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Category “work fulfillment”

The World Needs You to Follow Your Inspiration

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“Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.” ~Unknown

As I left the San Francisco head office of the clothing company I worked for, I felt anxious and scared. I knew, in the depth of my heart and soul, that I did not belong there and that I needed to do something about it.

Up until a year before then, I had thought I did. But then I met this new friend who was a very spiritual person. He talked to me about things like universal mind, energy, …

How to Create Joy Today: 7 Tips for a Happy Life

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“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ~Dalai Lama

I have recently come face to face with mortality—not my own, my friend’s. At only thirty-seven, Daniel left behind an army of people whose lives he had touched in some way, including my own.

At thirty-three I have just qualified as a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist. At the time Daniel passed away I was working as a human resources manager, a profession I had originally trained in and remained in for over ten years.

A number of factors and events led me to make the leap and …

6 Powerful Questions That Will Change Your Life Forever

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“Information is not knowledge.” ~Einstein

A few years ago I was lost. Frustrated. Scared. Unsure. Anxious. Trapped. Unfulfilled. Stuck in a dead-end job. Smothered by society’s expectations. Didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life.

I cared for myself enough to change my life, but I didn’t have the slightest clue where to start. I spent my days wishing that things would change—that I could escape a life that my soul could no longer bear.

The worst part of all, I was living the life that society had always told me to live. “Find a …

Keep Moving Forward: 4 Tips to Enjoy the Journey More

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“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” ~Proverb

Five years ago, I decided to fulfill my dream of getting a doctorate. I knew from talking to friends who took on the same endeavor that it would mean many sleepless nights and tons of reading and writing. But nothing prepared me for the path that lay ahead.

Graduate school is often compared to a marathon. Why? At each moment, when you think you’ve completed a major milestone, you realize you have a long road ahead. You just have to keep going …

5 Tips to Achieve Your Goals Despite the Odds

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“Excellence can be obtained if you care more than others think is wise, risk more than others think is safe, dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.” ~Unknown

After several excruciatingly painful and profoundly frightening years of undiagnosed symptoms, I was diagnosed with a “progressive and incurable” neurological disease, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy/Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (RSD/CRPS). It’s characterized by unrelenting pain that is disproportionate to the inciting event, usually an injury or trauma.

As luck would have it I was diagnosed and, shortly after, hospitalized for the first of three times, just as …

Getting Out of a Rut and Working on a Passion

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“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” – Charles R. Swindoll

For twenty-something me, a college drop-out utterly overwhelmed with choice and bewildered by unemployment, it can easily feel like a void of nothingness, so black and dense there is little point in considering a future beyond it.

I see friends studying Economics, English, and Engineering. They’ve joined their circus, and I haven’t even started yet. I’m behind, I’ll never catch-up; I’ll be the kid that got held up.

College has structure, solidity, a process, respect, certification, and a certain standing. …

3 Simple Ways to Turn Failure into Success

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“Life is a process of becoming. A combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” ~Anais Nin

I’ve always been an optimist, looking for the good in situations, even when they seem like the bleakest thing that could happen to me or the people around me.

But failure is a difficult one to turn on its ear.

You know when you don’t reach your goal. You know when you don’t get what you wanted.

Now I know the Rolling …

What Are You Worth?

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Have you ever worked a job where you were grossly overqualified or underpaid?

I once had a job where I was getting paid $12/hour for doing stuff that I thought I liked.

I was working in a field very closely aligned with what I wanted to do in the future, and I had access to all kinds of experts that I could talk with.

At the start, I thought it was great; I was young, the pay was tax free, and it was my first job after a long absence from the United States.

But as time wore on, I …

Letting Go and Becoming the CEO of Your Own Happiness

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“Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves.” ~Gandhi

Ten years ago I was a young executive working in a fairly high-profile job at a big entertainment studio.  I had an office with a view, a gorgeous convertible, and a huge wardrobe. I was invited to fantastic parties every week.

From the outside, it seemed like I had it all. I was convinced that I did have it all, because everyone was telling me how great it was. It was the life I’d been conditioned to strive for.

The …

How to Create Your Ideal Day in Work and Play

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 “Every new day is another chance to change your life” ~Unknown

Take a moment to imagine it: your ideal day. At work or at play. Big events or routine tasks.

Imagine how you’d feel as you yawn, stretch, and step out of bed. What your first action would be. Your second.

What you’d eat, what you’d do, and how you’d spend your time. The lightness of happiness as you ease (or not, if that’s your pleasure) from one activity to the next. Your ideal day, start to finish.

Just imagine.

Picturing your ideal day is a common exercise that I …

The Unexpected Path to Living the Life You Dream About

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“Of course there is no formula for success except, perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.” ~Arthur Rubinstein

I used to be a big fan of working hard, really hard. I still work hard, but I do it from a place of inspiration and peace, instead of fear and must.

In the past few years, something has shifted within me. It is both confusing and wonderful. I cannot put my finger on exactly what is going on, but it seems to be happening in just the right way.

Like Arthur Rubinstein says in the quote above, there …

When You’ve Lost Your Sense of Purpose

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 “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” ~Mary Oliver

I was always the child with armfuls of books and big dreams. I wanted to be a writer. When the limit at the local library was six books, I borrowed all six, and then talked my sister into letting me borrow some of her weekly ration.

While I had many friends, most lived several minutes away, and public transportation wasn’t available. When I couldn’t arrange a sleepover, my sibling and my books were ever at the ready to play school.

My parents …

4 Myths about Doing What You Love for Work

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“Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” ~Buddha

“Big flud strikes Revere!”

That was the headline of the newspaper I made with my sister when I was six. I hadn’t yet honed my skills as an editor, but I knew a good fake story when I heard it.

Eight years later, while wading through my anger toward several people who’d hurt me, I wrote a short book called The Line of the Virtues about the grey area between good and bad. An older coworker at my afterschool job asked, “Are …

Overcoming Shame at Work When You’ve Made Big Mistakes

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“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” ~ African proverb

Hitchen’s Kitchen. It sounds like a diner straight out of a romance novel. But there I was standing in yes, the kitchen, getting my first dressing down at my first paying job.

At sixteen I had screwed up waiting tables. I got the special of the day, swiss steak, mixed up with sirloin. And so I kept putting in tickets ordering sirloins and the cook kept on grilling them.

And then it struck. The customers were happily eating sirloin while paying the “special of the …

Stop Pushing: The Art of Relaxed Achievement

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“Some people think it’s holding that makes one strong—sometimes it’s letting go.” ~Unknown

A few weeks ago, I took a sip of my morning tea hoping that the day would be better than the prior ones. I had somehow tripped over the cracks of life and couldn’t seem to pull myself back. I had woken up feeling eager to start a new day, but like every other day of my life, within the first few hours, things had gotten off track.

I was stuck in a downward vortex of fear, anxiety and self-ridicule. I read my Yogi tea bag message, …

The Real Measure of Your Wealth

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“The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.” ~Unknown

A wonderful story from the yogic tradition highlighting the true meaning of wealth goes something like this:

There was once a beggar who spent his days sitting under an old banyan tree on the side of a dusty road that led to a bustling town. The man had been begging in that spot for years, rattling an old tin can hoping that passers-by would feel compassion and offer alms.

Yet, at the end of each day he would only have collected …

Realizing Your Self-Worth and Believing in Your Path

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“Your outlook on life is a direct reflection on how much you like yourself.” ~ Lululemon

“My existence on this earth is pointless.”

That thought crossed my mind every night before I fell asleep.

It had been several months since I graduated from high school and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. My future plans were falling to pieces, and everyone around me kept telling me that I needed to start accomplishing things that I had not yet accomplished.

I was not where I thought I should be in life. Everyone had expectations …

Define Success to Create Success, Starting Now

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“What matters is the value we’ve created in our lives, the people we’ve made happy, and how much we’ve grown as people.” ~Daisaku Ikeda

Ahhh success! It sounds so good. We all want it, but are you brave enough to define what success means to you and go for it?

Society conditions us to define success as being the best, attaining prosperity, making a lot money, or having a fancy CEO title.

I thought I had “success” ten years ago where I spent five years working on Wall Street at Credit Suisse, an investment banking firm in New York City. …

Career Transitions: How to Cope with the In-Between Stage

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“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” ~Proverb

If you’re a passionate person with goals for your life, you’ve probably been at the “in between” stage more than a few times. This is the stage when you’ve identified your goals, broken them down, identified steps to reach them, and started on that plan—but you’re not yet seeing the fruits of your labor.

Ambitious and excited at the goal-setting stage, you embarked on this path with a vision in front of you. Now you’re in the throes of it—or maybe …

Being Patient through Transformation: Trust, Change, Believe

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“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.” ~Charles R. Swindoll

Ever noticed a chrysalis hidden within its cocoon? The final few moments before it emerges as a butterfly compose what science terms as metamorphosis, a transformation.

If you have been lucky enough to observe this process, which I highly recommend watching, you’d notice it has to struggle quite a bit before it gets all the attention for being the magnificent creature it is.

It’s long and painful. However, while watching it, you may be tempted to clip off the outer covering of …