The 5 most valuable skills to find purpose and meaning in your work that no one wants you to know

Just like everything in life, there are beginnings and endings to every situation and everything living. Yet we so often try to avoid them, which leads to nothing but endless suffering.

This is a relatively common topic openly discussed throughout hundreds, if not thousands of years in yogic philosophy. Yet in the Western world, it is almost a completely taboo topic, well and truly off the list for discussion, leaving so many of us fearing new beginnings and endings instead of embracing them with curiosity and joy.

Take a good look into the natural world and you will see nature’s ability to let go and surrender to the natural flow of all things, whether they be beginnings or endings. We seem quite comfortable accepting death to a degree in nature, yet the mere thought of death approaching ourselves or our loved ones can be followed by what can sometimes become lifelong sadness.

We even go as far as to celebrate many of the transitions of death and rebirth in nature. The death of leaves is one of these, as deciduous trees in autumn allow their leaves to turn beautiful shades from yellow to red, as the tree consciously decides to stop nutrients from flowing to them, thereby releasing their leaves to their death. They then fall to the ground, becoming hummus, broken down in the undergrowth. Here they return to the earth to begin again, feeding the very trees that gave them life in the first place.

This is a beautiful process that is missed by many of us in the background, which we often barely see beyond the shades of green of the trees all around us. There are some beautiful books written by Peter Wohllebren describing the magic of nature from the giant to the minuscule that will have you thinking very differently about processes in nature just like the falling of autumn leaves.

Yet why do we see ourselves so differently from all the other living things in nature? Why is one death natural and others terrifying?

Social and cultural conditioning over many years builds stories, whether by intention, misguided trust in our childhood years, forced indoctrination in our education or subtle design that creeps into every part of our adult lives through marketing, TV, social media, movies, experiences lived through family and all the other circles of people with whom we associate.

The stories of fearing death didn’t exist in tribal and spiritual societies hundreds of years ago. In fact, they still don’t exist in many ancient cultures in existence today, including spiritual beliefs like Buddhism, yogic philosophy, Australian aboriginal people and Native cultural people all across the world. Many of these cultures celebrate death and honour those who have passed from their bodies from one life to the next.

This fear of death is more closely linked to all fears in life than you might first imagine. As humans, when we learn to understand how powerful this is, we learn to stop holding onto things that no longer serve us and make way for something better. This is something that many of us are just not good at. When you work through your fear of death, all other fears become child’s play. This is an invaluable lesson I learned myself.

Through social and cultural conditioning we’ve been taught things like, hard work is good for you and giving up is somehow for the weak. Yet in reality working hard at something that feels purposeless is a fast way to burnout, stress, anxiety and depression. We all know people who have suffered this way, in the pursuit of apparent success.

Yet when you focus your life on working purposefully, with a balanced view on caring for yourself and others, life has the potential to change completely.

That isn’t to say you have to completely uproot and change your career entirely. Some people do, but sometimes it’s about realigning back to what feels purposeful in life. To do this we need to understand ourselves better, knowing that not everything is external to us. What brings purpose to your life is your personal inward journey. It won’t just magically appear when someone else tells you what worked for them. It exists within your heart and we have all experienced moments of it. Those times when something in your work feels effortless, like it was second nature, giving you a tingling endorphin-like hit when you see someone’s joy from what you did to help them. These feelings are the little reminders that you are working purposefully.

Look into nature. The trees, rivers and all manner of living things, right down to the microscopic organism know exactly what to do. Doing their part effortlessly in flow, without question. All components of nature work in unity with each element surrendered to the role it plays in the big picture. Whilst people are busy waging wars, excluding and oppressing other people, nature harmonises perfectly keeping the balance in place. When purpose is in flow anywhere it appears effortless, just as it does in us.

You may be wondering, that’s all great but what has that got to do with leaving an unfulfilling job?

It might surprise you when I say, everything.

Nature works in harmony because, when not interfered with by people, all elements are in tandem, each one fulfilling its unique purpose.

We are falsely conditioned to believe it’s all dog-eat-dog out there. Yet, in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. To project this false image of nature only serves the purpose of a few people who benefit through hypernormalisation, in a detailed and complex way to keep us divided, spending and fearful at all times. It is exhausting and you likely know it.

Yet in reality, unlike people, animals only eat when they need to. We are fed the lie that lions are killers constantly hunting in over dramatic documentaries, when in fact it can take years to get just one hour of footage of hunting. Yet no other animals except people see it the way we are being constantly shown. So much so we’ve become obsessed with the drama that isn’t a representation of reality at all. When lions aren’t hungry, they drink at the very same watering holes as Zebras. Lions spend many hours daily resting where they can find shade avoiding the hot sun. Just observe your cat at home and you will shed some light on this in a whole new way.

So what if the dog-eat-dog idea projected on the working world is literally all smoke and mirrors?

What if I told you that there are many jobs, that just don’t get filled through lack of candidates in some places?

Would this surprise you? Probably not what you are being told, right?

You might be grinding the days hard, doing something that brings you no joy at all, just to feed your family and put a roof over their head. Yet in reality, this suffering you are enduring could likely be by design, not by accident at all.

How do I know these things? you might be asking.

Experience and self-awareness!

These are two skills that you will not develop in life by; playing it safe, staying in one job, living in one place, whilst being filled with fear of losing your job, your home and all the other things that you use inadvertently to distract you from finding your purpose. Your purpose needs disruption, discomfort and change to be uncovered.

Growth is not found through treading water, it is found when you are prepared to take on the rapids and sometimes even fall over the waterfall. Risk, change and ultimate purpose require intentional movement into the unknown, where you discover who you really are, behind the busyness, the giving up through quiet quitting and finally the ‘I don’t have time’ wall you have built to stay locked into your misery. I know because I built them all.

Let me share with you, five of the most valuable things I did in my work that taught me invaluable lessons about purpose, joy and the reality that, freedom is a decision, that you have likely without realising it, given away, just like I did.

The good news is you can take back control, so to speak and find your purpose at any time.

Number 1 — Regularly test the theory of ‘when one door closes another one opens’

Sometimes it takes courage to slam that door shut, closing a chapter in your working life to allow space for a new chapter to begin. This means that to find a job that brings you purpose, sometimes you must be prepared to leave a job without a new one on the horizon.

When you learn to do this, you begin to see the other opportunities you missed whilst you were busy being miserable in your current job. Misery is not a place where you will find the energy and effort to see other opportunities existing all around you. Yet, once you leave the misery behind and create the need, it’s interesting how driven you become.

During this transition time between jobs, you learn a lot about yourself which is helpful in your personal development towards purpose. The more you leave one job to find the next one, the more you grow personally. The fear falls away as you realise you are more than capable of finding a new job.

I was terrified the first time I left a job with no new job to go straight to. By sitting with my fear I was able to overcome it. I learned quickly of my capabilities within myself. I built confidence more and more, each time I left a job that no longer served me.

30 years later, I can do it easily. People around me are always surprised when I leave a job without another one already in place. To me, it’s invigorating knowing I am in total control of my working life.

By choosing to develop this skill I have become more skilled than those with the same years of work experience as me. In fact, through job diversity, I have exponentially improved my skill set and confidence in my ability to move forward in my career.

I am now what is coined as a ‘generalist’ in a world where specialisation was suggested to be king. Yet as a ‘futurist’, I knew better and set myself up to always be in demand when specialty roles became obsolete, as they do in a constantly changing world.

If you want to remain relevant in the constantly changing workplace, learning to let go of a job that no longer serves you is essential.

Number 2 — Learn to live with what you need instead of wanting what everyone else has around you

Early in my career, I learned that the things everyone else had were not what I needed. This valuable life lesson served me well when it came to leaving a job that no longer felt purposeful.

By understanding this, I didn’t get sucked into the trap of wasting money on buying expensive unnecessary things that everyone around me had, in some effort to keep up with the Jones’s, so to speak.

When I bought a car I got what I needed, not what everyone else had. Instead of buying a huge home and having a massive mortgage I focused on spending my money on growing my skills and helping those in my community who were less fortunate.

All things that feel far more purposeful.

Society is a giant vortex that constantly is sucking you into buying things you don’t need. It can be hard to escape this trap when you are deeply embedded with high amounts of debt. However, you can do what I did in this position, which was to create a plan, where over time I slowly removed the debt noose that was tightly gripping me around my neck.

You could start with something simple like cutting up your credit card or deciding to keep your car beyond the end of the repayment plan, allowing for an immediate reduction of costs.

When you lower the debt, you lower your expenses which loosens the debt grip, which stops you from leaving a job that no longer serves you.

Number 3 — Understand the importance of being a lifelong learner

The habit of life-long learning is about re-awakening the curious child, that you once were. Curiosity creates space for learning new things, enabling you to change your career, should you want to pursue something that feels more purposeful.

I have changed my career many times, which surprises most people who meet me. Yet, an appetite for learning makes career changes exciting, often invigorating you to engage in your new passion naturally with much more purpose.

Life-long learning keeps your mind young and active and teaches you adaptability, which helps to support you in times of ambiguity during career transitions.

When you do this a few times, you can begin to understand how easy it is to change careers and wonder why you stayed stuck for so long in a job that no longer felt purposeful.

I promise, as much as you may have been led to believe, no rule says you have to know what you want to do straight out of high school and stick with it for the rest of your life, no matter what your first choice was. Doing this is like missing your purpose and staying there because someone else might think you should. As my mother always said ‘It’s none of your business what other people think’.

Change is as natural as the sun setting. Avoidance is like trying to stop the sun from rising.

Number 4 — Consistently give space for creativity in your work life to foster curiosity

Creativity is fast becoming a lost art. Most of us stopped making time for creativity in our lives which directly impacts our ability to get enjoyment out of our work.

Creative pursuits are greatly undervalued in our personal development, so much so that most people now think that they are not creative at all.

If this is you? It might be time to re-ignite your natural creativity.

In keeping my creativity alive, I became an exceptional problem solver. Problem-solving is a skill that is highly prized in most workplaces, even though creativity is not actively engaged in workplace culture development programs.

Find ways to be creative, whether writing, painting, building things, fixing stuff, re-decorating, poetry or the plethora of other creative activities available to us these days. When you engage in creativity, watch what happens to things like your problem-solving skills in the workplace.

Creative people become more passionate about what they do in every part of their lives, yet we demonised creativity as if it was somehow less than other pursuits. An example of this is when people scoff at those who have an arts degree as if it’s somehow superfluous. Yet, they are much better positioned to deal with many of the challenges we are facing in the modern world, funnily enough.

Losing our creativity in society has hindered our ability to adapt, grow and solve the problems that we need to, together.

Get out and find something creative that feels meaningful to you, and then watch what happens!

Number 5 — Understand the importance of building resilience, self-awareness and self-regulation to avoid the death of stagnation

If you stay put in one job for too long you become irrelevant to your employer because you aren’t bringing anything new to the table, so to speak.

In employment 5 years is considered currency. If you stay in one job for one company for more than 5 years all you are doing is building your biases based on what you are constantly exposed to. This makes you stagnate personally and become stale bread to your employer causing workplace stagnation.

Stagnation is poison in the fast-transforming world we live in. Like a river that stops flowing a stagnant business will die the same death as the river. Stagnation has long-term impacts on both culture development and the bottom line.

Building resilience, self-awareness and self-regulation will help to stop you from stagnating. Resilience is built naturally over time when you learn to leave jobs that no longer feel purposeful. When you leave you make way for new blood in the company which is vital for its development.

In many industries we still have workforces that stagnate, leaving management scratching their heads, wondering why the business isn’t developing and the culture is becoming toxic. Stagnant water is toxic to its environment, just as stagnant people are toxic to workplace cultural development.

It is a bitter pill to swallow, realising you may be one of the stagnant people holding your workplace back. Even worse, there may be many of you, yet you don’t even realise it. Toxic does not equate to bad, it simply means something is in the wrong place.

Understanding how you may be impacting your workplace through self-awareness and self-regulation could not only save your sanity, by leaving a job that no longer serves you. It could also save the business you are leaving, not to mention the new business you go to.

Consider yourself as a boat on the water flowing down the river gathering experience and providing expertise you have gained previously. When you learn to understand the power of self-awareness and self-regulation, to know when it is time to let go and get out everyone benefits, including your pursuit of purpose.

Where to start?

You don’t have to do all these things at once. Commit to start today by creating a plan that will get you moving in the right direction to feel a working life filled with purpose.

You won’t have all the answers in the beginning. Just start and as you flow down the river of life, with some developed self-awareness you will learn to tap into your intuition to find the answers you need along the way.

You’ve got this! Whether you ride the winding back roads or the highway. May you enjoy every part of the journey on the way, because life as we know it is a journey, not a destination.

Much love to you all!