We devote major portions of our time on earth to working and we want our careers to go well. But there’s a range of problems that can blight our working lives: we can face squabbling colleagues, unsympathetic bosses, a turbulent economy, a low salary. We see others getting ahead but we feel unsure how to make progress.
Recently, I have found people asking me why I left the Corporate life (I called it the ‘hamster wheel’) to do what I am currently doing. For me, I increasingly felt an unfulfilled emptiness that I could no longer ignore. It is evident that for many – perhaps most, there is a specific but fundamental area of suffering that occurs around work: the feeling that we have a bigger potential inside us that we haven’t properly identified or managed to place at the centre of our careers. Or – to put it another way – self-realisation feels unavailable in connection with our jobs. We feel inauthentic and frustrated.
What do I mean by self-realisation and the search for authentic work? I believe that we all have within us a range of native talents and skills that are deeply embedded in our personalities: what we can call our ‘potential’. However, this potential doesn’t signal itself clearly enough to us and we can easily misunderstand its actual nature. An authentic working life depends on understanding our potential in good time. We can also add: we’re left very much alone with this task. A self-realised life is one in which we have had a chance to understand this potential and given it outward expression in the world. It has become an activity or object that others can see, that can please them, help them and gain their interest and approval. It may also make us money. What was deep inside has been ‘realised’ in the world.
Not everyone is interested in self-realisation around work. Many people don’t feel that their job needs to reflect or express who they are, that there needs to be this intimate connection between their ‘deep self’ and their work. This is, in a sense, a huge advantage. It gives them leeway to choose from a very wide range of careers: freed from the need to ask so narrowly what would suit their ‘deep self’, they can simply be guided by what is available, what they already know they’re good at and what might pay well and have good benefits. They also don’t need to spend ages introspectively wondering what they want to do: they don’t need to understand their deep self very well, because their deep self isn’t what they’re interested in engaging at work. However, the person who does want a job that reflects who they are, who does want authentic, self-realising work, is facing an additional task. They have to solve two problems:
a) How can I make a decent living/gain satisfaction/be comfortable?
b) How can the job suit my deep self?
They are bringing a difficult but impressive demand. The job has to meet the needs of the soul as well as earn a living.
It’s only relatively recently that people have been, on a mass scale, interested in authentic work and self-realisation. Work was, for most of human history, simply a source of suffering. Asking ourselves what we really want to do is a very modern question – which is good to realise because it can lead us to sympathy for our troubles. We’re at the dawn of working this one out.
We can get a powerful glimpse of the movement from potential to self-realisation when we consider the childhoods of people who have gone on in later life to establish very successful careers that seem exceptionally well suited to them as individuals.
Great talent is very widely distributed. What is in really short supply is a reliable route from potential to its realisation. Most people don’t manage to get their talents out. It is normally only exceptional fortitude or good luck that leads people to hit on their talent in time. The French writer Saint-Exupéry spoke of seeing the faces of commuters on the Paris metro and of wondering which of these belonged to ‘Mozart assassinated.’
Historically, there were many social and economic barriers why people never fulfilled their potential. For us, today, it’s often the case that the external world is not completely stacked against us, the barrier may be more internal. We don’t quite know what we want to do, or we are inwardly inhibited from acting upon our wishes.
But for me, this realisation was liberating. We really do have choices and we are largely free to make them – we just need to give ourselves permission to step off on the journey of self-realisation. And for me (perhaps this a statement of who I am), it wasn’t a journey that needed the approval of others. I write because I deeply enjoy the expression. I pursue my passions around beautiful furniture because of the places it takes me and the expression I find through it.
How might you get your talent out?
