Success E-Letter Vol.1/1 January 2001
Work as a Crucible of Learning
Nina Ham, CPPC, LCSW
The holidays are behind us and the new year has begun. It's often a time when many of us are laying down plans and intentions for ourselves and our lives. In that spirit, I send you a particular greeting directed to wherever you are on your work journey. I have some thoughts, insights, and even bits of poetry I'd like to pass on, in hopes they may further you on that journey in some fashion.
Having spent several years now as a coach (and a psychotherapist) engaging with people about their work lives, I've witnessed the profound fulfillment they find when they come into alignment with their right work. Freud talked about work, with love, as the cornerstones of mental health that call us forward into ourselves in compelling and formative ways. Eighty years later, David Whyte, poet and author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, echoes the same theme. He challenges us to enlarge our conception of work and create new metaphors that embrace it as a training ground for fundamental learning about our humanity. Here are some thoughts on that learning.
Work as belonging
Work is where we carve out our place in the world, where we forge a sense of belonging. Not a personal sense of belonging, as we aspire to in love, but a larger, more global belonging. We become part of an interlocking pattern of assertions and accommodations, forming our place.
Work as a call to integrate
Work can be a place of unification. Robert Frost has a wonderful poem:
Yield who will to their separation.
My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation,
as my two eyes make one insight.
Only where love and need are one
and work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever really done,
for Heaven and the future's sake.
Remembering that the words vocation and avocation stem from the Latin word for "voice", this poem calls on us to integrate, to bring the full force of who we are into our place of work.
Work as self-discovery
If we recognize work, like love relationships, as a platform for unfolding who we are meant to be, we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly onto that platform, acting and being acted on, seeking acknowledgement and granting it, vulnerable in our longing to have a place and knowing surely on occasion that we do.
My New Year's wish for you: that you insist that your work be a place of learning and belonging, and be vigilant that it remain so. As David Whyte puts it, "…anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you." (from "Sweet Darkness", in The House of Belonging.)
Book Review
Zen and the Art of Making a Living, Laurence G. Boldt; Penguin Books, 1993. "A practical guide to creative career design". May be a little cumbersome, but it offers a good map for locating your "life's work," covering emotional/spiritual and practical terrain.
Nina Ham, CPCC, LCSW | Success from the Inside Out
Email Coach Nina | Telephone 510-526-7377
all contents Nina Ham © 2002
