Before the book, there was the webpage SoulPancake :) (Click this link, and join, explore, post, and love.)
One day, I came across a post from a member, and it has stuck with me for a long time now. Whenever I feel that I need a pick me up, some encouragement or just to know that the path I am choosing to follow is ok with me, I open this text I have saved on my computer desktop.
I feel proud to be the ever struggling, right-brained person I am :)
Enjoy,
Em
"Today’s graduate, just like the rest of us, faces an uncharted world. Creativity, not conformity, is the new security. Back in the days of “snail mail,” horse and covered buggies and Ford Pintos, we were advised to stick with one career path, work hard, and aim “sky high” for the promise of predictability and a gold watch. Those days are gone. Today, there is no external job security. Yet there is a stable and intensely satisfying way to make it in the world. It’s called following your passion.
I’m grateful the world no longer supports the status quo. I want more for today’s graduates or anyone who may be graduating into a different period of learning in their lives. You deserve more than a gold watch. You deserve to experience a golden time.
Typical career advice focuses on vocational assessments, resume writing, and networking skills, along with studying the hot fields and companies in the available job market. But real career success, at any age, involves staying true to your talents, putting your nose to the ground and tracking your destiny, following the genius that you alone possess. It involves studying yourself, more than the job market. Because today’s world isn’t about “fitting in” to finite opportunities. It’s about waking up to new capacities and needs, stirring the pot, and revealing, creating, designing and divining the infinite opportunities available.
Business guru Daniel Pink says, in A Whole New Mind, that we are moving away from the information age to the conceptual age and that “right-brainers will rule the future.” He explains, “The keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards.” Pink emphasizes that in the imminent future an MFA degree will serve you more than an MBA, because global business and industry now require creative, emotionally intelligent, out-of-the-box, intuitive thinking to meet the divergent and evolving climate of business and life.
I’ve been a career coach for over twenty years now, and I’ve seen the fall-out of old career thinking, both in the lives of my clients, and in my own professional life. For me, traditional, now archaic, career advice garnered me a way to make a living, but not a way to discover and express my soul. Sure, I was “successful,” on the surface, at a major law firm, having graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. But, I could not sustain that kind of success. I was born to be a writer, and the truth will always out. Inevitably, the soul’s desire to express is stronger than the ego’s desire to maintain equilibrium. The Universe or nature gave us our desires for a reason. They are seeds that are meant to turn into orchards of good in our lives. And if those energy sources are denied, then those seeds become time bombs designed to destroy limitation. The infinite within us will always prevail.
In coaching, I’ve seen a pattern I find strangely encouraging. I’ll put it this way. The velocity of our times demands authenticity. Our fast-paced world is a 24/7 kind of marathon. So if you’re not doing work that comes from your soul, you will have to work too hard to keep it up. And you will always have to wrestle too hard to keep your true passions at bay. We used to have more of a buffer to keep our secrets, even from ourselves. But increased demand requires an efficient use of our energy. And living your calling is the most efficient, practical, joyous, and generous thing you can do with your life."
-Tama Kieves
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