Discover The Work You Were Born To Do - Work Ethic Of Joy

It seems ingrained in us to either sacrifice our dreams and our deeper self in return for a regular salary, or follow our heart and do something that inspires us and is meaningful, but holds no hope of financial success or security. The dilemma? Do you go for the money or the love and meaning? You can have both, but you need to move beyond the idea that work is something negative, and must involve sacrifice, pain, or boredom. Too few of us truly understand the vocational dimension of work – that it can be a blessing that we love, and which allows our unique gifts and talents to flow out and serve others. This is the work ethic of joy, and the highest view of work is wonderfully expressed by Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet, “Your work is your love made visible.” When your work is the canvas onto which you express your soul it is the job you were born to do, and is moving beyond sacrifice to inspiration, beyond dilemma to authenticity and leading to a life of meaning and success.

• Through your inspiration, joy and a sense of calling It is the work that would inspire you, you feel called to and your heart calls you to. It is what you are naturally drawn to and curious about. It is what you would most love to do.
• Behind your greatest resistance The twin soul of inspiration is resistance, and often the work you’d most love to do is what you spend most time and energy procrastinating about, avoiding, making excuses why you haven’t done it and talking yourself out of. Most people are beaten by their resistance and never reach their full potential.
• In your shadow life The talents you have disowned become your unlived life, which you can only see in others. You can be close to the work you’d love, but you are more comfortable seeing other people’s creativity and talent – afraid to acknowledge your own. Begin to put own your talents out there and move them towards the centre of your life. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
• Under the statement “I don’t know” Often we genuinely don’t know, but with good questions and coaching, we can reach clarity. I don’t know also masks I am afraid to know because then I’d have to change, and that scares me even more. We can confuse I don’t know what with I don’t know how. Don’t deny what you know you’d love to do because you don’t know how you could do it and succeed with it. You can learn.
• Through your naturalness, seen in the eyes of others A great blind spot most of us have is to our natural abilities and talents. We value struggle, not ease, so don’t value or even see what comes easily to us, and can easily dismiss it, missing our own unique brilliance. Notice how others acknowledge and appreciate you.
• In your lost dreams and your underutilized talent Often, as children, we do know what we’d love to do, but we can be actively discouraged from it, criticized for it or somehow abandon our passions to join the grown up world of working for money. You can go back and reconnect with what you loved, and sometimes this can be painful but poignant.
• Behind a wake up call or even a crisis A refusal to listen to our intuition and deeper self could precipitate a full-blown crisis. Things fall apart and we can feel awful, but so many people speak in retrospect about their illness/redundancy/bankruptcy being the best thing that ever happened to them. It got them back on track to a greater and more authentic life, but they needed to be broken open, allowing the phoenix to rise from the ashes.