Situation vacant: the job that makes you happy. Will you apply?

I’ve got a few friends in the process of changing careers and I’m really excited for them. There’s a powerful energy in the air right now, inspiring people to take steps in new directions. As I’ve discussed on this blog before, 2015 is facilitating life changes big and small.

Considering we spend more hours at work than in any other capacity, it’s crazy to even consider languishing in a profession that makes you unhappy. Yet a lot of people who book angel readings tell me they are feeling trapped in jobs that bring them neither challenge nor satisfaction. This is something I really struggle to relate to – thank God.

When I was at high school I had a friend who really wanted to become a teacher but her parents discouraged her from pursuing this profession because her earning capacity would be low. I’m so grateful that my parents imposed no such pressure on me – they gave me the freedom to choose a career that I knew was right for me, irrespective of financial factors; journalism was never going to make me a millionaire. Although I’m currently changing the scope of my work to include reiki and face-to-face angel card readings (stay tuned for updates soon!), I’ve really enjoyed my time in magazines and, until recently, I haven’t been bored. My creativity has always had room to flourish, which was a priority for me from the outset.

Last weekend I went away with a group of friends, and during one of our chats a mate told me that in 10 years of employment he’s never had a job that fulfils him. He’s taking steps to rectify that now (yay). I don’t have any advice for anyone in this situation – it’s your life, and only you can figure out how to make yourself happy – but I would like to pose this question to you: if you know what you want to do but you’re not doing it, what is holding you back? If it’s money, I’d gently suggest you re-evaluate your relationship with money. I’m sure that, like myself, you know plenty of people earning six-figure salaries who hate their jobs. Those people are spending copious amounts of that money trying to make themselves feel better – and that coping mechanism is not working. Truthbomb right here: work does not have to be an endurance test.

If it’s the time required to retrain in a new career that’s holding you back, consider this: time is going to pass anyway. You may as well spend that time getting to where to want to go. This is not just a job, it’s the vast majority of your waking hours, and you have a lot of say in how you spend them. You are not trapped. Even though there’s no such thing as a perfect job – every role has its drudgery and dramas, God knows – there is such a thing as a job that makes you feel content, fulfilled and, ideally, valued. Go after that. It’s worth the time and financial disruption. It’s worth the punt.

This is, after all, the only life you get.*

PS: You’ll notice my post is missing a familiar but tired cliché... you know the one: ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.’ I haven’t busted that out because I think it’s misleading. Even when you enjoy what you do, work is still work – no matter how fulfilling it is. If I had a choice between poolside cocktails and filling out my GST return, you can bet I’d choose the former.

*Not strictly true, from a spiritual perspective, as we all get multiple lifetimes… but let’s not muddy the waters….

I saw the sign, and it opened up my eyes

We all get messages from the Universe by way of intuition (which you probably know as gut feelings) but the problem is that often our logical minds intervene and discredit that message. ‘Oh you just made that up’ or ‘you’re just being paranoid’ are the typical arguments my brain comes up with. But asking for signs can really help get clarity.

That’s why I often ask my angels to give me a clear sign to confirm that the messages are accurate. It’s not a good idea to ask the angels what that sign should look like, but if I have made a decision I’m feeling uncertain about, I often say something like: ‘If it’s for my highest good for me to (accept this contract, for example) please give me a sign that I can clearly understand.’

Typically angels communicate through these signs:

Music

– a particular song that’s meaningful to you might come on the radio unexpectedly, or with lyrics that confirm what you’re already thinking;

Feathers

– may be left in your path or on your doorstep, for example

Coins

– finding coins in unexpected places (ie not your purse!)

Butterflies

– if you notice a swarm around a particular bush, that’s a sign

Clouds

– it’s not unusual for faces to appear in clouds, or sometimes the outline of angels.

This is not an exhaustive list. Sometimes the angels can be really creative and sometimes they’re just really, really obvious – a scenario I covered in this blog post.

Because I communicate with the angels so regularly, they often send me signs without me asking for them – they know that I need reassurance, even before I know it. For example, on Wednesday I was walking to a health appointment that I was feeling apprehensive about. A white feather floated out in front of me, almost brushing my nose, and I knew that was my angels letting me know it would be a favourable outcome (and it was).

Of course, I should point out that you should never use signs as an excuse not to make decisions for yourself. You’re the one in charge of your life. It’s really just a back-up for the occasions you are feeling deeply conflicted. It would also be remiss of me not to mention that you can get carried away with looking for signs, and that’ll lead you down a path of looking for hidden meaning where there is none. I clearly remember an occasion when I was walking home from work in Auckland a few years ago. I saw two feathers and got really excited about it and immediately started trying to deduce the unexplained message. (FYI if you have to think about it too much, there’s nothing there – if it’s a genuine sign your intuition will tell you what it means.) Then I rounded the corner and saw a dead seagull on the footpath – and almost cried with laughter. In case you were wondering, the Universe really does have a sense of humour. And sometimes a feather is just a feather – no hidden messages whatsoever. To know the difference, you have to trust your intuition. Which also happens to be the answer to every problem, ever, BTW.  

Why you should never lose your sense of wonder

I spent an hour watching humpback whales last Sunday and it lifted my mood far more than my daily meditation had.

The reason this excursion onto the rolling ocean turned my weekend around comes down to one very powerful word: wonder.

I had been feeling flat all weekend, struggling with some familiar demons and oppressed by a general sense of futility. I knew I needed to put some distance between my negative headspace and reconnect with hope, which is a fundamental ingredient when you are trying to bring about change. It took about 45 minutes to get out of the harbour and into the open water, where we waited. And waited. And waited. About 40 minutes later I finally caught a glimpse of a mama whale and her baby surfacing to blow out air, and it blew my mind. I saw two more whales after that and I think I said “oh wow!” about a million times. It was – and I’m not exaggerating here – extraordinary. 

Three days earlier I had attended a talk with US writer Leigh Ann Henion, who, as a young mother, realised her world had become too small. So she set off on a ‘wonder pilgrimage’ to see some of the world’s most astonishing natural phenomena – scaling active volcanoes and witnessing vast animal migrations. And then wrote a book about it, entitled (funnily enough) Phenomenon.

“Wonder is an underrated emotion,” she said. “It makes people feel more generous, more connected and more satisfied with life, and makes them feel less materialistic. The reason time passes so slowly when you’re a kid is because you’re always having new experiences.”

If climbing into a deep ravine isn’t an option or even a preference for you (me neither), there are other means to view your world like you’re a wide-eyed child again – and to reap the wellbeing benefits of those experiences. Think: visiting zoos and wildlife parks, star-gazing centres, bush walks and mountain-biking trails, just for starters.

It’s so easy to become immersed in day-to-day life and to forget that there is more to our existence than just work, home life and a steady stream of obligations. But being amazed – *actually* amazed in the true sense of the word, not just in the flippant way we throw the word around these days – is how we reconnect with the world around us. It puts problems into perspective and helps in appreciating the impermanence of what we have. 

About two years ago after I had been struggling with mood so low I had thought I would have to go back on anti-depressants, one of the first signs that the fog was starting to clear was when I started to notice incredible detail around me. Sensing this was significant, I started challenging myself to spot as many beautiful things as I could on my way to work every day. They were small, of course, but as I’ve noted on this blog before, the small things are really the big things. Snail trail patterns on fences, intensely coloured petals, gnarly tree trunks...  you get the picture. This sounds ridiculously twee, I know, but it really was helpful. I wouldn’t say it changed my life but for small moments it got me out of my own head and closer to a state of gratitude for what I had rather than despair over what I didn’t (which had been the root cause of my toxic gloom). It added momentum to a subtle internal shift of ‘looking at the doughnut, not the hole’, so to speak, which was a solid platform for getting myself out of the hole that I was in. When you’re in a deep pit of suffering you can’t see anything but the blackness. Noticing and appreciating beauty reminded me of the colours of joy, and urged me to continue riding out the storm so I could experience more of that. It gently whispered to me: it’s worth the struggle. 

This is why inspiration posters urge you to never lose your sense of wonder. I don’t think I’ve lost mine, but it does go MIA from time to time. Next time that happens I’m going send out a search party. And board a boat.

How trying to be happy can make you very unhappy

Here’s something I’ve noticed about the self-help industry: sometimes it’s not that helpful. 

If you look at the colossal amount of space the self-help section occupies in your bookstore – you guys still visit bookstores, right? Please do; bookstores are struggling and they really need our custom – one theme occupies the most shelf space: the pursuit of happiness.

That makes sense – we all wanna be happy. But if you read the back covers, many of these books are promising a magic formula for designing a life where every moment is happy. I don’t want to criticise books on happiness across the board, because I’m sure they have helped people, but my opinion is that this approach is problematic.

What concerns me is the underlying message – that we should expect to be happy all the time. To me, that idea is dangerous, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Last week I went to a panel session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival with the compelling title How To Live. The comments which struck a chord with me the most came from Paul Dolan, a London-based, internationally renowned expert on happiness and behaviour.

“The happiness industry is a distortion of the original positive psychology [movement]. It’s feeding this idea we are entitled to feel happy, that that is the default setting for humans. So out of the full spectrum of emotions that make us who we are – and all emotions, even the dark ones, have something to teach us – it’s saying that if we’re not feeling happy all the time there’s something wrong with us.”

YES! It’s natural to want to maximise your happiness levels, but unless you’re Miley Cyrus, life is not a constant party, and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you are trying to make it so. In fact I’m not sure that’s working out too well for Miley either. As much as we might relish the euphoria of graduating from university or the elation (or perhaps despair, depending on your circumstances!) of finally seeing those two stripes appear on a pregnancy test, happy events aren’t shaping you as a person. It’s the agony of rebuilding your life and healing your fractured heart after the demise of a relationship that teaches you how resilient you are, and that you’re capable of looking after yourself. Darker emotional states instil practical lessons too. It’s the despair of blowing your car’s head gasket in peak traffic that teaches you that if you’re driving a car older than Cyndi Lauper’s back catalogue, you need to top up its oil and water frequently. (This example may or may not be inspired by real-life events.)

Fixating on happiness like it’s some magical destination – the finish line of an emotional marathon littered with disappointing boyfriends, menacing bosses and unflattering haircuts – can also have the effect of lowering your self-esteem. Basically, you’ll wind up feeling like you’re doing life wrong when you’re unable to live in a state of infinite happiness. Ugh. We’ve got enough reasons to feel like we’re failing, thank you very much; experiencing normal human emotions shouldn’t be one of them. 

Instead, I think it’s more helpful to focus on contentment. Because gratitude is a core value for me, I spend time focusing on all the good things in my life. That means that when I get hit by an unexpected curveball and my life starts to feel like a giant pile of poo, I don’t pretend that it’s wonderful. I acknowledge the crapery (that is a word now, I just declared it so) and focus on what comes next, because I know it always gets better in the end, and my life is still, overall, incredible. When you’re broke, lonely and desperately overworked, it’s much easier to return to a baseline state of contentment – because unless your life is completely broken, there is always more right with it than there is wrong. Happiness is a beautiful place to visit, and you should go there often, but you can’t build your home there. 

Paul’s approach is to focus not on the meaning of life but the meaning of moments. As an example, he talked about teaching his child to read: “That has purpose, but doesn’t always have pleasure.”

The take-away message: knowing what’s important to you and what you value can be hugely helpful in achieving life satisfaction – even when things are not going so well. If you can focus on the moments that give you purpose, and celebrate moments of pleasure, you might not need to read a trillion books, or even one book, on happiness. And you’ll be better able to recognise and appreciate it when you stumble upon it. 

the art of accepting compliments

Receiving compliments is not a comfortable experience for me. Because I’m self-employed I have to fly the flag for my work – it is the mark of my “brand” (ugh, please forgive my brief lapse into marketing speak; it won’t happen again) and of my value. Because my work is published on the reg, it’s out there for people to comment on. Thankfully, they seldom do – I don’t receive a lot of feedback, and I’m happy with that. But on the rare occasion someone – generally within the industry, as readers don’t usually correspond unless they want to complain – proffers a compliment on a piece of mine, there’s a part of me that dissolves into cringe mode. 

I used to work with someone who would greet any compliment with a look of faint disgust. Her response was to tell you all the things that she regarded as being wrong with her story, and all the ways she should/could/would have improved it. It was almost like a slap in the face for the person giving the compliment – basically she was saying: ‘your opinion is uninformed and irrelevant, so keep it to yourself’. In her effort not to appear arrogant (FYI being proud of your work is not arrogant!) by deflecting the compliment, she came off as haughty and a little precious. Of course, it’s perfectly healthy to be self-critical – how else will you hone your craft if you can’t see the areas in need of improvement? – but to pour your personal dissatisfaction onto someone who just wanted to say something nice seems somewhat disrespectful. I understand that humility is important but I don’t think discrediting the opinion of someone who had good intentions is very fair.

My response to compliments is much less petulant. Over the years I’ve learned to disregard my discomfort and simply say: ‘thank you, I really appreciate your feedback’. I might not share their affection for the piece, but that’s OK. It’s taken some time to figure out how to separate my feelings about my work from the feelings of others. Even if I’m profoundly disappointed in the way I’ve executed a brief, if someone with no vested interest in that story enjoyed reading it, that’s awesome. I’ll take that. My work is, after all, for other people to read. It’s not some grand monument to hang in the Eternal Gallery of Trudie. 

Despite knowing this, whenever I receive a compliment I feel a small part of myself squirm. Partly this is because I’m shy so I don’t particularly enjoy being singled out in any way. Having attention drawn to something that bears my name – and by extension, drawing attention to myself – is an awkward experience. I much prefer to blend into the background. Unfortunately my work as a healer requires me to stand out.

The cringe factor also comes back to shaky self-esteem – which, I’m happy to report, is increasingly less shaky the more I work on my personal development. I’m better at actively challenging any message I tell myself along the lines of ‘you don’t deserve... ’ It’s harder for me to believe self-deprecating messages than it was in the past; they don't stick like they used to. That doesn’t mean I embrace compliments, but it means I don’t automatically reject them either. It’s a good sign that I am learning – finally – to value myself and my abilities. 

The times they are a-changing.