Mondays aren’t always such fun.

But I was privileged to spend an hour or so of mine today with El Edwards, interviewing her as part of my occasional series on purpose and meaning.

If you haven’t met El, she’s the woman behind the site Truth Passion Joy. She’s a writer & digital strategist on a very interesting mission: to empower children & young people to do work they love by inspiring their parents to show them it’s possible.

You might recall I talked about her in my kick-off post. One of the things I really admire about her is the way that she has allowed her sense of purpose to evolve in the public eye.

So I was interested to learn more and share it with you.

We did record this as a video, but the visual quality is poor. Nevertheless, using El’s technical wizardry, we uncoupled the audio, and here it is for your enjoyment.

Download audio file (christine-el.mp3)

(If you’re listening via RSS or a mobile device, please click here to listen online.)

I’d love to hear, in the comment section below, what insights El’s journey prompts in you.

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Ever have the feeling that work is playing a bigger role in your life than it should?

You know, that haunting sense that you’re expecting more of it, and it’s demanding more of you than seems healthy? That it’s got your psyche by the balls, dulling your ability to attend to anything else?

Of course, you’re a seasoned professional and have understood the dedication and sacrifice that come with the territory of having a career as opposed to just a job. Careers need heart and soul immersion, right?

So, how come you sometimes find yourself asking why you can’t push back on it, and manage it with the same kind of work life proportions that you see other people doing?

Yeah, I know you think you’re just tired and that the answer is to book your next holiday, and put yourself on a time management course.

But could the answer lie in facing up to the relationships – or lack of them – in your life?

The Tell-Tale Signs

1. Work is your life. If anyone asks you who you are, you struggle to define yourself beyond what you do for a living.
2. Weekends are for sleeping and getting ready for Monday. You don’t plan anything because Saturdays and Sundays are about recovering from one week and getting yourself in gear for the next. You have long lies, you go to gym, or spa, or laundry. You shop for office clothes, catch up on lost reading, and even do that presentation you know you won’t get done in the office.
3. Work dominates most of your waking head space. The first thing you do in the morning is check your smart phone for email or the state of the markets overnight. Your commuting time is spent on calls. Or on replaying conversations from the day that you wish had gone better.
4. Your romantic attachments are difficult to non-existent. You may be married or living with someone. You may be dating or having an affair. Or you may be single. Whatever, there’s no sense of “happily”  in any of it. You may do a good job of putting on to the outside world that everything’s good and sorted, but you know there’s baggage you’re avoiding.
5. You lurch between elation and disappointment at work. You want work to love the shit out of you. When something great happens or you get good feedback, you’re puffed up and proud or yourself. When something bad occurs you can feel devastated. You may translate it all into what sounds like logical business talk, but it all feels very raw and personal.

So What?

I know this isn’t territory that most executive coaches would bother to venture into, but I will.

In the UK and US business and the economy dominate our cultures. Add to the mix the changes happening to communities and families as a result of the increasing pressure on city living, and it’s not hard to see why work becomes the one thing that, for many, we can relate to as a kind of constant.

So much so that work has become a substitute for love.

Remedy

Changing the picture is far from a quick fix. Let’s face it, if it were easy to learn how to navigate good relationships, and to confront the personal learnings from doing so, you’d have cracked it by now. But it takes time and commitment. It needs to be worked at.

A good first step, however, is to have some empathy for yourself about where you’re at.

How come that it’s safer, easier to love the inanimate being of your work, than it is a person? Whatever, the answer doesn’t come by crapping on yourself, but by being sad for the part of you that has made that decision.

Then do something about it.

Many seriously smart people struggle in relationships because their smartness has come about by the development of their logical selves to a level that’s far beyond their emotional selves. But just because there has been a gap doesn’t mean there always will be.

A lot of the solution comes from building your awareness, and being ruthlessly honest with yourself, together with experimenting with new things. Friends for brunch on the weekend? Quitting an affair because you’re ready to value a committed relationship? Having an honest conversation with someone close about something that you resent?

Loving work is an ideal that I buy in to.

But work is not love.

If it has become so for you, don’t you owe it to yourself to separate the two?

So, what are you waiting for?

Photo credit:  All rights reserved by mr_moremi

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What makes for a brilliant career? Many people will tell you it’s about the quality of their CV: the brand names they’ve worked for, the job titles they’ve had, the progression they’ve made through the ranks; the businesses they’ve driven to success.

But if you buy into this picture, could you be deluding yourself?

Once upon a time, I had a brilliant career. HR Director for an über brand, corner office, good salary, bonus and stock options. What’s not to love about that? It was great going to parties or networking events and when people asked what I did, watching their approving nods. Approval felt good.

Envy, of course, was better. And admit it, don’t you love flaunting it when you have something other people desire? I certainly did!

Knowing that I was doing very well in society’s eyes made all the effort and sacrifice okay. While my CV screamed of academic successes and lust-after job titles, it didn’t matter that inside I felt hollow. Because outside was all that mattered.

Except that after a while it became a little weighty to keep propping up this picture, perpetuating my own myth. And, although at the time I could not have articulated it with this clarity, I came to intuit that I was deluding myself on a very important point.

Having a brilliant career is not the same as doing a life’s work.

The former, I have come to see, is pretty superficial and is guided by what the world judges as good. The latter is all about working from a soulful place and with purpose and meaning. I’m not saying that these two things are mutually exclusive. I’m sure there are lots of people in all lines of business that work in a meaningful way and have brilliant careers as judged by the world.

But don’t delude yourself that one is automatically the other.

In my case, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to do my life’s work while working for a corporation, and so after a while I quit. Besides knowing that I wanted to do coach and psychotherapy training to deepen my ability to work incisively with people I had only a fuzzy picture of how things would unfold. Being a former control freak, that was scary. What if I ruined my fabulous reputation and there was no way back? But I began freelancing to give myself the safety, funding and space to find out.

My work has morphed over the years that I’ve been self-employed. I’ve earned more or less, depending on all kind of things, not least of which are the decisions I’ve made about the directions to go in or not. Now, I’m happy that I work as Christine. In whatever guise you encounter me, it’s me you get. Do I still have a brilliant career? Some folks would tell you that they think I’m a role model for carving your own thing, others that I lost the plot some time ago. They’re both right.

What’s important now is how it feels to me. So long as it feels real and I feel alive in what I’m doing my career is brilliant on my terms. And that’s the difference.

What delusions might you be spinning in your own career? How might you break their spell and start building a brilliant career on your terms?

Image: Chris Halderman

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Do you confuse what you do for a living with who you are as a person, so that when something bad happens at work it affects the whole of your life? This is a theme that has come up in my work this week, and one I thought I’d share with you.

My people are hardcore professionals. You not only care about having a great career, but want to feel good about your life too. But because what you do for a living is such a fundamental pillar of how you understand yourself, you sometimes get work and you mixed up.

You know how it is. You have a poor trading day; you get critical feedback from your managing partner; you lose a client you’d expected to secure; your business’s blog traffic tanks. But you don’t see these things in isolation.They take on a blackness for you that pervades your whole life.

You take your misery home with you and brood on it. You tell yourself you were never cut out to be a trader, lawyer, sales director or online marketer. Feeling shit pervades your whole being. You sulk in front of the television, cancel some social thing, skip gym and eat more ice cream than you’d planned.

If imperfect things happen, you must be fundamentally imperfect.

It’s a mindset that can make you feel miserable, and in some instances lead to a scenario where work takes more of a priority in life than it should, as you strive for the kind of imagined excellence that will allow you to feel good about yourself. But that’s an illusion, my friend, as you keep upping the ante on yourself to achieve more and better.

The solution? Uncouple these two things. Know that you and your performance are different and need different things. You need your support and understanding. Your performance needs skills, feedback, learning, practice and improvement. You endure for the long term. Performance is more focused, can and will change over time.

Next time you begin to feel that a bad day at work threatens to overwhelm you, catch the thought in its tracks. Realize that you can separate it from who you are. Instead of allowing whatever it is to sink you, recognize you have a choice. Hold it away from you. See it as a piece of information, feedback, something you can do something about. Put yourself to the task of figuring out what that is. And then, get out there and enjoy your evening anyway!

Does this ring bells for you at all? How do you mix up who you are with what you do and with what results? How can you support yourself to separate these things out?

photo credit: Symic

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Those people who aren’t prepared to take step one, never take step two. Zig Ziglar

So you’ve decided you want to make a change to your life. You’ve decided that after all this time of working for ‘the man’ and being down trodden, you’re going to do this whole ‘creating your perfect life’ thing. You know what you want and you have a vague idea about how you’ll produce the results.

But you don’t do it.

You don’t leave that job. You don’t make that break. You don’t start something new. You just sit there, doing nothing.

To make it worse you’ve now been stuck in this limbo for so long you’re becoming bitter to those around you who are making the jump and you’ve started to make excuses for your lack of momentum. Do yourself a favour, if you don’t have the balls to do this yet, don’t bitch and moan at others who do.

I worked with a guy once, who wanted to be a model. He’d had interest from agencies and stuff and was keen to get going but he was staying stuck. He had lots of opportunities to do it and make the dream actually happen but he took none of them. Why? Well in this case it was fear of failure that was stopping him from doing what he wanted. He didn’t want to fail and that alone was robbing him of his dream.

But he never told anyone that he had “the” fear. What he told was a bunch of stories about why it wasn’t happening. And boy there were some great ones over the week and months!

Are you just making excuses?

It’s easier to stand still than go for a run isn’t it? If that wasn’t true, the gym industry wouldn’t be the success it is. Because we all know it’s harder to move than to stand still, it’s now people’s jobs to motivate us to exercise. But if you’re making excuses you’re standing still and that won’t turn those dreams of yours into reality.

Some excuses you might be giving for standing still…

• I don’t have the time.
• My manager doesn’t support me.
• I can’t do it as well as other people.
• I don’t know where to start.
• I don’t have the money.
• There’s no opportunities for me.

Bullshit! These are just claims from you about not having the resources but actually what makes people successful in this life is resourcefulness. If you really want this badly you’ll find a way. If you really want this to happen you’ll make it happen. The question is how badly do you want it? How much are you prepared to put on the line for all of this to come in a spectacular way? How much does your heart race at the thought of your dreams coming true?

If you’re not moving and just making excuses for why it isn’t happening try this….

Get a pen and a sheet of paper and write down all of the reasons you’ve given for not chasing your dreams yet and for standing still. Think of all the things you’ve said and done to stop yourself from starting. When you’ve done that go back through the list and come up with a solution to over it. For example:

Excuse: I don’t have time.

Solution: I can create more time by not watching mindless TV in the evening.

Excuse: I don’t know where to start.

Solution: I’m going to start in the only way I know how, from the beginning and make sure I find out how others started off.

Now is the time to stop making excuses if you really want this to happen. It’s time to shift your mindset from “poor little me” to “watch out world, here I come.” It’s time to stop bitching and moaning at other’s success and show the world that you have something to contribute too.

It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man actually in the ring. – Theodore Roosevelt

Ben Lumley writes about Success and Personal Achievement at TheBenLumley.com. He is a Personal Achievement Coach and Motivational Speaker. Make sure your grab the RSS feed to keep updated and also subscribe to FREE Weekly Success Tips.

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Can you believe that a year ago this week I was loading a van with all my stuff and heading from my much loved house in Wimbledon, to a cottage in the Buckinghamshire countryside? (Well, technically, I wasn’t loading the van, but you get the picture.)

The whole purpose was to allow me to create my own different kind of work. I had a sense of what that would look like when I set out. But let me share with you some of the awesomeness I’m seeing from this vantage point in my transformation journey.

Why move?

That’s a question I get asked a lot. Why not just stay in London and do something new? Well, I figured that, if I was serious about creating fundamental life change, I needed to do something symbolic, to send out the message to myself, the universe and anyone else for that matter, that I meant business.

What was driving me, was a big need to create a more fun, funky and entrepreneurial way of working than I’d been used to. One that was more virtual and portable, because down the track I want to do more traveling and be flexible on where in the world I live.

Getting out of the city was a way of indicating that I was ready to break my dependence on it and to take the first steps into my more virtual lifestyle.

The benefits of the country

Listen, I’m a city girl at heart. Don’t forget that I was born and brought up in Glasgow, and besides London, have lived in Johannesburg and visited New York a lot on business. I miss the convenience of having Sainsburys and Starbucks on my doorstep, and bristle with the need to get more planned and organized about food shopping and socializing.

Still, life beats to a different rhythm in my little village. So, I feel more grounded and centered. I love that when the weather’s good (and even when it isn’t) that I can go walking in country lanes at lunch time, or just when I need a break or to re-inspire myself. I’ve become so much more aware of nature and of the seasons. I adore the pheasants and ducks and sheep and owls and moor hens and all the wonderful wild life that lives on my doorstep. When I’m working, I look out to flowers and fields and trees, where there once was traffic and passing school kids.

My energy as a result is much, much better, and with it my focus, my creativity and productivity.

Crushing a limiting belief

Before working as I do now, my business was corporate and came from referral. I had a pretty good reputation among some circles as a “go to” coach and OD consultant.

But I got bored, and had become a little cynical about the role coaching was being expected to play in some businesses. I wanted to work with smart business sorts, but with less interference. That meant learning how to pitch myself to my people directly. A scary prospect, as I had always told myself I was crap at marketing.

The truth is that, marketing as it used to look – all static websites and cold calling – doesn’t interest me. But, when I “got” that I could use social media to create relationships that allowed folks to opt in – or not – to what I had to say and offer, I suddenly became very excited about learning how to market myself that way. That’s just so much more “me”. I still have much to learn, but now I’m voraciously hungry to build on what I already know and am spurred on by how much I enjoy developing connections online.

The driving force of the blog

A key catalyst in the whole transforming me process has been this blog. As I’ve written before, I’ve always loved writing. And I’ve had a closet passion for the role work plays in creating meaning, and in being a vehicle for fundamental growth and change in people’s lives. So, it was serendipitous that I stumbled upon blogging at the time I was getting restless about wanting to be more open about all of that.

Creating the blog, and daring to decide it was going to become a significant one, meant that I had to in tandem decide that I was going to stand out and differentiate myself. I have a pretty unique skills mix and indeed take on the world of work, but I think I was afraid to put it out there because I couldn’t find a box for it. And meantime, it felt cozier to promote myself as a consultant, coach, therapist based on whomever I was talking to at the time.

Blogging, and connecting with some of the wonderful people it has opened me up to, has been fundamental in helping me find the confidence to say who I really am, and to express myself as me, not a job title. That personal learning is, in turn, fundamental to the work that I do in helping others do the same for themselves and to feel the power in that place.

The power of the Internet

Okay, so with a successful traditional career behind me, I’m not one of these phenomenal young bloggers that was born attached to her laptop. I’ve had to learn geek stuff from scratch. But I’m delighted that I was curious enough to try. Because not only has it come naturally and not only do I love it, but it has opened my eyes with a passion to the possibilities for work and life that exist in this dimension.

The diversity of my connections

I’ve always loved and done best when surrounded by all kinds of different people, and I’m delighted to say that working virtually has opened up the horizons of my little cottage to folks from across the globe. On any given day I can be chatting to friends in the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Israel, Greece…

And geography is not the only point of difference. There’s also the amazingly different things that people do. From technology gods to marketing geniuses, from worklife protagonists to HR mavericks, from small business owners to writing magicians. All with something important to say about themselves, their lives and the things that drive them. Then, I pop down to the village pub to hear some of the trials and tribulations of the farmers trying to get the harvest in before the weather changes.

Phenomenal!

And people who don’t work this way are often cynical about the depths of connections you make or whether you can really call a Twitter friend, a friend. But I’ve made some friend and client connections online that feel as strong and enduring to me as any I’ve made offline. Signing into Twitter every morning, is like walking into a virtual office and catching up like you do in any real office. The thing is, I don’t need to be in any office to connect with the same mix of key folks every day. I can do so from wherever.

My learning and development

One of the big things to change over the last year is the way that I learn. Historically, I’ve preferred to be in a classroom with a group of people I respect and admire. I did all my coaching and therapy trainings that way.

Now, however, I’m preferring virtual learning. It’s not that I won’t pick up a book, or go to a seminar, it’s that I’m more likely to want to download an eBook, or sign up for a virtual program.

And that’s only when we’re talking about more formal stuff. Blogs and social networking sites provide endless opportunity through the content they share to get news, see fresh stuff and have my mind stimulated, or just as platforms to reach out for help, and ask questions.

It’s awesome.

The world of work is changing. I am a protagonist and thought leader in all of that and in any case have always believed that folks who teach need to be able to walk their talk. The last year has been tough at times. Taking my blog from plain vanilla Thesis theme and wondering what the hell to talk about, to having created 108 published posts on custom designed Headway, while doing client work, and developing new products has been hard work. But I’ve loved every minute. And I’m loving the life it’s giving me.

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I was sitting in Costa first thing Monday morning, lost to my blog week planning thoughts, when a dad walked in, pushing his toddler daughter in a buggy. I watched as the pair of them got their respective latte and babyccino and sat at the table next to mine, her in a high chair that a barista fetched from the corner for them. It was like they were on a date.

“Sweet,” I thought and got back to my serious work. You know the score: big agenda; lots to do; best get on.

I may have thought nothing more of it, had I not been hauled from my reveries by some squealing that was going on between the besotted pair. I have to admit to being annoyed that my concentration, and my important thoughts, were being interrupted by a baby and goo-gooing father. I kind of felt like saying, “Guys, I’ve got work to do.”

But I didn’t.

For, something about the way they were behaving caught my attention. There he was, clearly the grown up and in charge and all, but intent on having fun with his little girl. And there she was, all tiny and blonde and dressed in candy floss pink, angling for some silliness with dad.

One made noises, the other mirrored it. One tickled, the other squirmed, laughed and reciprocated. The baby had a chocolate moustache from her drink, and dad had bits of panettone in his hair, but neither of them seemed to have noticed. If anything, it made the scene even more endearing.

The whole thing was infectious. Every so often dad or baby would look around the shop, catch an onlooker’s eye, and smile. In turn we all began smiling and nodding to one another about the pair of them.

“So cute,” I said to a man who was sitting to the other side of me.

“They’re wonderful at that age,” said an older woman across the aisle.

The baby felt me looking at her and turned her gaze on me. My eyes widened as she held my stare, then she hid her face in her hands, unselfconsciously inviting me into a game of peek-a-boo.

“Are you flirting with the lady now?” said dad.

Everyone giggled and smiled. For a few moments before we all got back to the serious business of Monday morning and work, we were a little community around this adorable kid.

Fast forward to later in the week, when a client was talking to me about feeling stuck. Her business that she’s developing around a blog hasn’t been meeting her expectations of it. Traffic was levelling out and income trailing her targets. Demoralising for her, as she’s planning on getting it all to a point where it’ll bring in enough cash to allow her to ditch the day job.

We explored what was going on. Brainstormed practical things she could tweak, and mindset shifts she could make around her level of expectation. She went off with renewed excitement and enthusiasm. She’d recaptured something of her fundamental self-belief.

But some words she said stayed with me beyond the session. They were:

“I was doing so well. But it really all changed when I began to put pressure on myself to make money this way.”

It was only later that I connected her story with the experience I’d had earlier in the week.

Because, for some reason, it struck me to think about, how often when we do something as a hobby, we engage with it like children. With no requirement that it ever do anything for us, we can just love it for what it is. Without any self-consciousness we can try things and fail, and it’s no skin off our nose. Who cares if, in our enthusiasm and naivety, we make complete dicks of ourselves or end up wearing metaphoric chocolate moustaches? We’re so caught up in the spirit and fun of what we’re doing that we don’t notice. And we draw people to us because our enthusiasm is of itself so attractive.

That’s its magic.

Ah, but put big pressure on it to make money for us and its whole complexion changes. The kid is still there, but fun loving, besotted dad disappears and gives way to some strict internal school teacher that starts bossing us to deliver.

My client had been talking about the tyranny of writing schedules, social media presence, reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, building mailing lists and RSS subscribers.

Phew!

No wonder it had all felt so difficult. What she’d once been able to do for fun, and from a clever, quirky, all out to enjoy herself and kick ass place, had become a chore.

Her joy and spontaneity had gone. Maybe her readers had been picking that up?

So, does that mean that we shouldn’t try to make a business out of things we love?

Not at all. You saw how easily a tiny child drew people to her. If it’s engaged with in the same spirit, we can ignite our communities with our passion too.

And, sure, we can make good money from doing just that, and it’s good and right that we track what we’re doing and keep a commercial head on our shoulders. But the trick is not to put the financial targets first. Not to make money the fundamental purpose. Because that’s when we turn our dream back into a job. And, if I’m not mistaken, that’s what so many of us are trying to avoid.

So, take my advice. Engage your child magic and watch your fledgling business rock!

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I was already mulling over the idea of treating you to a more personal post for the August Bank Holiday weekend. But it was my friend Eleanor who gave me the call to action. Writing about how to earn a crust doing what you love, and picking up on a frivolous comment I’d left about my weekend chocolate cake hobby, she wrote:

That stuff that you love doing? The stuff that makes you smile? Can you do more of it and still get paid? This might seem like a really stupid question, especially if the thing you love doing is something like Christine’s eating chocolate cake. How can Christine get paid for eating cake?

My first reaction to El’s challenge was to say, “don’t be ridiculous, eating chocolate cake is my Saturday treat, and what has it got to do with making money?”

But, since I like both chocolate cake and making money, and I’m always up for learning things about myself, even in completely wacky ways, I thought I’d stick with the question and see where it took me.

I don’t actually need much of an excuse to spend time in my local coffee shop but I thought a chocolate cake fieldtrip was called for, so off I headed this morning in search of whatever magic I could find.

Sure enough it came in the form of childhood memories.

It’s probably no surprise to know I loved chocolate anything as a child. My mum was a terrific baker and I ate pretty much everything she produced. Often before it actually made it to the oven.

These were terrific days. When I wasn’t eating, and sometimes even when I was, I was often holed up behind the sofa with pens, papers, crayons, paints, gripped by my creative project of the moment. See, I had the biggest fun as a kid writing stories, and doing all the illustrations for them. Sometimes the stories were serious; sometimes they were satirical and witty. Whatever, I just loved putting stuff together that people would both read and be affected by.

I should have been a writer. That was after all my dream. The child in me had visions of living in a beautiful old cottage, with my dream husband, and a brood of cute kids. When I wasn’t keeping house and feeding my family chocolate cake, I’d be producing block buster books. Stuff that seemed light and frothy on the surface, but captured people’s hearts and so made a difference to their lives.

My father’s death more than took the edge off of things.

But the killer blow was delivered by my guidance teacher who simply sneered as she met with me and my mother to decide what subjects I do for exams.

“Nobody makes money from anything arty in Glasgow, Christine” she said. “You need to focus your efforts on academic subjects and think about a commercial career instead.”

With my dad gone, and us living off my mum’s widow’s pension, what I heard that night, whether it was implied or not, was that I couldn’t do things I loved and make money from them. That I needed to stop thinking like a child and grow up.

I’d always thought that the creative kid had died at that point. But looking back I see that’s not true. What happened was she just got clever and did what she had to do to survive. She took her story in a different direction, and created a new leading role for herself: the business woman. And she played it impeccably. It was what got her through school subjects in which she had no interest; pushed her to do things that felt incongruous; and propelled her to levels she would not otherwise have chosen.

Neither of my parents were around to see me become an HR Director, or to launch my own business. If they had, they’d have been beyond proud. Such achievement was beyond their wildest dreams. So, the career girl certainly did good.

And, make no mistake: it was a part in which I came to feel very at home. It gave me lots of fun challenges, allowed me to meet lots of wonderful people, and enabled me to do lots of international traveling.

But it wasn’t sustainable in the long term.

Curiously when the persona began to crack, and I needed to find out who I was beyond it, how I was going to live and work without it, I intuitively turned to writing as a form of therapy. It allowed me to express myself in ways I may otherwise have not. It was through writing that I could articulate my passion for coaching and counseling, the things I’ve focused on in the last years, that I completely adore and that pay my way in life. But having retrieved the artist in me, I’m not letting her go.

My best writing has always been done in coffee shops, and often with some form of cake or other. Perhaps it’s just the caffeine and sugar buzz. Perhaps too there’s something of the warmth and busyness I find there that invokes happy memories of my family living room and stimulates my creativity.

And, sure, I’m not making money from eating chocolate cake.

But, I am marketing my business almost exclusively through my writing now.

Here’s the big, circle-completing part of the picture, and I only just saw it this way myself. So much of the work I do with clients is about story. When they come to me, although they never use this language, it’s because something of their story doesn’t fit, or is difficult to deal with. They’ve lost their way in the plot. An old script needs to change.  A new storyboard needs creating. Partnering with others as they share their own cliff-hangers, romances and heartaches is privileged creative work indeed. Can you imagine what it feels like to work with someone who becomes truly gripped by your story; who can hold all the sub plots together; who can help you emerge from your own self-created mask and carry your true self forward in life?

Now that I’ve had this massive insight about story, will I do more with it? Will I write more? Will I start producing block busters?

You’ll just have to wait for the next chapter! But meantime I’d love to know in what direction you’d take this story next.

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Lots of people get sucked into the current new age wisdom that we all have one unique thing we’re called to do in life.

They spend years, not to mention thousands of pounds, on the next book, coach or workshop that offers the key to the holy grail.

Meantime they feel pretty miserable doing whatever it is they’re doing – or not – right now. And beat themselves up for being a lesser person because, unlike the zealous peddlars of the vocation myth, they haven’t found what work it is they’re really supposed to be doing.

Experiments

In working with clients having this experience, I encourage them to take all that forward-looking pressure off themselves and live in the present.

What if they could allow themselves to find something meaningful in what they’re doing right now?

What if they saw their current work or lack of it as an experiment, telling them something about themselves, their lives, and what they most enjoy?

What would they discover? How could they use that learning to course-correct their current situation, or future work decisions?

Not one calling but several

In my client work, as in my own life, I see time and time again how what we do shifts and morphs over time. The picture of vocation as a static, certain thing into which we can plough ourselves for endless years is misguided.

Sure, some people know early on that they’re called to be a doctor or singer or lawyer or whatever.

But for others it’s a discovery process of finding one jigsaw puzzle piece of ourselves after another in the different things we do. Without valuing the purpose of the bit we’re doing right now, we’ll never get to understand the full picture.

Implications

If you’re someone searching for your one big calling, I encourage you to sit and think about this today:

How might you be diminishing yourself by constantly yearning after some other thing than what’s right in front of you?

I’m not saying that there’s not something bigger waiting for you.

What I am saying is that, if you put yourself back into the flow of what you’re doing right now, you’re more likely to find it more quickly and more powerfully.

What do you think?

photo credit: alicepopkorn

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Monday morning. How did it feel to get out of bed and anticipate another week?

Much of your answer will depend on how you choose to see the work you do.

Job

If you see your work as a job, you consider it primarily as something you do for money. That’s not to say that, at a level, you don’t enjoy it or don’t get along with some of your colleagues. But the chances are you have little real engagement to it.

What’s important is that you earn the money you need to finance your life.

When this job is done, you’ll hope to get another of the same. You live for the weekend, for holidays and to retire.

Career

Having a career means that somewhere along the way – at school, or university perhaps – you hit on a chosen field within which you wanted to work. A profession maybe like accountancy, or law. Or teaching, or science, or medicine, or business management.

Whatever, study and training have probably been an aspect of your journey to date. Progression is important; there’s a strong sense of the career ladder and you want to get as high up it as you can. In fact, a lot of your motivation is about getting more or better, whether that’s in the shape of salary or benefits or any of the other outward trappings of career success.

When your current position comes to an end, you’ll want a move that signifies progression or at least one that you can position as such on your CV.

Calling

When what you do for a living feels like a calling to you, work is its own reward. You turn up and do what you do because you love it. It means something to you beyond the here and now.

You bring something of yourself to the world, and the world needs it. Whether that’s your entrepreneurialism, or your unique writing voice; whether you’re finding the antidote for a serious disease or are developing the prototype for a new invention. Whatever, how you choose to do it will be pretty unique to you.

Sure, you want to be paid for your work, but that’s an outcome; a consequence. The primary thing is the work itself. In fact, you enjoy what you do so much and it’s such a part of you that the idea of retiring seems a bit strange to you.

So, Monday mornings, like any other mornings are other exciting days to work on your thing.

So, which is yours: Job, Career, or Calling?

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