The Power of Positive Life Choices: Creative Work

Work has the potential to be a vehicle for your creative self-expression as
well as cover your expenses. A key success strategy is to choose work that
suits your talents and lifestyle and reflects your passion as well. In this
topsy-turvy work culture, where reliance on others for job security is fast
disappearing, building a worklife based on what you love has emerged as a
quest. The question of meaningfulness is capturing the
sentiment of the stressed-out baby boomers as well as the seniors who got
the golden handshake and still have both the desire and the vitality to
contribute to the workplace. You spend hours working. Are you happy
with your results? Is your work in alignment with your values? If you won
the lottery tomorrow, would you still want to do the work you're doing
now? Is work a positive choice for you?

In my practice, I see many people who "fell into" their line of work. We
do a terrible job in this country of guiding young people in making this key
life choice. As a child, we are often only exposed to the work we see our
parents do and the jobs in a school system, where we spend all day. So
when asked to choose a work field, we don't have the self-awareness or
life experience often to say, "Aha, I want to be a landscape architect" and
know for sure because we've done it.

I saw a lawyer recently who told me, " I became a lawyer because my
sister told me to apply to law school and I didn't have a job. I had no
vision of the day-to-day life of a lawyer. I was just smart enough to do
well on the LSAT's. So now I'm a lawyer and it terrifies me. I don't know
if I have any goals for myself as a lawyer." Another client with an
outstanding thirty year sales career in office equipment says, "I've never
really felt like a salesman. It's like I've been a superb actor all these years.
Now I just want to be myself ."

A second phenomenon that impacts the wisdom of your choices is the
natural flow of change. Even if you made a great career decision for
yourself at age twenty-two, it's often unrealistic to expect that you'll be
content with that choice for forty years or more. Stan, an emergency room
nurse, says that if he'd known about managed care, he would have become
an architect. Joan, a high tech public relations pro, showed up in my office
saying that she never wanted to write about a piece of computer hardware
again as long as she lives. " I need to learn something new and exciting,"
she moaned. Many mid-lifers express a similar sentiment. They want to
express a different part of themselves. I see many clients who want to pick
up on a theme they left behind--the writing they began in college, the
interest in photography that they won awards for in high school, or their
"sixties" wish to change the world. Picking up these lost threads and
re-weaving them into your life certainly qualifies as a positive choice. We
continually change and grow and our work-life ought to reflect that. Bob
felt rejuvenated when he left his big bureaucratic university to teach
classes of twenty students in a small college. He loved the sense of
community on his new campus and met his second wife, too. My
gynecologist cut back his practice and parlayed his acting talents into a
video series on menopause. Most of us will change careers several times in
our worklife. While it can be unnerving, it's also healthy to scale fresh
challenges and develop new talents.

The art of Positive Choices helps you to create the life you want. Positive Choices help you to discover what truly makes you happy and realign your priorities. Life is a series of additions and subtractions. You control the calculator.

© Copyright 2004. Gail McMeekin, LICSW, Creative Success. Material may not be utilized without the permission of the author. Permission is hereby granted for each user to print one copy for his/her personal use.