Jobs & Careers: A Shift in Consciousness

Shifting Tracks: From working in fear to working from Joy

The job and career market seems really hard these days.

In the outer world, we are graced with news of massive lay-offs across industries in a time of tumultuous economics. This can grind down our sense of expansion, opportunity and even self-worth.

In the inner world, for some of us at least, there are a lot of questions around jobs, work, business, service, what we want to create and perhaps how to generate more wealth, meaning and value. We may be wondering what to do next, how to do it and evaluating the risk of changing job or career tracks completely.

These inner questions and outer pressures can create tense confusion for us.

For me, this is about understanding my personal motivation.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Motivation

When I was younger, a lot of my personal motivation and goals were to make myself indispensable at a workplace.

I would effort towards doing more with less, and make sure I was seen doing so. This worked really well for me, until it didn’t.

When our notion of being indispensable is challenged, it has a specific pain associated with it. Anyone who has gotten fired, been taken off a passion project, received early retirement before they were ready, or simply got let go due to a restructure has known this pain; it has an after-taste of betrayal.

For me, this didn’t come from the outside. It came from within. One day, many things culminated and my motivation to work towards indispensability faltered. It was replaced with a deep exhaustion and a point-less-ness around work. It had been coming for a while and I had ignored it, until a health concern flared up to the point where I couldn’t ignore how I was feeling.

On the surface, becoming indispensable to a workplace seems like a great idea, but there is a lot the lives beneath.

Photo by Viktor Jakovlev on Unsplash

If you are indispensable to your team, company, or even your family business, the entire structure of work and success rests on your shoulders. Over a long and consistent time period, this becomes exhausting, as it had for me. It also disallows any true equality of collaboration and team-work, since there is a strong dynamic of power and control wrapped into this. Often, our ego structure and identity get involved as well, which is why it is so hard when this is challenged.

We may do this in our relationships outside of work too - where we are consciously or unconsciously driven by the desire to always be needed. This satisfies, for a short moment, our need to belong and our self to be valued. It may also satisfy our urges for power and control in our lives and the lives of others.

These things - the desire to belong, to be valued, to feel like we have power and are in control - can be really awkward and uncomfortable when we look at the underbelly. This is because our true motivations get revealed here.

When I took a peek here within myself, I was mortified at the depth of fear I lived with and brought to work everyday. Fears of not being validated, not being needed and being abandoned were my reasons of wanting to be indispensable. When I felt like I was needed, my fears quietened for a time. So, I could pretend they weren’t there.

Being horrified at yourself is gravely unpleasant.

But, it is often the most powerful and intense activator of change in our lives. This was the case for me - more so than any external factor causing me to change paths.

Changing Tracks

Personal transformation is a wild, messy, intimidating and confusing process.

If you’ve decided to change something in your life, then you need unplug from the old, dream up the new, and build bridges between the two. This is step by step, day by day process.

With something personal - like self love, or our diet and lifestyle - it takes all our motivation, inner trust and self-commitment to change our habits and beliefs, to break our complacencies and reliances and to have the courage and resolve to change.

With something trans-personal - like our jobs, careers, businesses - that are woven in with the dreams, structures, emotions, beliefs of others and what is common in the collective, it is much more layered. It is a little like managing a complex railway network, where you have to change tracks, move back and forth to adjust to all the other movement.
The journey, the timing, how we interpret things like change, growth, moving forwards and backwards, the direction and journey of other people, all participate here.

Changing tracks also includes understanding where you’ve been coming from and deciding that you want to move elsewhere.

Photo by Sam B on Unsplash

When I understood my past motivations, I very clearly knew I couldn’t continue on this track. My fears had led me to create this goal of indispensability. I did achieve it in some sense, but I was exhausted, unsatisfied and drained.

I realized that my relationship with work, was an outside-in one, as it is for most people. Jobs are where we receive money, which is often perceived as the physical representation of how much we are valued in society. We also give our minds, our work effort, our skill and we receive validation, challenges to overcome and perhaps success. 

For certain job roles, for certain people and certain times in their life, this works really well, and it can absolutely be a measure of success.

For me, it turned out that it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close.

So, I had to figure out what my inside-out relationship with work was. That, was my new track.
But I didn’t know where this track would lead. I didn’t even know where it was or what it looked it.

Re-Creating Work, in a New Track

At the start of 2022, I wrote this piece called New Year, New Realities and How To Create Them. At the time I was musing about re-definitions as a starting point to re-patterning how we create our realities. At the time I had articulated that I felt an overarching purposelessness and lack of fulfillment around work.

Yet, there was another truth - I’ve actually been very lucky with my jobs.

At some point, I’ve always come to a place of simplicity, where I realize a sweet and steady joy in doing a work activity, even a mundane one. It may not have lasted, but I have known it.

This feeling, or rather memory of this feeling is what I chose to build my new track from.

For those of us who have never experienced moments like this at work, perhaps they exist outside of it. It may be a moment of simple surrender when we are driving down an empty serene road, cooking for our loved ones, doing our daily crossword or or simply doing something we love under the Summer Sun.

My happiest moments at work are where I am so immersed, that I forget I’m working. Sometimes this is a solo task and other times, I’m in the spirit of creating and collaborating with others. In either scenario, the feeling is the same - timeless immersion.

For me, this is what joy feels like when it comes to doing work.

Immersion in the present moment, where nothing else exists.

There’s an insane simplicity to it all, when we actually get out of our own way.

Once we find the feeling within, it is like an energy.

We can sit in this energy.

It moves through us and we move with it in a dance.

Our inhales dance with our exhales here.

Our momentary period of rest dances with our racing mind and our piling to do list.

Lines drawn between our life and our work, sway and blur, like sea-water at the beach.

I believe this is how new tracks get built. They are constructed from a completely different level of consciousness that our old track.

For me, instead of creating my work experiences through fear, as I had done before, I started to build on Joy.

Emotions are energy.

So it is up to us, which energy we use as a source of our creation.

In the map of consciousness, Joy, as an energy is infinitely more powerful than fear.

This isn’t a joy that we derive from external stimuli. It is Inner Joy of already being Whole and Complete.

My practice of late has to let myself steep in this Joy-energy.

In the minutes when I sit before my laptop, just before I open it for work, I breathe into the feeling of Complete Joy.

I am already immersed. I am already Joy.

Fear or the need to be indispensable doesn’t come up here.

So, the question that arises is: What can I do today that amplifies this Joy, which already exists, outward - in my work, in my conversations, in my activity, in my service?

And I wait.

And as surely as the Sun rises, inspiration comes, direction follows, and I no longer have to seek my motivation. It is right here with me.

In the Larger Context

All of this inner stuff is amazing.

And yet, the truth is that our coworkers, bosses, business partners, society, the world itself may not feel, validate or encourage any of this. They may actually be characters who polarize us completely. They may push us to what is comfortable and familiar for them, in the material world.

As well, if we are looking for a change in our job and career, there is a certain reality to the current economic turmoil and our meandering journey to find a secure, impactful job where we are valued.
We may be exhausted, demotivated and simply not be getting the compensation, the validation, opportunities and the success we know we deserve.

I used to think self-work and inner work is important because it is the only thing you can control. We can’t control the world, other people and how they treat us.

This is certainly true. But it is also so much more than that.

It isn’t actually about control at all.

To me, this is about Creation.

How much of our life and our work is an outcome of Our Creative energy?

Do we even know the power of our own Creation?

Are we stuck in fear of failure or disappointment that we cannot believe we are worthy of capable of Creating our joy in the workplace?

If we are thinking of changing tracks, can we view our current situation from a different angle or vantage point?

When we sit in the power of our Creation, we ride the waves of Divinely inspired trust and action.

This could mean looking at how we work very differently.

Remevolution - Find your David.

This quote above from Michelangelo turns on its head the work effort and artistic skill we may have imagined the sculpture took. Certainly it took that, and yet, the Artist himself, just removed what wasn’t needed.

There is a huge difference when we create in the world, from our lower consciousness and from our higher consciousness. We know and feel the difference. Others do too, but they may take some time to realize it.

So, how do we do this with our work?

We would have to realize the track of life we have been riding on and decide on change, compassionately.

We would absolutely have to work through, neutralize and disconnect from unconscious and helpless reactions to the world, the news, our coworkers and expectations of society.

We would open to knowing ourselves, our desires and our true motivations as well as our skills and talents.

This would give us the space to start to create our authentic responses, our experiences, our projects, our dreams and our realities in our unique way.

This is how we transcend the culture of failure, exhaustion and negativity that permeates our minds, and actually Create from a more loving consciousness.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

I recently met an incredible woman. She just opened up this lovely unique clothing shop, just down the street from me. Our neighbourhood has lost many small, local business owners due to sky high rents and a greatly reduced customer base over the last few years.

And yet, here she is. She’s managed to open and run her three retail shops successfully, at time when a lot of people are closing their shops.

When I asked her how she managed it, she looked at me, smiled and said - with Grit and Grace. Her boutique is aptly named.

Her story is the story of many other true Creators - people who found ways to tap into their Creation, their joy, their natural and perhaps hidden talent and found inspired alignment with that was needed in their world.

I believe that we are being re-oriented in our work, our service and how we relate to bringing out our skills and gifts into the world, in a way that creates real value for you, your community and for the world.

This starts with knowing our motivations within and then finding our source of joy and service. It is also finding what the world needs, rather than being attached to what we think it should look it, and finding brilliant and innovative ways to bridge that by just being you.

Because what is truly indispensable in this world is Your Creation Energy.

So, make sure you allow it and bring it with you everywhere you go.

That, is the real Job.