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Conscious Choice

The very best way to relate to our work is to choose it. Right Livelihood is predicated upon conscious choice. Unfortunately, since we learn early to act on what others say, value, and expect, we often find ourselves a long way down the wrong road before realizing we did not actually choose our work. Turning our lives around is usually the beginning of maturity since it means correcting choices made unconsciously, without deliberation or thought.

The ability to choose our work is no small matter. It takes courage to act on what we value and to willingly accept the consequences of our choices. Being able to choose means not allowing fear to inhibit or control us, even though our choices may require us to act against our fears or against the wishes of those we love and admire. Choosing sometimes forces us to 1eave secure and familiar arrangements. Because I work with many people who are poised on the brink of such choices, I have come to respect the courage it takes even to examine work and life options honestly. Many pay lip-service to this process; to do something about the truths we discover in life is no easy matter. However, more people live honest lives than we might imagine.

One young woman told me she had grown unusually depressed about her career in finance, one for which she had been preparing herself since high school. "Lately I've lost interest in what I'm doing. I'm living more for the weekends; on Sunday nights, I find myself dreading Monday mornings. Maybe I'm bored and need more responsibility." Yet, when her boss suggested she return to graduate school for an MBA, she began to feel even worse: what she found in herself was a host of conflicting desires.

After scrutinizing her enjoyments, motivations and values she admitted, "When I first started talking with you I thought I wanted to climb the corporate ladder. But I've come to realize that the idea of starting back to graduate school doesn't appeal to me at all. This is the first time I've been willing to see that.

"I realize I haven't been truthful with myself. What I really want is more flexibility with my time — not less. I dearly want to have children and to be a mother. I've entertained the graduate school goal so as to please other people.

"My boss — even my parents — would like to see me become a financial whiz. I know I have the capacity to be good in finance, and I guess I look like their image of the corporate brain who makes good. But I also know I have a great interest in raising a family, in being a good wife and mother, in trying my hand at some sort of crafts. That is what would really be satisfying to me at this time — not business."

She discussed her decision with her parents, and with her boss, and they were highly critical. But she was willing to pay the price of their possible rejection in order to stick to her choice. "I feel more together than I have in a long time," she told me later. "I feel an inner confidence that tells me things will work out just fine."

A Spanish proverb teaches, "God says, 'Choose what you will and pay for it.'" And so it is that as we weigh the yes/no possibilities of our choices, we learn more about our strengths and weaknesses and become more willing and able to pay the price of each choice. By choosing we learn to be responsible. By paying the price of our choices we learn to make better choices. Each choice we make consciously adds positively to our sense of ourselves and makes us trust ourselves more because we learn how to live up to our own inner standards and goals.

But the reverse is also true: When we unconsciously drift through life, we cultivate self-doubt, apathy, passivity, and poor judgment. By struggling, by facing the difficulties of making conscious choices, we grow stronger, more capable, and more responsible to ourselves. Once we see and accept that our talents are also our blueprint for a satisfying vocational life, then we can stop looking to others for approval and direction. Choosing consciously also forces us to stop postponing a commitment. In this way we move one step closer to being responsible, contributing adults.

Choosing our work allows us to enter into that work willingly, enthusiastically, and mindfully. Whatever our work is, whether we love it or not, we can choose to do it well, to be with it — moment to moment — to combat the temptation to back away from being fully present. As we practice this art and attitude, we also grow more capable of enjoying work itself!

Work Is a Way of Being

As a way of working and as a way of thinking about work, Right Livelihood embodies its own psychology — a psychology of a person moving toward the fullest participation in life, a person growing in self-awareness, trust and high self-esteem.

Abraham Maslow, foremost to study and describe such healthy personalities, calls them "self-actualizing." The phrase simply means growing whole. These are people who have taken the moment-to-moment risks to insure that their entire lives become an outward expression of their true inner selves. They have a sense of their own worth and are likely to experiment, to be creative, to ask for what they want and need. Their high self-esteem and subsequent risk-taking/creativity brings them a host of competencies that are indispensable to locating work they want. They also develop the tenacity and optimism which allows them to stick with their choices until the financial rewards come. They are life affirming. For them, work is a way of being, an expression of love.

A friend of mine is a furniture maker — a true craftsman and artist. Of his work he says, "I get great satisfaction from making fine furniture the process enriches me, makes me feel that I am somehow in each piece." He believes, as I do, that part of the unique beauty of a lovely, hand-made piece comes from its being part of the spirit that is brought to it during its making. He nourishes his creations with his care and attention, and his work, in turn, nourishes him.

Self-actualizing persons follow the often slow and difficult path of self-discipline, perseverance, and integrity. No less is required of those of us who yearn to trade in our jobs or careers for our Right Livelihoods-work that suits our temperaments and capabilities, work that we love.

Copyright © 1989 by Dr. Marsha Sinetar. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Dr. Marsha Sinetar is an organizational psychologist, mediator, and writer who for the past several years has been increasingly immersed in the study of self-actualizing adults.