Modern Day Heretic

I decided to be a modern day heretic when my lifetime of professional and personal experiences told me we are going about career fulfillment all wrong. I concluded we don’t need more free sodas, flex hours, or a louder declaration that bringing our strengths to work can solve today’s biggest business dilemma. These are analogous to putting lipstick on a pig, because none address the real reasons we can’t love work. We are afraid.
I’m not talking about the kind of fear that causes us to lock our car doors and bedroom windows, but the type that closes our hearts and puts us in self-preservation mode. We give up on the things we dream about or care about because we are unconsciously afraid of some mysterious repercussion. We fear this isn’t the right career, or we’re nervous it is. It tells us to ignore our own intuition, and keeps us from going after what we really want. We dance with the anxiety that we’re not good enough, smart enough, or deserving enough, and play defense to prove our worth. This creates the instinct to be cynical and see the faults in even the most ideal circumstances. What else could cause this current epidemic where almost 80% of our workforce shows up on Monday morning unexcited about work?
I used to think I had all the answers to career fulfillment. In fact, that was my job: I’d worked for some of the best companies and was responsible for solving this problem in one way or another most of my career. Not only did I have the privilege of guiding thousands of individuals to all the prescribed answers to loving work, but I thought I’d cured myself of the same disease. Egotistically, I saw myself as a living tribute to all the wisdom, espoused by countless consultants, which was supposed to solve this unwieldy business epidemic. Until my final wake-up call arrived.

At the time, I was working for the largest philanthropic foundation. My work was rich with meaning, which is a key ingredient to creating engagement, you know. I felt competent. My strengths and passions were fully engaged, allowing me to do some of my best work. I was emotionally connected to the work and my heart ached for the causes we championed. I had all the right ingredients in my career, but I found myself succumbing to the same cycle of disenchantment I’d experienced in the past. It just didn’t make sense. This was the last straw, and I set out on my own quest to find the real answers to loving work.

It was my own experiences, and now those of my clients, which supports my seemingly heretical hypothesis – the greatest obstacle to loving what we do for a living is contained in the three-pound organ we call the brain. We are wired first and foremost for safety, and gone unchecked, too much of our internal programming stems from this natural flaw of nature. In fact, I am confident saying that the lack of happiness in the workplace is an outcome of our own internal fear-based tendencies. Unfortunately, too many find it easier to blame the establishment, circumstances, a poor manager, or declare this is just the way I am to avoid looking inward.

In fact, our minds even constructed the ego so we don’t have to look too hard at ourselves. It keeps score of our disappointments, insecurities, and wounds and ensures that we don’t fall into similar circumstances. It conveniently points out disparaging things about others, so we can feel better about ourselves. And, most dangerous – it is the gathering-place for the self-defeating beliefs we unconsciously created in adolescence. Thus, through the art of comparison or judgment, it constantly reminds us that there is much work to do. By the time most of us are gainfully employed, we are unconsciously programmed with bundles of automatic attitudes, strategies, behaviors and emotions that promise to keep us safe - but from what?

Our mind is attempting to protect us from the past, not the future. It does this by creating an enormous inventory of internal representations – collages of pictures, sounds, and feelings – that storehouse our memories. The collages tell us what to see, experience, think, feel and do based on the past. For example, when someone with a spider phobia loses themselves in a sea of anxiety it is not the sight of spider that scares them, but the internal representation held in the mind which is connected to fear. What most people don’t understand – we can change the internal pictures we hold in our memories and, in return, uninstall the patterns of fear and avoidance that plague our lives.
I use the word “patterns” intentionally because, while fear might be a natural destructive tendency of the mind, our effort at finding reasons to not enjoy work, or life, is a learned behavior borne from a lack of consciousness. Today’s biggest business epidemic doesn’t call for another newfangled employee engagement strategy or even require us to change jobs; it requires more curiosity, faith, and a guided pilgrimage back to love. I’m not talking about romantic love, but the kind of love that has the power to reconfigure the collages in our minds by removing the illusion of fear. This modern day heretic knows… this is where we find the real secrets to loving work, and life.