Doing the Work You Love

Beloved friend of PSCS, Lyn Lambert, sent a magazine article by Harvard lawyer Tama Kieves, who gave up her law practice to pursue a lifestyle that was more meaningful for her. Now Kieves is a life coach. Her message is summed up by the title of the article, Your Divine Assignment: Doing the Work You Love.

The article suggests five areas of focus (which are excerpted below). The parallels between adults stuck in dead-end jobs and kids receiving a dead-end education are clear, and Kieves’s advice is right in line with the values of PSCS.

1. It Takes an Intermission to Find a Mission: I don’t care how much you can multitask. You’re not going hear an inspired voice within you with a cell phone in one hand, a PalmPilot in the other, while driving your kids to soccer and making grocery lists in your head.

2. Honoring Your Crazy Love: You’re looking for aliveness. You’re seeking to fall in love. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see how you’ll make money by colleting abalone shells or learning ancient Taoist wisdom. What you love has energy, and that energy will propel you into new experiences, insights, abilities, and expressions. . . . This is a dynamic path. Where you start off is not where you end up.

3. Trade in Your Label for a Ticket: The culture may demand definition, but your soul craves expansion. . . . You are as undefined as you are unlimited.

4. Only the Tender Can Breed the Fierce: [T]he esteemed psychologist Abraham Maslow taught something I always remember: “All creativity comes from safety.” It’s true. You cannot hear an inspired voice while underestimating yourself. True genius lives inside you. But it only grows in the soil of self-allegiance.

5. Just Start Dancing and the Band Will Find You: I often remind my students: “You can’t plan an inspired life.”

-Steve Miranda