Rearview Check: What Deserves One Final Glance?

Get your engines running… head out onto the highway… 🏎️✨

With the Bathurst 1000 getting closer, I decided to mark the seven-week countdown in a very Jenn, aka “The Gnome That Inspires”, way: by sharing a different downloadable activity from my Drive Your Career: Shift Gears with Hope and Purpose approach each Tuesday.

For anyone reading from outside Australia, the Bathurst 1000 is an iconic annual Australian motorsport event held at Mount Panorama. Although Bathurst provided the starting-grid spark for this series, the reflections and activities are not limited to motorsport enthusiasts, one race, one season or one country.

They are designed to offer different ways of exploring our career-life journeys, navigating change and noticing what might help us get curious, gain clarity and get unstuck.

The Drive Your Career journey

Over the first six weeks, we will explore six Drive Your Career capabilities:

🏁 Rearview Check

🏁 Headlight Clarity

🏁 Future Mapping

🏁 Shifting Gears

🏁 Forward Steering

🏁 Adaptive Suspension

During Bathurst race week, we will then take a playful little detour with a curiosity-filled activity that brings some of these ideas together.

Where Drive Your Career began

Drive Your Career began through my work supporting veterans navigating career transition. By listening to the language they used and understood, I began using automotive metaphors, language, concepts and mechanical parts to make conversations about career exploration and navigating change feel more familiar, practical and tangible.

Those early ideas gradually developed into my Drive Your Career card deck, framework and a broader approach that can be used across many different career-life contexts.

Automotive language gives us another way into conversations that can otherwise feel abstract or overwhelming. We can check signals, look beneath the hood, adjust the settings, select a different gear or notice whether something in the system requires attention.

We do not always need to begin by demanding an immediate destination or perfectly formed plan. Sometimes, the journey begins by noticing.

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Beginning with a Rearview Check

Before driving away, one of the things we should automatically do is check what is behind us. The same principle can apply when considering our career-life journey.

Looking back is not about remaining in the past or reversing indefinitely. A purposeful glance behind us can help us recognise the experiences that shaped us, the strengths we developed, the lessons we want to retain and what we may no longer need to carry forward.

Sometimes, we discover that an experience we had dismissed contains evidence of adaptability, courage, creativity or persistence. At other times, we notice an old expectation, assumption or story that has remained attached to us long after it stopped being useful.

The curiosity question for this Rearview Check is:

What deserves one final glance before you drive forward?

Download the Rearview Check activity

The downloadable Rearview Check activity offers a playful space to explore that question.

There is no single correct way to respond. You might write, draw, add colour, use images or combine several approaches. The purpose is not to produce a polished answer. It is to notice what appears when you give yourself permission to look back with curiosity.

Download the full Review Check: Bumpers Stickers From the Past tactivity here:

If you feel comfortable, you might also share what you discover or use the activity to spark a conversation with someone travelling beside you.

A little team curiosity spark

Have you ever considered what analysing a suspension system might reveal about the different roles people play in keeping a team running smoothly?

I will leave that question travelling rather than unpacking the metaphor here. It is one of the automotive-inspired ideas I use to help teams become curious about the contributions, connections and dynamics that may not always be immediately visible. Reach out if you would like to explore this idea further or discuss how my automotive-inspired approach could help your team gain clarity and get unstuck.

Wherever you begin, remember that checking the rear-view mirror is not the same as driving backwards. Sometimes, one intentional glance is what helps us move forward with greater clarity.