There’s one fact that most people keep forgetting, yet this one fact could clarify their thinking and help them to choose correctly the actions that will improve their lives.
Here’s the fact: Your life ends.
Yes, you will die one day. For most people, this fateful day comes much sooner than expected.
Now, don’t panic. Everybody dies, so you’re not the only person who’s afflicted with this thing called mortality.
Let’s recall the famous line that Mel Gibson’s heroic character utters in the movie Braveheart: “Every man dies. Not every man really lives.”
Are you really living at work? Are you jumping out of bed every day, looking forward to do your work?
If not, you might not be living the life that is worthy of you.
Let me share with you my own experience. I was very satisfied professionally after I graduated in 1999 and started to work for a publicly traded firm specialized in corporate training. Yet, after 7 months, I realized I was NOT where I was supposed to be.
Even though I had the best boss, the best coworkers, the best clients, and was working for a firm ranked as one of the top 50 best managed firms, I still felt I was just “fooling around” and not doing the work I was born to do.
So in June 2000 (I had just turned 31), I decided to leave Corporate America (or Corporate Canada, to be precise).
I’ve never been happier, nor more peaceful, ever since.
So what I’m sharing in this blog and in the workshop called My Ideal Career, comes from personal experience and much reflection. I’m not a career “counselor” and the knowledge I share with you is not abstract and theoretical.
What I share with you is the truth, as I have been able to perceive it. We all want to be happy at work, and there are definitely many ways to get there. The way I share here is only one way, and you will know if it’s for you once you try it and see if it works.
It’s my job to offer what I know to be the truth, and it is up to each person to evaluate this truth and apply it in her own life in order to know this truth personally herself.
The truth is we deny ourselves the amazing and fulfilling career we all deserve.
The cure is simple: Just do it! (As the Nike slogan says).
This sounds simple enough, yet most people can’t just do it. They have too much resistance internally, and their mind has been conditioned by society, the educational system and their parents to do the “responsible thing.”
The trick is to change our mindset from “I should do this” to “I want to do that.”
The vitality and dynamism of Life comes from WANTING, not from SHOULDING (if that word even exists!).
“I want” comes from joy, freedom, faith, self-confidence, self-worth, while “I should” comes from places of doubt, fear, lack of self-confidence, conformity, peer pressure, lack of purpose, etc.
So by adopting the wrong mindset (“I should” rather than “I want”) and turning it into an automatic, unexamined belief system, we deny ourselves the pleasure and joy of doing work that could fulfill us and enable our personal growth.
This is quite insane, yet this is what our so-called “modern” society has led us to.
Every person owns his own life, yet has been conditioned by society to sacrifice himself at the altar of political correctness.
The good news is, there IS a way out of the insane modern workplace.
I will write more to expose how this perverted way of thinking leads to self-sacrificial lives.
