"Vision
without action is a daydream
Action without vision is a nightmare"
Japanese proverb
Written by Joy Broughton, Career
& Life Coach
How’s your attitude? "Imagination-at-play is the heart of all
good work," says Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way. Ask yourself,
"What does that statement really mean to me?" When was the last
time you examined your belief systems about "work".
Here’s another questions for you. "How does your lifestyle
and your career choices affect your personal satisfaction with life?"
Don’t you just love these questions? Sometimes, when I ask my clients
to answer these questions, it’s like I just handed them a bomb.
They look down in their lap as if they’re looking at this bomb and
wondering what to do about it.
I remember a story one of my mentors told me about his life and career,
and how it literally "blew up" on him one day. He said, "I
didn’t even see it coming." He told me the story about working
with Lee Iacocca on the Mustang accounts. At the time he was a Senior
Account Executive for J. Walter Thompson. He thought he had his act together.
He thought all was well in his world. Little did he know that everything
was to soon fall apart. He had this nice big house in the Bay Area, and
one day as he was crossing the Golden State Bridge going to work, he realized
that his marriage was on the rocks, both of his kids were on drugs, his
wife was in a major depression, and he had become complacent in his work.
Everything blew. After the dust has settled, he decided to get help. He
went into counseling, changed careers, and got a divorce. The kids went
into a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program and the family literally
went into a tailspin. There was much work to be done.
How do these things happen. Therapist have a word for it . . . denial.
We do not see what we don’t want to see. In actuality there are
many reasons that these kinds of things happen. However, if my mentor
had done a reality check on his attitude, he would have found that he
really wasn’t happy personally or professionally. If he had asked
himself, "How does my lifestyle and my career choice affect your
personal satisfaction with life?" The truth was that he was living
into the "role" that society said he had to play, the faithful
husband, the strong and unyielding father, the single focused professional
. . . he would have realized that he wasn’t any of those things,
nor did he want to be. So many times, we conduct our lives in a way that
is not healthy for us. We get attached to how other people think we should
be. Dr. Phil talks about this in his new book. The book starts off with
him telling the story about how everything fell apart on him. And as we
read it, we see a little bit of ourselves in his story.
So, here’s what we need to do. We need to step back, take a good
hard look at our lives, and ask ourselves some of these "time bomb"
questions. It’s okay if we don’t have the answers right away.
But it’s important to answer them eventually.
Ask yourself, "What am I inspired by? Who are my role models?
What give me joy in my life."Marsha Sinetar, author of
Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow , says we need to identify
what makes us happy and then figure out a way to make money at it. The
problem is a lot of us don’t even know what makes up happy. If that’s
the case with you, I suggest you devote some time to uncovering what gives
you joy in your life.
