It’s very easy to do the little, microblogging on Twitter without feeling compelled to write a big time-consuming blog post. It’s been a busy week with lots of work and I’m very pleased to hear that I will be taking a few days off this week. It should give me a breather and I really should capitalize it and not just veg out. I really should plan at least part of that time so that I won’t be wining about it later. Sounds like a plan.

Lost

Been too busy to watch and to be honest I’m losing some steam. I don’t know why. It could be that I know that I have 30 more episodes to catch up on all the questions. It could be that Sun is being a bit of a hard-ass right now with Jin and I don’t like that. It could be that I wish Jack/Sawyer/Kate would just get it over with. I will say that the flashbacks are still compelling. For the most part I haven’t reached the point of saying, “I don’t care about that! What happens now?” We’ll see…

Career: “What’s Your Message?”

I came across a couple of thoughtful articles by Steve Pavlina, a blogger with a brain and a soul. Sometimes he’s a little too California for me and his cheerful optimism grates my frosty, dark, Northern composure, but then if I just shut up and read his articles I find that he has a lot of good things to say and consider.

Case in point: our use of the word “career”, how overdetermined its usage is, and how defining it for ourselves usually leads to some soulessness. He says that we tend to be instructed on what our careers should be by a bottoms-up method in which we look at our physical/mental strengths and match those up to whatever set of strengths reside in an occupation. The top-down method employs the “What turns you on? What’s your core passion?” roster of questions to find another set of profiles that reside in some occupation. What I love about Pavlina is that he is quick about avoiding false dichotomies: he says that both methods have their strengths and weaknesses so he marries them in an 80/20 top-down/bottoms-up split.

I strongly sympathized with his assessment of his wife’s difficulties as a secretary. Pavlina’s wife, Erin, could type 90+ words / min, and that skill was overplayed in career considerations. “Oh, you can type fast? Why don’t you be a secretary?” Being a secretary never addressed her passion to be and  exhibit being compassionate. Likewise, I have a great deal of technical skill but working in an environment where emotions are taboo (engineers) is what left me cold at Ford. It was a stultifying experience, to put it mildly.

In his other article, he talks about how often we look only at our career’s label and its functional responsibilities and not recognize how poor and flat that view is. That view doesn’t really consider the person do the work and their multi-faceted motivations for doing a job. “Oh, you’re an attorney. You must like doing legal paperwork.” If your motivation and passion in being an attorney is to negotiate peacefully that passion is completely lost in the appellation, “attorney”. Pavlina suggests reframing the label, maybe just for yourself to something relevant to your motivations and passions, in the case above, “Peacebringer.” Yeah, I know, it sounds a little fruity to me too. But I too see and feel so many of us who get completely depressed talking about their careers or jobs. We seem to wait for some sort of put-down since we are obliged to hate our job. It is the appropriate and fashionable thing to do. God forbid that we might more plainly state what joy we do derive from our work.

So, I’ve been thinking about what are my real passion is. As Avenue Q, might ask, What is my Purpose? I think it’s to be a counselor. What form that takes, I have no idea, but I need to try harder to express that passion to counsel and advise. I like doing it. I like helping people sort out their feelings about whatever it is. Now, I just need to be mindful of that drive and to build outlets to express it.