What is it about a career and working in a field that we love?  Most of the time it seems that we fall into careers.  You know, the one that you took straight out of high school or college?  At the time, we think, well, I will do this job for now, because it pays the bills.  Then you get better at doing the job, it’s comfortable and you get promoted.  Before you know it, you have years of experience in a career that you never actually chose.

Somewhere along the line, we each think, ‘I could do this job blind-folded with my hands tied behind my back’.  That was exactly my thought after ten years as a Director in non-profit day care.  Surely this is sign that I was not challenged.  In my case it was also a sign of trying to work in a system that fed my desire to make life better for the children in our care, but it also created the problem that I was unable to help me care for my own children better.  On top of that fact, I had topped out of the salary for that position in the area that I lived.  After ten years it was time to look elsewhere for a career.  I looked at what I liked about my job and what had better salary possibilities.  

I ended up choosing Training and Development because I had loved seeing my employees develop and thrive.  Moving careers in my 30s took a lot of networking, additional training and lots of time spent sitting on the edge of “OMG, how can I make it in this field?  Everyone has so much more training and experience!”  Sound familiar?  Even now, I can only say persistence, connecting, leveraging my previous experience and plain walking on the edge of making the outcome match my employer’s expectations was the order of the day for several years.   I was helped enormously by a boss who saw my potential and supported me as well as getting to work with my assistant and other trainers who were deeply invested in trying to help our employees feel better and perform better at their jobs.

Then I repeated the cycle in my 40s when I decided that corporate life was not for me.  I was laid off twice, looked at how I actually felt in corporations and realized that I was always on the side of the employee not the management.  When that realization hit home, it was time to step away from corporate life. I searched for something that was not corporate; still helped me help others and had the potential for the income that I needed.  From my experience as a trainer I knew that I wanted to work with individuals who wanted to change, who weren’t being forced to attend a class.  One day I was looking thru a local paper on alternative health businesses.  I was drawn to an ad about a local Massage school and another ad about training in energy work.  I attended both the Open House and introduction class for each of these specialties.  Emotionally I felt that ‘these were my people’!  I decided to work in both fields.  This time I needed specific training to get certified to do the work which took three years to complete.  I worked as a free-lance trainer while I went to school and afterwards because it took another five years to build my business until it was viable enough to support me and my family.  I ignored a lot of advice about needing money in the bank before I started a business, so there was a lot of tightrope walking financially.  I was willing to take the risk because I knew I couldn’t live thru working working under someone else, and it was clear to me that I wanted to develop my own mix of techniques as a healer.  Also, I was 50 by this time and I felt like it was time to leap into something that fed me and used all that I brought from my life experiences. I ended up doing a wonderful mix of massage, cranial sacral therapy, energy work, sound healing, mentoring and teaching over the 15 years of my healing business.  It was delightful and always a mix of caring for clients and marketing the business.  Every entrepreneur/consultant learns the fact that we must spend 50% of our time marketing ourselves.  It turned out that I loved networking too even though I still liked to help others connect more than I like to talk about my own skills and how I could help the client shift their own life.  That was always a part of the job that I needed to work on.  Yet working with individuals fed my soul as no other job or career had ever done.

Whew, even now, all that I did seems somewhat daunting.  At each transition, I assessed as best I could what I liked and didn’t like about what I had been doing.  I was open to what attracted me and what careers that I felt resonant with.  Then I researched what was required to do the work; leveraged what experience that I did have and just tried harder.  In each field, I found people that mentored me and supported me.

Now I am still standing the edge of a new career while doing the work that I love.  The work that I love is still working with individuals as a coach and spiritual mentor.  I LOVE working with people who want to change.  It is a privilege and a joy.  The new career is being a writer of fiction. Yes, believe it or not, just loving to write is not enough.  The writing requires discipline, it requires knowing how find resource in both editing and publishing etc.  So here I go again, loving both the work that I do and the career that I am moving into.

Careers can change over our lifetime.  How can we make the best choice for a new career?  I would now advise others to keep up the search for a career that is resonant with you.  A career that beckons to something inside of you, that calls you!  I call that experience one of resonance.  Do you know what your own markers of resonance are?  A marker of resonance is your internal sentient intelligence which is sensations, emotions, energies that move thru your body when you read/write something that is resonant with you.  The best way to learn what your sentient intelligence is comes thru practicing writing resonant phrases inside of the creation exercises of the Language of Creation.  It’s a tool which helps us become aware of our deepest cravings.  It’s a tool that takes us from where we are consciously to a deeper knowing of where we want to be.  My own career journey might have been different if I had these templates when I was younger, but the Language of Creation wasn’t even written until the early 2000s.  I have been writing these exercises regularly for four years and teaching others to use them for two years.

It’s a tool that I use with my clients in my coaching and mentoring practice.  As I continue to blog, you will see more blogs about the creation exercises and the Language of Creation.  I hold monthly calls where we talk about life changes and how we can find the most resonant path for ourselves.  I hold a monthly call normally on the 3rd Tuesday of the month via Zoom at 6:30pmMT.  This month the call will be on the 4^th Tuesday this month, Jan 22^nd.  Register for my January call at https://my.sendinblue.com/users/subscribe/js_id/3neux/id/2