How do you define "work" and "career"?
The Global Citizen’s Life Coaching Blog
Welcome to my new blog! It is my playground for life coaching ideas. No real projects going on here, just the free flow of ideas and creativity. I’ll be talking to myself most of the time or to my imaginary friend, which very well could be you if you are reading this!
Feel free to come and play with me and my ideas by commenting…. Or just observe the creativity in progress.
First, I absolutely must thank a very brilliant former client who is now living out her dream in Spain. Erin is now my "blog consultant" and got me started with my new identity as a blogger. She is a traveler, a musician, a poet, a savvy business woman, a blogger and simply a really cool gal! Check her out at http://www.wandering-woman.blogspot.com/.
Well, since I don’t really have a plan, I’ll just write about what coming up for me now….
It’s about
Redefining Work
(sounds kinda heavy for a first post, but what the hey… let’s play…)
A new quote I heard recently from a wonderfully talented woman I coached were the wise words of her father. He told her
“If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
I found out later that it was a paraphrasing of Confucius...
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. --- Confucius
I love that idea and I really do believe in it!
Do you? Do you think if you do what you love, it will never feel like work?
Like many of my female clients who I coach on work/career topics, this woman made a breakthrough in our coaching session about what “work” and "career" looks like for her now that she has a family. Her vision of her ideal work life now is completely different than the work life she had before kids. Her old view was that "work" was a place you go to and that it was a means to an end. In her new view, "work" is something fun she can do from home or anywhere warm wearing a bandana, shorts and sandals....AND earn money doing what she loves!
This isn’t the first time clients have defined concepts with their own definitions. In fact, I encourage it.
Another client, for example, didn’t even include the “work/career” segment in her wheel of life pie chart where you break up your life into different segments, such as family, health/wellness, relationships, etc. For most people the work and career part is a big piece of the pie.
My client, who had changed her job in the time we were working together, renamed the work/career category to “life purpose”. As her coach, I loved that she made that shift! My heart smiled. She found out who she truly is inside and found out she wasn’t her work. She “cut the emotional tie” with a job and career that were no longer serving her. By doing so, she embraced her life for the richness it offers, while taking time to explore her true purpose.
Empowering stuff! My clients are letting go of old beliefs and definitions around work and career. They have to if they want to create change. People are finding that to succeed, they have to redefine what work, career, success, life and many other concepts mean for them personally, not how society defines them.
What are your new definitions of “work” and “career”?
