What would your work look like if it was fulfilling?

What would your work look like if it was fulfilling?

Not easy, or fun, but fulfilling.

Because more than likely a job that is fulfilling will also be hard.

And complex.

And challenging.

Not always in your corner.

That’s the very point.

“You are not born with unlimited choices. We can’t be anything we want to be” - Pressfield, War of Art

The buzz word of late (if you exclude anything and everything that mentions AI) is ‘Authenticity’.

We are all meant to bring our authentic selves to our workplace, to our home, to every facet of our lives. But what does that mean and what does that even look like?

What happens if you have no idea who your authentic self even is.

Carl Jung warned us - “Beware the unearned wisdom”

I would amend and modernise that to - “Beware the unearned Influence”

Even as adults - supposedly full formed, mature and worldly adults, we can easily spend inordinate amounts of time and energy trying to fit into a mold that ultimately has nothing to do with who we are or what we want to be.

The philosopher Rene Girard termed it ‘mimetic desire’ - we might call it ‘keeping up with the Jones’.

The drive to have that job, that car, that title, that curated, filtered and broadcast life. We believe it's what we want. We have convinced ourselves as such. In reality - many of us simply haven’t put much time or effort into thinking about what it is we really, truly want.

We tell ourselves that we are busy and that means we are heading in the right direction. The process of reflecting deeply on what it is we actually want, what might actually be fulfilling - require we step back, away from all the myriad of distractions that the modern world is hurling at us.

You have to find the quiet spaces, alone, - it can be scary, even terrifying, because we may find lurking back there something that is in conflict with the very lives we lead now.

Or maybe we don’t - but we must search in the back of the dusty attic upstairs to determine the truth.

So what do we do?

Start here.

When are you happy?

When do you feel you are operating at your best?

What does that environment look like, how did it feel, who was there, what was happening?

What would your ‘work’ look like if it was fulfilling?

Sometimes that doesn’t mean you’re about to throw out your entire career - but perhaps you love the work but hate the workplace. Maybe the question is not what you are doing but the manner and environment in which you are doing it.

Look back through the work and relationships you have had - are there themes that resonate.

If I look back at my many and varied roles - from retail pharmacy, gym owner and coach, author, keynote speaker - underlying alll of those is a capacity to communicate with people.

Fulfilling work for me appears to be communicating with other humans and solving problems. Be it about sickness, fitness, finding adventure or building skills around discipline and resilience.

But that style of communication requires a balancing of the equation for me., I act like an extrovert but find happiness as an introvert. So I have to respect that and manage energy, output and medium.

Try not to split the authentic work self and the authentic home self - there should be no divide.

There is just your authentic self - it takes a lot of the required energy out of the equation when you don’t have to turn up to work and pretend to be someone you're not.

This is not something you will figure out over the weekend.

This is big picture stuff.

It goes through seasons, it will morph and flex and bend.

As your life changes so will that authentic self as it matures and adapts.

So keep the internal conversation alive, around how and why and who and what.

Find what you are good at.

Find what you love doing.

Understand what you can get paid for.

Understand there may be a gap

Discern how important that gap is to you.

You don’t have unlimited choices, we can’t all be rock stars and millionaires.

But you can be happy, and navigate a path to a fulfilling (not easy) work and life.