Is your Work a Reflection of Who You Are at the Inner Level?

This might sound like a strange question, but it’s a really important one to consider as we go along in life. To fill it out a bit, I’m sure we all know folks who dislike their work, are bored with it, or feel unfulfilled by it. Going along like this day after day can be mind-numbing at best, certainly not a pathway to happiness in one’s life. In fact, I think what we call “burnout” is powerfully related to this.

How come we tend to adopt a pathway like this one? Well, since the deeper matter of “am I really matched for this kind of work?” is very often not discussed much, most people just finish their schooling and then “go get a job” without necessarily much introspection about the matter. In many cases, what’s available in the job market dictates the choice; we just “take what’s available”. Once we’re thus employed and engaged, it’s hard to shift away from the job and look for something else, even though it might not be much of a match for “who I am on the inside”. Add to this the almost-universal human tendency to stay in a situation even though it’s not optimal for us… Are you getting the picture?

So what are we to do? The primary challenge is to ask ourselves early in life, and to keep on asking as we go along, “does this work reflect who I truly am on my inner level?”

Here’s a terrific example: some years ago a college-age young man in our community was sent to me by his father who wanted me to “cure” his son of his passion for riding around during the summers on trash trucks working for the local trash hauler. The family was embarassed to have their son doing work that was “below his stature” in life. I interviewed the young man and rapidly discovered some important things, such as, in his college life he was in a service fraternity (not a social fraternity like most of us) and served meals to the homeless and needy. After such events he would routinely volunteer for the clean-up committee. There was a pattern of behaviors like this in the young man’s life and, to condense the story, he had a love for restoring order and a “flair” for cleaning things up. In short, he had a tremendous amount of life energy parked in the region of cleaning things up. The young man went on to establish a successful environmental clean-up operation. It generates lots of revenue, supports quite a few employees, and does significant community give-backs every year. That young man is satisfied in his work, and knows that who he is on the inside, identity-wise, is reflected in his work, in his outer life. For my way of thinking, this is a blueprint for life satisfaction.

So…where is your life energy parked? Is your outer life a reflection of your inner life?