As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I recently made a big professional shift in my life to begin focusing my energy around being a life transformation coach.
It’s already been an amazing and fulfilling change. It’s dropped so many important piece of my life into place.
There was also a powerful personal revelation that catalyzed the shift. I think is important to share because it’s been the key behind every major transformation I’ve made in my life. This will obviously play in to the type of coaching I offer too.
Prior to this most recent shift, I’d been struggling professionally for awhile, maybe even to the point of “lost.”
I was teaching storytelling to organizations, which is work I loved doing and it paid well, but it was never very consistent.
I was also doing some freelance marketing and copywriting, which paid decent and was consistent, but I didn’t necessarily love doing it.
I was also working on reigniting The New Narrative, which I’m still very excited about and hope to get back to soon, but it was never destined to be a lucrative project, certainly not in the short term.
My attention was spread across three projects, none of which were viable on their own. They weren’t overlapping in such a way to adequately feed one into another either.
It was all affecting my sense of security too. It’d been a long time since I’ve made the kind of money I felt I needed to live life the way I wanted to live. In fact, it had been years of working independently and I was still barely scraping by.
I thought to myself, “I’m a smart person with big dreams… I’ve made amazing changes in other aspects of my life. Why is this piece in particular so hard for me to figure out?”
I thought back to other changes I had made in my life and tried to figure out what the key was each time.
I had worked through serious issues around self worth, alcohol, taking good care of my mental health, and improving my relationships with women. The trick for each of those in the past was to get out of my story, quit looking for external validation, and learn to be comfortable with my more authentic self.
Yet, when I applying this thought process to work and money I felt stuck…
What if the things my authentic self wants to do aren’t the type of things that make him money?
And I NEED external validation in the form of people appreciating what I do and paying me money for it. That’s unavoidable.
So that wasn’t going to work either.
Then it hit me. I remembered something else that had helped me with break throughs on previous challenges in my life. It was so simple that I couldn’t believe it took me so long to realize it now.
I realized that the key attitude and approach I needed to take was through love. Specifically I needed to love myself.
I would love myself by pursuing the opportunities I want for myself. I would love myself by generating the type of income I need to live the life I want to live. I would love myself by taking a leap into playing a bigger game than I had been playing before in everything I was doing. I would also love myself by taking some time off and realizing that downtime was actually just as important to my mental health and performance as time spent working.
The mantra I adopted was “my job is to love myself.”
All professional decisions were filtered through those parameters.
Am I doing work in accordance with how I want to love myself?
Am I getting paid at a rate that equates to the way I want to love myself?
Am I pursuing opportunities that will open new doors and create a better future for myself?
Now when I offer my services to an organizations it’s from a place of love. I love your mission. I want to help.
When I ask for way more money than I had asked for before, I did it from a place of love, both for myself, but also for the client or organization I’d be working for. I’m being honest and up front about how I want to fully and excitedly show up for the relationship.
It’s a subtle yet profound shift, but it’s also been ground breaking for me.
It sounds corny, but to me it was a good reminder of how love needs to be at the center of things.
If there’s a questions, what’s the most loving answer?
How can you apply love to the work you do?
How can you apply love to the next challenge you’re working through in life?
So I share in the hopes that maybe this helps someone. I think it’s easy to lose track of how we can love and take care of ourselves in the context of our professional relationships and endeavors but it’s necessary to think about it that way too.
* * *
Storytelling is a fascinating aspect of how we perceive the world and exist as humans. If you’d like to learn more, download the Storytelling Primer below and start learning more about storytelling today.