You are completely responsible for your own career path, so it makes sense to build a career you want instead of settling for what you don’t want. Your current situation is the result of your previous choices, so if you aren’t happy with it, remember that you’re always free to make new choices. The only one who can keep you trapped is you.
Avoid the common mistake of settling for a career that disempowers you. If you find yourself in a situation where your contribution is neither valued nor respected, get up and leave. Go where your talents are appreciated. Otherwise you’re simply abusing yourself.
You deserve to have an empowering career, but that won’t happen until you fully commit to it. The obstacles and setbacks you encounter aren’t intended to keep you from reaching your ultimate goal. They’re merely part of the training course you must complete in order to prove you’re strong enough to hold on to your dream once you reach it. Demonstrate by your actions that you’re 100 percent committed and the obstacles will tend to recede on their own.
The principle of love relates heavily to the message of your career. When you discover your core message, it will connect with you on a very deep level, and the emotional release of that connection can literally move you to tears.
Here’s a simple yet powerful process you can use to discover your core message, also known as your life purpose. This process has produced major breakthroughs for many who’ve tried it. Find a place where you can be alone and won’t be interrupted, then complete the following steps:
1. Take out a sheet of paper or open up a blank word-processing document where you can type.
2. Write at the top: What is my true purpose in life?
3. Write down an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine. If you’re feeling nihilistic, begin with the answer: “I don’t have a purpose,” or “Life is meaningless,” and take it from there.
4. Repeat Step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your core message.
What do you perceive when you look at your current career? What do your most honest predictions reveal about your path? Did you choose this path, or did you simply fall into it? Is your career aligned with the truth of who you really are? If you were starting over from scratch today, would you choose this same line of work again? Do you have any regrets about the paths you didn’t choose?
To align your career with truth, you must ask these tough questions and answer them as honestly as possible. Accept your answers even if you don’t like what you see. Your’re always free to make different choices from this point onward, but in order to do so, you must unconditionally accept where you are. Never pretend to love a career that you know is wrong for you.
Think of your career as your primary outlet for creative self-expression. Your career may take the form of an income-generating job you perform or a business you manage, but it doesn’t have to. Your career is your occupation; at a very basic level, it’s simply what you do to occupy your time. Of course if you’re going to live consciously, this choice becomes a rather important one.
Your career has two components: your medium and your message. Most people think of their careers in terms of the medium, which is the specific method you use to express yourself. For example, you could say that I (Steve Pavlina) am a writer, speaker, or blogger, since those represent some of the media outlets I use to express myself. Most job titles are defined in terms of expressive media, including doctors, lawyers, police officers, teachers, pilots, and so on.
Consciously cultivate the most authentic habits you can. For each habit you consider, ask yourself: Is this really me? Is this consistent with the person I most want to be? If any part of your life feels phony and inauthentic to you, it needs to be replaced with a more genuine alternative. This won’t be easy, but it is correct.
Your ultimate goal in this area is to create a set of mutually supportive habits that synergistically increase your alignment with truth, love, and power. Good habits enable you to remain in a positive flow state while you focus on creative self-expression. You consciously make the high-level decisions, and your habits take care of the low-level details. When your habits work together so congruently, the result is both beautiful and elegant. You may never reach this ideal within your lifetime, but every step you take in this direction is worthwhile.
Use a variation of the heart-centered question to evaluate your habits. Which habits put you on the path with a heart? Which ones lead you astray? Don’t wait for good habits to install themselves or for bad habits to die on their own. You must take the initiative and create the changes your desire. Cultivate behaviors that keep you on the heart-centered path, and drop habits that don’t have a heart.
To build your courage, make a habit of doing something that scares you. In my (Steve Pavlina) Toastmasters club, we do impromptu speaking at every meeting. Someone will ask a random question such as “If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be and why?” Then you must immediately get up and give a one- to two-minute speech on that topic in front of the group. Your goal isn’t to give a perfect presentation off the top of your head. Instead, the idea is to build confidence speaking in front of people. When you can summon the courage to speak in front of a group with no preparation, it makes prepared speaking that much easier. The courage you build in one area of your life will also spill over into other areas.
Remember that you’re the commander-in-chief of your life. You must decide which habits you’ll keep and which you’ll abandon. Conduct personal experiments to discover which habits produce the best results for you. Which habits increase your effectiveness? Which ones get in your way?
Here’s a list of 66 habits that can help boost your personal effectiveness. Scan these items to see if any of them appeal to you.
01. Daily goals. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it. Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions.
02. Worst first. To defeat procrastination, learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
You don’t live in a void. For better or worse, your habits impact the lives of others. Take a moment to consider the social consequences of your actions. Do your habits help others align themselves with truth, love, and power, or does your behavior lead people astray? Your actions have a conditioning effect on other people, subtly influencing them to adopt similar behaviors. This is especially true of children, who frequently look to adults for guidance.
Oneness teaches us that we’re all role models. As we interact with others, we teach them how to behave, whether we realize it or not. Our interconnectedness means that individual habits can’t be considered in isolation. One person’s bad habits can create serious consequences for others, and sometimes those consequences are severe, as in the case of a drunk-driving accident. Consequently, we must not only be responsible to ourselves, but also to the community in which we live.
