7 : Following Your Bliss
Continuing with the stress/well-being theme, in this issue I’m going to talk about a major cause of stress in many people’s lives – being in the wrong career (and by ‘career’ I mean whatever work you do to earn your living, whether you are a salaried employee or self-employed, running a small business or a creative artist).
I’m often asked to work with individuals and groups on ‘work/life balance’. This phrase seems to imply that there is ‘life’ and there is ‘work’‘. Life is one thing, work is another? Work is not part of life? 'Life’ is what you do in the time when you don’t ‘have to’ work? Unfortunately, for many people this is true. In a recent UK survey, 57% of respondents said that, given their time again, they would choose a different career.
‘Given your time again’? You will never be given your time again. This is it!
So, why do people stay in work which, at best, doesn’t fulfil, energise and excite them; at worst, makes them unhappy,stressed and even ill? Before reading further, just jot down any reasons that might cause you to feel that you couldn’t change direction – even if you’d like to.
Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard people give :
- Fear of change – unwillingness to step out of your ‘comfort zone’
- Fear of failure
- Fear of success (things would change, more responsibility, who would a ‘successful you’ be?)
- Financial obligations
- Impact on pension
- Lack of confidence in self
- Fear of making the ‘wrong’ decision
- Don’t want to ‘waste’ the investment you’ve made in your existing career/skills/qualifications; Don’t want to disappoint other people’s expectations
and
- You know what you don’t want but you don’t know what you do want.
That’s an awful lot of potential reasons not to go looking for your ideal job/career/business. So, there must be some other, even more compelling reasons, why some people do commit to creating their ideal career. Before reading on, jot down what they might be for you.
Research shows that those who are most satisfied and motivated by their work earn their living in a way that reflects their real passions, that draws on their strengths and uses their favourite skills, that energises rather than drains them.
And perhaps most importantly of all, work which allow them to honour their deeply-held values and to be their ‘real self’.
So if you know you want to do something different but you’re not sure what, a good starting point is to attempt to identify your most important and deeply held Values. In coaching, the concept of ‘values’ is not used to mean your moral standards orprinciples (for example, ‘honesty’ ), although these may be included within them. Instead, they are seen as those qualities that ‘define’ who you really are. When you are honouring your values in the way you live and work, you experience yourself as living in integrity with yourself and are at peace. When you are not, you may well feel uneasy and unfulfilled (without necessarily being clear about the cause). Yet values are not always easy to identify. Some of what we think of as our values may actually be ‘shoulds’ or have been given to us by other people – parents, teachers, religion etc.
Here’s one activity that can help you to identify your values.
Think of different times in your life when things were ‘flowing’, you were on a roll, you felt alive and energised. It may have lasted for weeks or just minutes. Find at least 5 then choose one and write down your answers to the following questions :
- What was important about what was happening?
- What engaged your passion and aliveness?
- What contributed to that experience of ‘flow’?
- What was interesting about that experience/situation?
- What needs of yours were being met?
- Who were you being in that experience/situation?
Then repeat the activity for some of the other experiences.
What Values can you see operating in what you have written?
Sometimes using a ‘string’ of words, rather than just one, can help you get even clearer about what this value means for you. (The same words often have different meanings for different people).
For example, three of my important values are :
- Being 'real' (not playing games/not going along with/speaking out/not pretending/taking risks)
- "It's just the gypsy in my soul" (exploring/searching/journeying/learning/being)
- Making a difference (supporting people to make choices not based on fear/helping people to find their ‘vocation’)
Choose four values that are important to you and score each in terms of the extent to which it is being honoured in your current work (10 – totally, 0 – not at all).
If your score is :
35 – 40 Sounds like you really love your work. I’m surprised you read this far!
21 – 34 Time to think about a change? To have the courage to dream?
20 or less Well done for managing to get out of bed in the morning (Maybe you don’t?)
If this Article has inspired you to take a fresh look at your work, the How Fulfilling & Meaningful Is Your Work link takes you to an overview of a programme which engages you in a journey of ‘Exploration, Dreaming & Discovery’ to identify your ideal way of earning your living.
End quotes
“Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”. Confucius
“(Vocation is) the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need”
quoted in “Let Your Life Speak” by Parker J. Palmer
And my favourite quote of all : “Follow your bliss”. Joseph Campbell
This has become a very famous ‘catch phrase’. The full quote is :
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time”.
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