Happiness and Work: Your Life Depends On It

By Craig Nathanson

Early one morning, Robert awoke, made his wife of 41 years some banana bread, took out the garbage and called to cancel a doctors appointment scheduled for the next day. He wrote a note to remind his wife to pick up the dry cleaning. All things considered, it seemed like a normal day.

Robert had "retired" four years earlier after nearly 40 years doing what he loved in the banking industry. After retirement, his life took a challenging turn.

While he remained friendly and encouraging to others on the outside, on the inside he was suffering a deepening depression. After retirement, Robert couldn't find anything to replace the meaning and fulfillment that work provided him. And this void was slowly killing him.

So on that "normal" morning, Robert cleaned up the kitchen after finishing baking his wife the banana bread. Then he drove himself to the parking lot of the bank where he had worked all those years. After carefully parking and locking his car, he walked into a local store and handed a note to the clerk behind the counter. Then he walked outside and shot himself in the head. He ended his life with one bullet at 1pm on a blazing sunny day.

Robert was my dad.

Your happiness is your responsibility

A few years back, when I decided to leave corporate America after 25 years, I thought I had learned enough about mid-life and work.

After all, I was in the middle of my Ph.D research on what happens to mid-life adults when they leave the security of the nest to follow their hearts and their life's calling. I had coined a new term, ''Vocational Passion,'' to describe this alignment of passions, abilities and interests. I had started a new on-line community at www.thevocationalcoach.com, and I wrote a book, ''P Is For
Perfect: Your Perfect Vocational Day'' in an attempt to boil down this research in a practical 10 step model.

Yes, I had thought, with my corporate background, various degrees, new clients, new office, workshops, public speaking gigs and a burning desire to make a difference in the world, I had learned enough.

I was wrong. The biggest challenges were still ahead.

So as I struggle to make sense of his death, I also am finding new strength in my own work, helping others to find meaning and fulfillment in their vocational lives. This is especially so in mid-life, which can be the most threatening period of all.

When my dad lost his purpose for living, he also lost the will to live.

Fortunately, most people don't take this action to end their own life but many people shoot themselves in the head emotionally, continuing to work at jobs which no longer provide meaning or passion or fulfillment.

It doesn't have to be this way. With this article, I am hopeful, maybe one life can be saved as a result of acknowledging that depression may be a symptom of not living a life filled with purpose, meaning and fulfillment. As a result, a call to action is a must.

As the psychologist Carl Jung said, mid-life is a time to listen deeply to your heart. Whether we plan for this or not, midlife can be a period of transition and reappraisal. More inner questioning can occur. Career plateaus can be reached during this period, which drives a need for internal insight and reflection.

Those who don't invest in time for self-reflection in mid-life may experience increased stress and other distress signals. The sense of crisis may vary from one person to the next. For those who do experience stress, making changes in mid-life is never easy or without challenges.

Can you make the difficult choices?

Making work-related change in mid-life to pursue a dream or passion generates a lot of issues. I have observed in working with my own clients that these issues generally fall into three categories: emotional, relationship and financial.

Am I good enough? Can I can give myself permission to follow my heart?

What will my loved one's say? If they don't agree, do I dare test a relationship or rock the boat at this point in my life?

Despite all the "sound" financial advice to save for retirement, do I instead invest in myself now, thus perhaps turning my financial world upside down.

Are my loved one's willing to make this sacrifice? What if they are not?

These questions will all come up. One will feel selfish and may well be accused of being self-indulgent of self-absorbed. Well, mid-life is a time to be selfish. This isn't about change for its own sake, but to position oneself for the second half of life, to be authentic and to shred external views and norms.

During this time, it doesn't help that society's view is the general belief that work continues to be something not necessarily to be enjoyed. As a result, most career theory and research has supported this notion by largely ignoring the enjoyment factor. Even counseling psychology has largely followed the same path. The focus has been on matching skills and available types of work. While this can be helpful for younger adults, in mid-life internal needs, desires and passions beg for attention.

While society expects those in mid-life to simply roll over and prepare to die or retire (I am not sure which is worse) many in mid-life actually begin to wonder how they can start living. For many, it is a re-birth with new wisdom and self permission to follow your heart.

Economic conditions can force people to ignore their inner needs and take jobs they don't like to pay the bills. This only helps to further ignore your inner needs. Jung believed that ego was important for development in the first half of life but in the second half, ego should step aside for humility.

Achieving vocational passion requires looking inward to understand what brings you the most enjoyment in your work. As a result, you can begin to understand the relationship between achieving greater meaning and the way you choose to conduct your life.

It takes action to follow your vocational passion. I am not convinced that money can buy happiness at mid-life, but I am convinced that happiness can increase the richness in your life. We each get to define what that means.

It all starts with a simple re-examination of what you have done, are doing and might do vocationally in the second half of life. In mid-life and later, it's critical not to ignore your heart. In mid-life, it may be the most consistent thing in your life when everything else seems in flux. Sadly, Robert wasn't able to do this.

My wonderful grandmother who lived well into her mid-90's used to always say to me, "Bagel (that's what she called me) just do what makes you happy."

I think now, I finally understand what she meant.

Craig Nathanson is The Vocational CoachT and the author of, P Is For Perfect: Your Perfect Vocational Day by Bookcoach Press and the publisher of the free Ezine, ''Vocational passion in mid-life''. Craig believes the world works a little better when we do the work we love. Craig Nathanson helps those in mid-life carry this out! Visit his on-line community at www.thevocationalcoach.com where you can sign up for his next teleclass.

Visualize This: Values and Motivation

by Barry Maher

A little imagination can do wonders for changing the scale and putting things into perspective. Here are four simple visualizations I've found to be particularly effective for me in providing insight into the things I actually value as opposed to the things I sometimes think I value or the things I often act like I value.

Visualization 1. This one should seem familiar. I'd be amazed if you haven't imagined it on our own. You might want to try it a bit more seriously this time.

You've just come out to visit me in my home in California, just outside of Vegas. But before driving to my place, you stop in at Caesar's Palace. As you're walking through the lobby, you drop a dollar into a giant slot machine. Bells start ringing, lights start flashing, people come running up, and you've won the largest jackpot in the history of Las Vegas. One hundred and thirty-seven million dollars! After taxes and a small finder's fee to me for leading you into this fantasy, the lump sum payment to you is $73 million.

What are top three to five things you want to do with the money?

Visualization 2. The chairman of a major television network just called and asked me to give you the following message. Because of that thorn you pulled out of his paw when you were at Caesar's, he's going to give you an ad campaign on all the network's top rated shows for any non- commercial message you might chose. What's your message going to be?

Visualization 3. Your fairy godmother's come down with senile dementia. She's got one wish left to grant—and it's all yours. But in her confusion, she's decided that it can't be something for yourself—and no, it can't be more wishes. It also can't be money, or something for your immediate family. And no, it can't be more wishes. What's your wish?

Visualization 4. Here's an old motivational test I always like. Imagine a six inch wide, forty foot long board lying on the ground. What would it take to get you to walk from one end of that board to the other? Certainly you'd do it for a million dollars or to save the life of a loved one, but what's the minimum you would do it for?

Now raise the board. Make it five feet high, stretching between two banks of a stream. It's forty feet long so it sags a bit in the middle. What would it take to get you to cross it? Make the banks ten feet high. Now what would it take?

Add alligators to the stream.

Now, raise the board to the height of a house and try it. Keep raising the board until finally it stretches from an open window on the top floor of one towering skyscraper to an open window in another skyscraper, forty feet away.
What would you cross that board to gain or to preserve or to protect?

How do your board-crossing priorities match up with the way you prioritize your time? Are you spending great hunks of your time pursuing things you wouldn't walk a particularly high board for? How are you using your career and the working hours of your life to help you pursue the things that are really important to you?

Nothing you ever do in your work will be as difficult as crossing that board. If you can get the motivation that could get you across the board to motivate you in business, you're going to be hard to stop.

Copyright 2004, Barry Maher, Barry Maher & Associates

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Barry Maher speaks, consults and writes on management, sales and on increasing productivity AND job satisfaction. His book, Filling the Glass: The Skeptic's Guide to Positive Thinking in Business, has been honored by Today's Librarian magazine as "[One of] The Seven Essential Popular Business Books." Visit his website and sign up for his free email newsletter at www.barrymaher.com or contact him at 866-243-8062.

The Language of Intuition

Claudette Rowley
Copyright 2004


"Like an ability or muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is
strengthened by doing it."
- Robbie Gass


Last week I was speaking with a client about the language of intuition, and how it's a language that we can learn to understand just like Spanish or Chinese. When we first hear a foreign language, it either sounds interesting but meaningless or we ignore what we hear because it doesn't spark comprehension.

Deciphering the language of intuition can be a lot like that. At first, you might not even be aware of what you're hearing. Or you notice something, but "it sounds like Greek" to you. For some of us, learning a foreign language comes easily. And for some of us, knowing the language of intuition is innate. The rest of us have to work a little harder.

There are general ways of tuning in to your intuition: for example, paying attention to a gut feeling, a dream, or a song lyric that pops into your head. However these are simply portals into your own knowledge of your intuitive voice. Intuition is truly a "sixth sense" - it's as available to you as your sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell. In other words, intuition is largely a form of sensory knowledge. Just the like the other five senses, it's a felt knowledge that has very little to do with your mental capability, and its interpretation is
individual. For instance, how do I know that an orange tastes the same to me as it does to you?

What's the dialect of your intuition?

Becoming acquainted with your intuitive voice is a personal experience, and may involve a widening of your perspective about what intuition is. We often think of intuition coming in dramatic "flashes." Intuition may also come in the form of
strong physical sensations or images. For example, I had a conversation with a woman who recounted feeling strongly pulled to move to the U.S. Whenever she resisted this urge to move from her home country to the U.S., she literally felt punched in the stomach. Once she made the monumental decision to move, the
stomach-punching stopped. She firmly believed that this physical sensation was the work of her intuition.

Most frequently, though, intuition shows up in the dialect of the ordinary. Ordinary, everyday intuition usually doesn't set off fireworks or make the 6 o'clock news. Everyday intuition often takes the form of a seemingly fleeting inner comment such as "I really should call Ken and tell him about my new business
idea," or "You know, every time I drive by that restaurant, I feel compelled to stop." We often dismiss these comments for two reasons: Intuition doesn't necessarily inform us in advance why it's important to do or say something, and soon after we hear an intuitive comment, our inner critic jumps in to say, "Now
there's a stupid idea."

How can I get to know my individual intuitive dialect?

- Notice the fleeting inner comments. Experiment with following the direction of these messages even when your inner critic makes a judgmental comment.

- What seems persistent or insistent in your life? That may be your intuition talking to you.

- View intuition as a sixth sense. Use it as you would your eyes, ears, nose, mouth or skin.

- Ask your intuition a question and listen for an answer. That answer will come from your intuition.

- Notice if your body is intuitive. Do you get a pain in your neck when something is a "pain in the neck?" Sometimes I develop headaches when there's something I don't want to think about or when I think too much. Both are intuitive messages.

- Use your energy levels as a barometer. As your energy rises, plummets, shifts, centers, grounds or ungrounds you, what do you notice? Energy and intuition are intimately connected.

Become acquainted with your intuition; view it as an immensely informative language to learn. The difference between learning a spoken language such as Portugese and learning the language of intuition is that learning Portugese requires external resources while intuition requires only the internal. You have all the tools you need to learn your own intuitive dialect. With practice, you'll be fluent!


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Claudette Rowley, coach and author, helps professionals identify and pursue their true purpose and calling in life. Contact her today for a complimentary consultation at 781-676-5633 or claudette@metavoice.org. Sign up for her free newsletter "Insights for the Savvy" at http://www.metavoice.org.

Enjoying the Fruits ...

"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them." -- Ann Landers

The Internet allows me the tremendous opportunity to live where I do, which as one visitor who saw my online snapshots of the area commented, "... where you live is as close to paradise as I think you'll find on this planet!"

Barring the occasional storm, I'd tend to agree.

At this time of year, the weather has cooled a little, the first monsoon-like rains fell last week and the fruits of this fertile valley's year-round production are being harvested and enjoyed. Unlike much of the rest of this sub-tropical island, we have a four-season climate here.

Earlier in the summer, I'd picked apples, peach-like durasno and plums of various colours from the front *garden*.

Both black & white grapes are harvested from the rows of vines in my backyard. Enough to make 200 litres of wine with a few huge bunches left over for me to eat.

Fields of wheat, potatoes, maize, pumpkins and saffron are cultivated around & about. Cabbages grow wild around field perimeters and even 50% of the "weeds" that are collected for goat-feed, are made up of fennel.

There are trees of avocados, lemons and oranges, as well as date palms and almond groves. I have quince at both the back and front of the house. We've already eaten kilos of fresh figs, which also grow wild and abundantly.

For weeks now, I've been enjoying fresh blackberries daily, collected from the hedgerows just yards from the house.

We have cacti everywhere too, with their profusion of prickly pears. Yeah, imagine that, growing either feet from or, intertwined with the blackberry brambles!

Before I moved up here, I lived on a banana plantation.

For a "city-girl" to arrive and literally, take my own pickings, compared with the costly convenience to which I was accustomed, was Harvest Festival and then some. Even Eve couldn't have had such a field day in the Garden of Eden and, it was very easy to get overly excited about it.

But it's not until you've lived amongst nature for several years, as I now have and seen the rhythm and passing of various seasons; the fates and follies of both nature and human intervention, that one stops taking it all for granted and begins to fully appreciate the true wonder.

It doesn't have to be like this, as was demonstrated by a few rogue storms and excessive rains at all the wrong times one year. None of the normally millions of figs ever got enough sun to mature and ripen. Whole fields of potatoes rotted or were simply ripped up by the high winds. The wheat was lost entirely and the grape harvest shriveled to nothing with bad case of mildew en masse.

Yet, the same effort and constant care; planting, tending, pruning, ploughing, daily comings and goings had gone into producing nothing, as went into another year's plenty.

There's little or no automation can be used on this mountainous terrain. Tools are almost primitive. Add the tending of a few goats for cheese and meat, a couple of chickens in the backyard and the occasional rabbit stew and this is what people have done here, for centuries.

They aren't daunted by the occasional failure. They simply go about their daily tasks, focussed on their goals, guided mostly by the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun.

They know it takes patience, persistence and not a little hard work before they can enjoy the fruits.

Remember this applies to business too. Even online.

Former accountant & journalist, Pamela Heywood, has been working online since 1997 and from her home for even longer.
She writes many articles and tutorials, which range from inspirational to step-by-step tech stuff - explained in plain language. To benefit from her experience, visit:
http://www.pamela-heywood.com