The Risk To Discover YOUR Work

reprinted with permission (Summer/Fall 1997)
Laurie Mattila, M.S.Ed., Career Counselor

I’m not interested anymore in doing somebody else’s work, which I define simply as work someone else wants done that I end up doing. Unless work can somehow engage me enough to become mine too, I find it a distracting waste of my time and I try to avoid it.

For many years it was a different story. What I used to do for forty hours or more each week was somebody else’s work. And I was very good at it too. Many of the things I did really pleased other people and in a sense I was fortunate because most of them let me know it. But doing the work didn’t please me. I knew I was not doing my work, but I didn’t know yet what that meant.

The more I thought about trying to change my life and what I was doing, the more trapped I felt by the risk of giving up what I had but didn’t even want. I was overwhelmed by circumstances which felt totally insurmountable. That’s not at all unusual; many people thinking about and exploring change feel similarly overwhelmed. Although we really want change to happen, we want to do it without RISK. The truth is we don’t want change badly enough yet to risk changing ourselves. We’re still in that critical stage of adjusting to the whole idea that change requires us to change too.

Since reading How, Then Shall We Live? by Wayne Muller, I’ve been reminded of the importance of paying close attention to doing the everyday work that lives. Some of my observations, about what exactly that entails for me, surprise me.

Planting seeds and weeding the flower garden is a Yes. Writing this newsletter is also a Yes. Creating a new presentation complete with handouts, hanging up wet laundry outdoors on the clotheslines, talking in the alley with my neighbors... These all resound with Yes.

As I pay attention to my responses, I am remembering what holds real value for me and what supports my true work. Amazingly, things are quite clear. I feel much joy and power in choosing what I will do and what I will let go. Then it occurs to me, will I simply choose what lives for me? No one else will do it for me.

Searching for and finding Your work happens in the moment, not next month or next year or five years from now. It happens today and again tomorrow and every time you say “yes” or “no” or “later” to dozens of opportunities. Keep holding the question:   Does this live for me?

Every rationalized, practical choice away from your true self costs you. So does every choice you risk to be and do who you really are.

There’s no escaping it; both ways cost you. You can take the risk of living your life a stranger to yourself or the risk of following the unexplored path your heart is calling you to find. Either way, you pay!

Are you giving and receiving what You value? Are you doing Your work? Is it time to listen more to the things that are alive for you, and less to the demands of someone else’s work? Is it time to let some things go to make space for what matters and lives for you?

YOUR WORK IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE KEPT WAITING.