says Egan. "I wrote my career biography -- everything that has happened since I graduated from the University of Texas in 1997."

While that initial step was helpful, Egan says she didn't get to the meat of her career path until she broke down her 5,000-word bio into bullet points, one for each significant career move. She wrote those points on index cards and put them on a wall. Egan then linked each card to the next with a list of the reasons, real or perceived, that she ended up at the next point -- or in this case, the next index card -- in her career.

"Some were obvious connectors, like 'Had my baby' for index card No. 4, which stated, 'Took six months off. Did nothing but be a mom.' Or 'Josh accepted a job at Oklahoma State University,' which was the textual link to index card No. 7, 'Sold cosmetics,'" she says.

Egan says the cosmetics piece of her history -- "It wasn't a bad job. It was just a stopgap gig for me, but it was a bad fit." -- helped her hone in on what she wanted to do for the duration of her career. "I'm motivated when I'm part of a bigger operation. I can be self-motivated but I save that part of me for being the best mom I can be, the best wife I can be, the best sister I can be," she says. "For work, I need the structure. I like being part of the machine. I like the pressure of knowing that the machine can stop moving if I don't do my job."

Moving forward

Egan says looking back at her career brought her to another realization. "I sacrificed very little for my family," she says. "I'm not saying that in a heartless way. I'm just saying I've always worked for great people who understand the realities of raising children. I was promoted three times in the past seven years, and each promotion was within a year of having a baby. That means I worked for people who trusted me and let me be a mom and do my job."

Crenshaw says he often hears from people who learn some surprising things about themselves after taking a detailed look back, including a woman who told him about new opportunities that came her way after her divorce.

"At first, she thought it was because she was more relaxed and focused, but upon examination, she realized it was because she wasn't car-pooling with her husband, who worked nearby and always left the house late. That perpetual lateness ruined her reputation," says Crenshaw. "The CEO of a software firm in California told me he never realized how his diet affected his productivity. He noticed his most unhappy and unproductive period occurred when he was having his kitchen renovated at home and he was having all sorts of problems with the city, which delayed the project for months. He says he ate fast food for lunch and dinner, five days a week, which led to his lackluster performance. When the renovation was complete, he ate healthier, was happier and did better work."

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