A year ago, I worked with a client who had been intentionally out of the work environment for 2 years. When we started working together she was keen to get back to work. She didn’t want any job. She wanted her dream job. “What will you be able to do, once you have this dream job?” I asked. “Well, then I’ll be happy” she replied.
Being Happy, peaceful, less stressed and fulfilled is the crux of most of our ambitions and goals. Think about your own pursuits and I’m sure this resonates. I pointed out one major flaw that I intuited from her strategy:
She wanted to HAVE the dream job. In order to DO the kind of things that made her happy in her life. And she thought that she would then BE happy.
The problem with this mindset is that it continuously kept her in limitation. When she described her life at the moment, she felt like she was going through the motions with an underlying feeling – “I don’t have my dream job and therefore I can’t enjoy even the things which are working for me in my life” and “I’m not deserving of doing the littlest thing right”. The underlying belief here is “I don’t deserve happiness if I haven’t achieved bagging the right job”.
Something had to change.
I suggested that we switch this around to focusing on the last part. We discussed her answer to this question – “whom will you want to be when you are happy?”
We explored ideas such as:
- Who are you when you are happy?
- What are the things you do when you are happy?
- How does she lead her life when she is happy?
- What kind of choices does she make when she is happy?
- How does she show up in the world when she is happy?
I gave her a challenge to show up in this way at least once everyday. She took up the challenge. Soon the equation shifted to:
She was focussed on BEING happy As a result, something really magical happened. When she started to be that person, she discovered what happiness meant to her. She realized that it meant different things to different people. She also realized that for her, happiness meant being courageous and standing up what her beliefs, talking about the things she really loved and having the kind of engagements with people she really wanted to attract into her life. She slowly started to DO all the things that started creating in a whole new set of opportunities for her. The quality of companies she started interviewing with shifted. Her approach to interviews changed.The perspectives she brought to her career shifted. Happy result: She currently works full time for a great company that’s the ideal fit for her, her values and her personality. In other words: HAVING what she wanted
Waiting for milestone experiences to come into our lives to fill us up with the fulfilment we desire may not always work out. Furthermore, it can be a painful wait and devastating if it doesn’t show up as the ideal we wish it to be.
My go to question every time I feel unfulfilled and want to take action:
Whom do I want to be today, to do what needs to be done, in order to have that sense of fulfillment show up.
Go be that person. Today.
