At some point in our lives many of us will suddenly stop to look around and ask ourselves how exactly it was that we ended up in the job we’re in. As children or young adults we often have dreams and aspirations of who we want to become, and who we want to be when we 'grow up'. Then one day we realise that we are 'grown up', and that those dreams of earlier years are now merely distant memories.
I had this experience recently. It was about a year and a half ago to be exact. I was working as an Account Manager for LinkedIn – using my languages, working with incredibly bright and interesting people, already with over two solid years of good performance under my belt in a company that would offer me excellent further career prospects. I had an exciting and promising career path ahead.
Music had always been my passion, but I had closed the door on a career in music at the age of 19 after suffering from problems with my back. Following this I studied languages at university. While I adore learning languages, the move away from music performance hit me pretty hard, and I stopped listening to what my heart was telling me to do with my life as it was too painful to do so for many years. Several years on with a languages degree I fell into Marketing and then into a Spanish-speaking sales role in LinkedIn.
Having spent several years starting to listen more intently to my heart through yoga techniques, feelings of unease with my choice of career path started to surface. This feeling of uncertainty along with the lessons I was learning through yoga philosophy classes kept eating away at me, and the discomfort of it was making me feel like I wanted to run away from it all.
I spoke to my yoga teacher for guidance, expecting that as a free-spirited yogi he would tell me what I was hoping to hear – i.e. that I should leave my job and go far away, preferably to a hot country, to find myself. Much to my frustration he said to me – ‘Well, you can’t just leave your job. We all have bills to pay, and responsibilities in life. We can’t just run away.’ Annoying and all as it was to not get the advice I’d been hoping for, I took his advice and sat with it. A couple of months later when I spoke to him again on the topic he simply told me that if I didn’t know what I wanted to do that I should pray to the universe to help me find my purpose.
I recognise that for many of you reading this, the thought of praying to the universe may seem pretty eccentric, so please go ahead and replace ‘universe’ with whoever or whatever you go to for advice when you most need it. Ultimately ‘praying to the universe’ is the same as going inside and asking ourselves or our hearts what it is that we really want and need to do.
Taking his advice, before or after my daily yoga practice I would say ‘Please Universe/or please God (as this phrase is well embedded from childhood!) help me find my purpose’. I would say the words, and do my best to also really feel the sentiment behind the words.
When faced with feelings of discomfort and uncertainty, our first instinct is often to bolt and run away. While I was very tempted to do exactly that, I am in retrospect very grateful to have received my yoga teacher’s advice, which encouraged me to listen carefully to my heart before making any rash decisions.
The following are some of the observations I had, and the lessons I learned along the way:
- The pace of modern life has become too fast for some of us to bear. Many of us are leading lives which favour material wealth and/or career status as the definition of our success, yet many of us are starting to sense that this theory is flawed.
- As a result a shift is taking place whereby we are starting to reassess our careers and priorities in life.
- We feel overwhelmed, and crave a slower pace of life and some time for reflection.
Having gone back and forth with many of these thoughts and feelings over the last year and a half, my advice would be the following:
- If you feel like quitting, first sit with it and observe the feeling. Really listen to your intuition and figure out why it is that you are feeling like this.
- In the meantime start asking yourself what your values and priorities are in life. What do you want to invest your precious time and energy in during your time on this earth? What type of life do you want to look back on when you are preparing to leave this world?
- Ask the universe or your heart to help you find the right path for you, and then trust in this.
- Finally – have the courage to follow what your heart is telling you.
Most importantly, always know that happiness and freedom come from within, and that while it may seem like all of the things that annoy you in your current environment will disappear when you leave it behind, rest assured that life will throw challenges at us wherever we go, and that our demons will follow us.
Trust that the obstacles on your current path, are most likely exactly the obstacles you need, to find the path that you are destined to follow.
Taking the time to really assess my driving force and what it is I care about it life encouraged me to focus on creating what I wanted for the future rather than just leaving behind the past. I truly believe that it was thanks to the little daily prayers I was saying that the perfect role in an organisation whose work I greatly admire just happened to crop up soon after I handed in my notice.
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