This is the question I lived with for the last two years, seriously considering what I was doing with the majority of my time each day. It settled into my psyche slowly, this question, nagging me while I worked long hours and checked email around the clock for my job. I gradually realized that the amount of time I was spending on work that I loved to do was dwindling. Gwen Bell started a conversation about the percentage of time people spend on their own work vs. other people’s work. You can read it here. That mentality is exactly what caused me to reevaluate my career choice and ultimately why I decided to take a break from school administration. It had become other people’s work.
When I was teaching, I didn’t feel that way at all. That was ‘my work’ just as much as my writing and photography. I had a great deal of autonomy and creative license in what I taught and how I taught it, I was inspired daily by my interactions with colleagues and students, and I felt like I was making a positive difference in the world. There was balance in my life between that work and my own creative work; it was a healthy, intertwined blending that made it ALL feel like my work.
That is how soul work feels: completely authentic and empowering. It fills you with passion, drive, enthusiasm each day. If you love what you do you are doing soul work. If you hate what you do, or are doing it mostly for the paycheck, you are doing ego work. Ego work is a job that you think you need because you don’t believe it is possible to do what you really love. Or you don’t believe it’s possible to make money doing what you really love.
The turning point for me emerged very gradually, over several years, mostly from reading Eckhart Tolle and listening to Wayne Dyer’s Excuses Begone on my iPod while hiking. Nearly every weekend, I would head out for a two hour hike with my camera and listen to sections of that book, especially the parts on contemplation and possibility thinking. I can still remember vividly his description of meeting a photographer on a plane who loved what she did but knew she would “never get rich doing it.” Or the teacher who hated what he did but had “only 16 years until retirement with a pension and benefits.”
I could hear myself in that phrase, wasting my life, waiting to live.
Then Dyer himself, talking about quitting his tenured position as a professor to pursue his dream of writing and publishing a book, a decision no one understood at the time. All the exercises about questioning whether our beliefs are true or not really opened my mind to a new way of thinking and believing in possibilities. Eventually, it inspired me to take a huge risk with my career, to stop doing other people’s work and spend more time doing my work. While I still have a job, the work I do is aligned with my soul so it doesn’t feel like other people’s work. It also doesn’t consume my life, so I have time for my own writing. It’s a perfect step for my evolution and expansion to all that I can be.
Whose work are you doing? Your work or other people’s work? Soul work or ego work?
Are you considering a shift in your life to allow you to do more of your soul work?
