To build an authentic career, you need to find the path that keeps you aligned with truth, love, and power. This requires paying attention to the following four questions:
- Body (needs): What must I do?
- Mind (abilities): What can I do?
- Heart (desire): What do I want to do?
- Spirit (contribution): What should I do?
An authentic career is found in the place where all four of these questions produce the same answer. This is the career that meets your needs, leverages your abilities, fulfills your desires, and makes a positive contribution to others. This means that your body, mind, heart, and spirit are aligned with truth, love, and power.
Consider your current career in light of the questions above. Are you successfully balancing all four of these areas, or did you only get some of them right? Does your career generate sufficient income to meet your needs without causing you to sink into debt? Does it leverage your strengths and talents? Do you love the work you do each day? Are you doing work that truly matters to you?
It may take significant effort to build an authentic career, but it’s definitely worthwhile. When you have all four areas working synergistically together, the combined effect is truly amazing. Instead of meeting your needs, you experience true abundance. Instead of applying your knowledge to your tasks, you unlock your true genius. Instead of tolerating your daily routine, you work in a state of joy. And instead of just putting in the time, you fill your days with a sense of purpose.
What if you know these four areas are out of balance? If you can’t immediately target all four, where should you begin? Of all of them, the heart area is the best place to start because it gives rise to all the rest. There’s some truth to the notion that if you do what you love, the money will follow. It’s not quite that simple in practice, but the basic idea is correct. If you simply persist in doing what you enjoy, you’ll eventually get good at it. Once you reach a decent skill level, you’ll be able to share the value you create with others, and many people will appreciate it. Then if you simply ask for fair value in return, you can begin to generate income from your work. This process may take many years to unfold, but it will lead you to a very positive place, and it all starts with doing what you love.
Consider the alternatives. When you aim to meet your needs above all else, it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing soulless work to earn a decent income. The longer you follow that path, the more skill you build at something you don’t enjoy. As you gain experience and seniority in that line of work, your income may continue to rise. But you aren’t happy, and you probably aren’t contributing in a way that fulfills you. The longer you follow this path, the deeper a hole you dig for yourself. The secondary gain of your income substitutes for the true fulfillment you really crave. If you find yourself in this situation, the best way out is to allow yourself to crash. Bring truth, love, and power back into your life and you’ll realize that no amount of external success can compensate for betraying the guy in the glass. Your true self cannot be bought at any price.
Another problematic alternative arises when you do your best to give to the world but fail to attend to the other three areas. I (Steve Pavlina) call this lightworker syndrome. Such people tend to be very loving and compassionate, but they don’t put forth the effort to develop the skills that would make a significant contribution possible. They’re very much aligned with love, but their power is way too weak, and this holds back their ability to contribute. They have to keep putting their grand mission on hold in order to scrape together enough money to pay the rent. If you want to change the world, then choose an approach that will be effective. You won’t do anyone much good if you can’t meet your basic needs.
The last alternative is to make your top priority the development of your talents and skills, but this can also be a dead end. You may wind up getting really good at something you simply don’t enjoy or that fails to meet your needs, and this disconnects you from your true self. I think it’s a huge mistake for parents to pressure their children to go into a certain line of work such as medicine or law just because it’s what the parents want. The world doesn’t need more unhappy, unfulfilled doctors and lawyers.
There are no substitutes for true happiness. It’s better to do what you love, homeless and broke, working from a park bench, than to sell your soul for millions of dollars. The good news, however, is that if you follow the heart-centered path, you probably won’t be broke for long. You’ll be doing work that provides value for others, which is precisely how you generate income in the first place.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina