Sunday, August 27, 2017

Day 218 - In Money but not OF Money - How to Find Your Passion Without Chasing Money





I was able to sit in on this interview recording which discusses the problems money can create in our lives, and how it can flatten our passions and work when it becomes the starting point of whatever it is we become involved with.
 
I will first share the questions addressed in the interview, questions which I am sure almost every working person has asked themselves at some point in their career. Next, I will share my own case study example of how I lived this issue in my own life.

The Questions:

Is the quality of your work and your expression within it diminishing over time?

Do the things that you once loved doing feel more like work and less like something in which you are expanding and exploring yourself?

What happened to that spark that was once there?

These are often symptoms of when money begins to take over our lives and our expressions to such a degree that we suffocate our passion, our drive, and our sense of self-value.

Discover how we can begin to change our relationship to money so that we can bring back the spark and the inner passion of who we are within what we do, and not allow money to override our work, our living, and our expression.

The recording can be found here:

My living example, and how I lived it for ME:

For me, personally, I found myself in a corporate job in the back offices of a bank. I got this job because I had just moved back to Canada after a divorce, and I had bills to pay. I was working because of a need for money, I was working for money. The job itself was robotic and repetitive, reading and correcting SWIFT and other payment messages all day long… basically reading money codes and finding where they are broken, why they stopped for repair instead of going straight through into the recipient's account. I also did high volume settlement transfers for large US corporations, monitoring for insufficient funds and verifying that audit requirements are met for approval limits on transactions. It sounds about as fun as it was, meaning, not at all! I felt like a real robot, a cog in the machine, working inside the mysterious black box where your money passes through when you send it anywhere.

This was NOT my idea of living my passion or changing the world to any degree, and the potential was there for me to become depressed, unmotivated, discouraged and complain… in fact, before and even during my process of change, I did all of these things! But the difference between living according to the automated patterns and programs of the mind, and living in self-awareness with the tools of self-correction, is that by using the tools of support I have been practicing for some years now, I managed to change myself within the work I do, find my fire, my passion and my spark of life, even within these conditions. I will explain how I did this, which is also looked at from various angles in the interview recording I sat in on.

The first thing I did was to change my perception of my job and why I was there. Instead of processing transactions and verifying payment messages, I made it about self-development and acquiring new skills. At work, I pushed myself to practice discipline, focus, and the ability to learn new things – all are qualities which needed some attention and development within myself anyways. I viewed my job to be more like a game, where there are moving pieces and every day, throughout the day, I needed to put the puzzle together and solve the problems.
 
This is how I changed my perception and starting point of my job, and here are some of the results:

In pushing myself, I ended up leading campaigns, doing training and making presentations to develop leadership skills and the ability to work within and direct groups. I ended up finding and implementing process improvements to improve the running of my department, and even changed the way our cross-departmental quarterly townhalls were presented. I pushed for and achieved a change in terminology within how the corporate announcements referred to employees, to a way that is more aligned with my principle of respecting and honouring my peers as my equals, and to not support the corporate hierarchy where employees low on the ladder are seen as replaceable resources. In pushing myself to develop myself, I also managed to leave changes in my workplace that will remain there after I have left.

I also developed qualities within myself the serve me to this day, leadership skills, the ability to work with all types of personalities in a group, the ability to be more direct and expressive, bringing myself as Who I Am into what I do. Also, the ability to focus on tasks that may be perceived as mundane and repetitive, discipline to push myself to do things that I might have otherwise judged as overwhelmingly boring or unpleasant. All of these things are present in daily life no matter what we do. The reality is that it is not always fun and stimulating, there’s always paperwork, administrative tasks, bills, budgeting, and things that repeat every day, so these skills I viewed as essential to my future, no matter what my future brings.

It is easy to list things here, years later, but the truth and reality is that at many points, this process was difficult, challenging and I had many hard times. 

Realistically, some skills can take years to develop. I spent the first year or so feeling a bit shell-shocked and getting back on my feet after my move and divorce. What I was able to accomplish there was planting the seeds within myself, and nurturing them into seedlings that will require continued maintenance, nurturing and support in my life. “If you don’t use it, you lose it”, as they say.

The process is far from over or complete. This is a living process of self-creation that can and must be lived in all moments throughout life. Does this sound like a burden or a lot of work? Maybe. But I don’t think so, because before I made the push to change, as I mentioned, I was living as depressed, unmotivated, discouraged and complaining. To me, THAT sounds more like a burden and a lot of hard work! Both ways are using mental and physical energy, but one way leads to growth and development, while the other leads to self-diminishment and misery.



If you got this far, thanks for reading! I will continue in my next blog.

For now, check out these links to learn how to change yourself to live your utmost potential:

 

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Visit the store

 To read about how I got here, check out my journey:

Leaving the Rat Race - Going to Africa
Turning a Self-Defeating Moment Into A Moment of Self-Empowerment
The Greatest Gift
The Cure to Self-Sabotage: Unprejudiced Objectivity
Conquering the Rat Race
Defining My Own Life
Re-Defining my Moment
Change Who You Are Within the Work You Do
A Small Change in Environment, A big Change in Perspective


3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the awesome example Kim here and in all your recent sharings, grateful :) and keep them coming!

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