Expectations

We have a lot of opportunities for career development starting first with a series of personality tests and a "visioning" exercise where the world renowned Tim Butler tries to hypnotize you by saying the same thing over and over again.

"You are where you want to be five years from now. Where are you? What do you see? Who does this job? Who else is there? Are there plants?"

While my personality tests revealed firstly that I'm a dork and secondly that I want unstructured lax work environments ("freeflow of ideas" is an image my career team came up with), during the visioning exercise, I imagined... Ally McBeal. High corporate office. Large windows. Expensive plants. Me in a suit and minion asking for my approval on random documents. Doesn't make sense, or does it? While all these career soul seeking showed me that I know what I want (and am sometimes just too chicken to do it), deep inside me, there's still a desire to conform to societal pressures of what it means to be "successful". This effect was a lot better when I was not in the east coast when the breadth of things people did with their lives seemed to expand... but now that I'm back, it's so easy to fall back into thinking those expectations from others are actually what I want. The corporate office, the money, the prestige, the elite education and the sophisticated tastes and activities. Interestingly, it seemed like every career team but mine also talked about the importance of prestige later in life.

Is this really an east coast thing or is it that I'm not exposed to this in California and abroad because I never fully integrated there?