Every now and then, I come across someone – a friend, client – who is grappling with one of life’s classic dilemmas:  how can I do what I love and meet my needs for security and safety?  I’ve had a little flurry of conversations this week in which some quite diverse people have raised this issue and decided to address this subject here today.

Let’s be clear, if you are nurturing this dilemma, you are far from alone.  As we embark on our careers at least some of us will make choices which favour earning a good living over having fun at work doing those things we most love.  Perhaps we have parents who have programmed us this way.  Perhaps we are already clear that we want to be in a position to marry and have children.  Perhaps, right now, we’re looking out of the window and recognising the economic climate that awaits us with all its challenges.  Later in life, when we have the spouse, the children and the mortgage and who knows what else we may find ourselves sitting in our offices looking out of the window thinking “if only…”, even whilst holding the conviction that we couldn’t possibly leave our well paid job to pursue our heart’s desires.

One of the challenges we face is that, as long as we hold the belief that the joy of work and financial rewards are mutually exclusive, we won’t begin to engage with the question I posed above:  how can I do what I love and meet my needs for security and safety?  Perhaps it will knock on our door every now and again only to be summarily dismissed.  The yearnings won’t go away (perhaps they’ll become louder over time or manifest as some lingering discontent or even as some physical unease) and at the same time, the voice we most sponsor within ourselves will be speaking to another agenda (think of the mortgage, think of your pension, think of your kids…).

There are paradoxes of course.  Richard Branson (as you know, I have recently been reading his autobiography, Losing My Virginity) did not set out to become rich, nor did he worry about his pension.  He set out to have fun and got rich in the process.  Stephen King (author of Carrie and many other best selling books) was not always wealthy.  He pursued a talent for and a love of writing, and he did it in his own way despite feedback from his teachers (in On Writing:  A Memoir of the Craft he describes how he sold a story he’d written to his fellow pupils at school and was summoned to the principal’s office, where he was told he couldn’t turn the school into a marketplace.  ‘What I don’t understand, Stevie’, his teacher said, ‘is why you’d write junk like this in the first place.  You’re talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?’).  Along the paths to many extraordinary successes lie periods of poverty, feedback that discourages and the sheer surprise of doing something you love and finding, suddenly, you’ve become an ‘overnight’ success.

I could mention some of the resources available for people who are grappling with this dilemma.  Perhaps I will, though not today.  For now, it simply occurs to me to say that one of the reasons we experience it as a dilemma – as an either/or – is that, within ourselves, our yearning to do work we love and our longing for safety are sponsored by different parts of us so that we imagine that what we carry within ourselves is also true out in the world.

Check this out:  is it true for you?  Do you find that the part of you that yearns to get paid to do work you love is at odds with that part of you that is fearful and longs for security?  If it is, you might like to read a posting I wrote a while back, called welcoming your parts to the party.  This, in turn, will lead you to a couple more postings which touch on the subject of our inner dialogue and its effect on our lives.

PS  And to those of you with whom I had conversations this week on this subject:  I dedicate this posting to you.  You know who you are.