Shape Your Success

Are you doing what you incarnated to do? Do you love how you spend your days, every day Monday thru Friday?

If you’re like thousands and more thousands of people, these questions may hit a sore spot or even seem ridiculous. ‘I can’t afford to ask myself things like that,’ one man said to me. ‘I’ve got a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay.

But just because it’s a difficult question doesn’t mean it’s not worth answering. And the question becomes more and more important as you get older.

Trying  to ‘make yourself’ do what feels wrong to you is like walking in whatever direction you are facing and forcing the needle in your compass towards north. While it may work for a while, as soon as you let up the pressure for even a moment, the compass will begin to self-correct and you’ll find yourself in the wrong direction. You might be lost and don’t know how to come back to full reality and sanity.  Uninspiring and treacherous stress comes from forcing yourself to do what you don’t want to do each day only leads to strain, tension and potential illness.

If you’ve spent a lifetime ignoring your feelings and quite literally ‘making the best of a bad job’, it may seem like it’s too late (or too scary) to do anything about it. But chances are that the changes you need to make are nowhere near as dramatic as you think. So don’t go quitting your job, selling your things and joining the convent. Even if big changes are called for, you don’t have to make them in a dramatic way.

Here are three simple changes, as described by Michael Neill – Super Coach, you can make that will make a major change in how you feel about your working life:
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1. Become self-employed while you’re still at your job.
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If you’ve begun saving money for your retirement, chances are you’ve done it by withholding money from your paycheck each month. A more effective strategy is to have all your money paid into a central ‘reservoir’ account. This can be a savings or even a home equity account. Then ‘deduct’ the money for your monthly expenses into a checking account.
Now instead of taking money away from yourself in order to save, you are having to take money away from yourself in order to spend. And for most people, when you see your reservoir of cash begin to grow, you will become less interested in spending and more interested in the freedom that comes with not being dependent on your job for your income.
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2. Get noticeably better at whatever it is you do.
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Extensive research into optimal experience at work shows that people who challenge themselves to continually improve at what they do not only increase their value in the marketplace, they enjoy their jobs considerably more than those who just do the minimum required to get by. While further training may or may not be a practical option for you, there are always ways to enhance your skills on the job.
One simple trick is to imagine you are training your replacement – if you had to teach someone to do what you do, how would you do it? In thinking about how to teach someone else to do your job, you will invariably find little improvements you can make that not only make you better, they make the job more enjoyable.
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3. Begin exploring new possibilities
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Many people fear that if they begin exploring other options, they will become more and more discontented and miserable about what they are currently doing. But only one of two things can really happen. Either you will find out that what you’re doing isn’t as bad as you thought when you compare it to what else is out there, in which case you’ll begin to appreciate and enjoy it more, or you’ll find out that there really is a job or career path that’s calling to you.
And if you are fortunate enough to find a job that’s also a calling, you will never have to work another day in your life!