For many years before I transitioned to full time life coaching, I preached to my university students that a career choice should never be based on how much money they could make, or how easy it would be to land their first job, or how much job security they would have. Parents would ask me how good the job market was for this or that career. I would tell them that they were asking the wrong question to the wrong person. I would turn to their son or daughter and ask, “What is your passion?”

 

“The only good reason for any career choice is this: The chooser cannot imagine doing anything else for the rest of their lives. If you have that kind of commitment and passion, no matter what career, no matter how demanding the work, no matter how challenging the competition, you’ll be successful. But the best part is that you’ll wake up everyday, not to go to work but to play. And you’ll be paid well enough for it. ”

 

When my son was quite young, I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.  Without the slightest hesitation, he said, “an OBGYN”. To say the least, I was a bit amazed at his response, given that he was only eight year’s old.  I asked him if he knew what an OBGYN was. He said, “Yea, that’s a baby doctor.” I thought for a moment, trying to contain my astonishment, and then asked, “Do you know what baby doctors do?”  He said, “Oh, sure! They meet the mommy at the hospital, and they help get the baby out of her tummy.”

 

My wife was a school nurse, and she believed in sex education at any age. Procreation and reproduction were familiar topics in our household. Although the term “baby doctor” may have been part of our discussions, “OBGYN” was not uttered with any frequency around our kids. It turns out that my son had learned “OBGYN” from his little friend across the street whose dad just happened to be one. But even at that, the term “OBGYN” seemed a bit of a stretch in the vernacular of two eight year olds. I wondered what impression had contributed to his newly expanded and precocious medical vocabulary.

 

To add to my wonderment, there was something about my son that didn’t quite fit the nocturnal professional demands typical of OBGYNs. One of his most memorable qualities was his extraordinary propensity for sleep. This kid could sleep through anything. And he could sleep anywhere, in the worst of comfort. He slept so deeply that remarkably we could get him out of bed in the middle of the night, walk him to the bathroom to relieve his bladder, and lead him back to bed without his ever waking. “What would Dr. Spock say about that?” Our pediatrician assured us that he had seen “undisturbable” sleep in other perfectly normal children, and we had no reason to be concerned.

 

Clearly, my son’s ability to sleep through any midnight emergency could be a significant impediment to his availability in the service of expectant mothers. Knowing this, I gently asked him if he knew just when the baby doctors met the mommies to deliver the babies. He thought for a moment and hopefully asked, “In the afternoon?”  I answered, “Sometimes. But the baby, not the doctor, typically decides when they want to be born. You and your sister decided to be born in the middle of the night, long after I want to go to sleep. In fact, baby doctors most often meet the mommies at the hospital while you are sleeping.”

 

He gave me a bewildered look. Obviously, this was an occupational hazard he had not considered in his bright future as an OBGYN.

 

I then asked him why he thought he would like to be a baby doctor. He said, “Well, so I can drive a red Porsche like Dr. Pete.”  I asked, “You mean Pete, the baby doctor who lives across the street?”  He answered, “Yea, like Dr. Pete. He’s an OBGYN, right?” I answered, “Yes, and I hear his red Porsche roar past our house at all hours of the night.”

 

I paused for a moment to let this sink in a bit and then asked, “If you could do anything you want when you grow up and also drive a red Porsche just like the one Dr. Pete drives, what would it be?” He looked at me with a quizzical expression, as if this was a completely new consideration. I could see his mind having some difficulty visualizing a red Porsche in a garage that had NOT been built from the proceeds of cutting umbilical cords. After a few seconds, he cautiously said, “a fisherman”. I said, “Well, some fisherman are paid lots of money. Some have very big boats, and I’ll bet some of them drive red Porsches.”  He looked at me as if he had already parked one in our garage.

 

I continued by asking, “Wouldn’t you like to go fishing for the rest of your life and own a nice house and drive any car you want? Well, the most important thing in deciding what you want to be when you grow up is to do the thing you most like doing. If you do, you’ll find a way to have whatever you want. In fact, I know a couple of very successful fishermen just like that. Would you like to meet them?”

 

That was the beginning of my son’s career decision process. He’s now a grown man with a family, a house, a beautiful piece of property overlooking the bay where he learned to fish, and two fishing boats. (The red Porsche dream was long ago abandoned for a self-image less “yuppie”.) Thanks to his grandpa (My dad loved to fish as much as my son.) and his own passion for fishing, my son is the most adroit non-commercial fisherman I know. He can out-fish the best of them, and he could have been a successful commercial fisherman. But as he grew up, he discovered other passions and explored most of them, including owning his own business in the surfing equipment industry.

 

While in college, he discovered his passion for architecture. Now he is a successful building contractor. I don’t know how long he will stay in the home construction industry. He never took the easy route to his work, but he has always followed his passion. My son is a man of many interests with great adaptability. He’s very inventive with some registered patents to his credit, and he’s full of ideas of new ways to have fun making a buck. I have no doubt he will be a success at whatever he applies himself. He knows that pursuing his next dream isn’t necessarily the easy and secure path, but he understands the value of struggle in personal growth and the joy of pursuing his passion.

 

He may not be the wealthiest man in his county, but he is enthusiastic about his work and he understands that there is a great deal more to a career than how much money he can make, or how much prestige his career brings him, or how many hours he works a week. He understands that when he awakes to the next day, its important to look forward to doing what he passionately enjoys. It just happens to also pay the bills and build a financial future for his family.

 

I probably sound like an opportunistic father bragging about his own kid. I am quite proud of my son and my daughter (another BLOG). Both have done many things much better than I. My son’s example as someone not afraid to pursue their passion serves to reinforce my approach to coaching people through life transitions.

 

Whether transitioning from college to a career, changing careers, or making the transition to retirement, it’s essential to pursue our passion.  That doesn’t mean that all will come easy. Indeed, it may be the most demanding thing we will ever do. But if the passion is there, the energy and commitment will be there to see us through the greatest challenges.  And in the end, we will be happier and more fulfilled than had we chosen the safe and secure path.

 

Pursue your dreams. Pursue your passions. The rest will resolve itself.

 

 

Chuck Jennings

Life Coach for Life Transitions

www.life-coach-chuck.com

lifecoachchuck@gmail.com

805-459-7416

As a teacher and a holistic life coach, encouraging positive thinking and a positive self-image have been essential in helping my students and clients grow and change for the better. A positive attitude and self-confidence are absolutely necessary to successfully navigate and direct anyone’s life transitions. But only until recently have I become acutely aware of the direct cause-and-effect relationship between focused intentional thoughts and the creation of our reality, good and bad. This revelation has come through a close examination of the manifestations of intent in my own life.

 

Although I was introduced to the power of  “goal visualization” 25 years ago, I became more convinced of its real potential only within the last few years. A recent re-examination of a long-ago personal transition resulted in a new appreciation for achieving goals through the subconscious mind. Unknowingly, forty years ago I had practiced visualization in my own life with remarkable results.

Since my childhood in Indiana in the 1950s, watching the first episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland, I had fantasized living in California. Following their own dreams, my parents moved to California while I was a college student near Chicago. Two years later, while in graduate school at Northern Illinois University, I had a map of California pinned to my apartment wall.  Everyday I studied that map with somewhat innocent  anticipation. I had no specific city in mind. I simply wanted the California dream. One morning, I stuck a map pin on San Luis Obispo, a small town approximately half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the area we call “the Central Coast”.  I had driven through San Luis Obispo a few times on visits with my parents, but I knew only that it was a beautiful town in the middle of the state with a state university offering courses of study in the subjects I wanted to teach. 

 

Everyday, that map served as a stimulus for me to visualize living and teaching in California. Looking back now at the visions in my imagination, I was seeing my memories of San Luis Obispo as my picture of California. I was not consciously, knowingly practicing the law of attraction (The Secret), but that was exactly what I was doing and doing it well. 

 

Teaching positions at the college/university level, at that time, were not at all abundant, so my chances of landing any teaching position on the West Coast were slim. Hoping to be located anywhere on the West Coast, I decided that my job search would include all colleges and universities in Washington, Oregon, and California. My research results indicated 120 institutions with programs in my field of design. I mailed resumes to all 120 schools from which I received approximately 20 replies with five schools requesting a full application, one of which was California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo. From those applications, I was asked to interview at three schools, all in California. I was offered two positions, amazingly, one of them at Cal Poly.

 

Now, what were the odds that out of a 120 schools on the West Coast, I would have a job offer in the town where I had intuitively stuck a pin in a map in a state the size of California? Even then, I didn’t consciously make the direct connection between my mental visualization and the results of my job search. It seemed a “mere coincidence”.

 

As I recently watched The Secret (http://thesecret.tv/) for the first time, I realized that my transition from graduate school to a teaching position in California was more than a coincidence. It was a perfect example of the law of attraction. I had “attracted” my new life in California through repeated visualization of what I wanted. I was shocked! Although I had considered positive thinking as “useful”, especially in the learning environment, I had never so clearly and consciously appreciated the remarkable cause-and-effect connection between visualized thoughts and desired outcomes. I began to recount all of the major transitions in my life, including my career transition into life coaching, and I wondered if all were as “self-fulfilling” as my transition to California. Of course, I could not recall all of my thoughts and visualizations preceding every major event, but of those that I could recall, there was no doubt that I had unknowingly applied the law of attraction through visualized thoughts with incredibly reliable results.

 

Norman Vincent Peale was probably the most well known modern inspirational author and speaker to suggest a link between our thoughts and the events in our lives. In 1952 he published his memorable book, The Power of Positive Thinking, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 consecutive weeks and selling over seven million copies.

 

Although I remember hearing “the power of positive thinking” as a frequent mantra in the 50’s and early 60’s, its application in everyday American life was certainly overshadowed to a great degree by our cumulative fear and anxiety over the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war, especially after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.  The emergence of “new age” philosophy in the 80’s, the recent popular interest in The Secret and Wayne Dyer’s book, The Power of Intention, are among some of the forces fueling a revival of the power of the mind and spirit to create not only hope but also realities. The mind-force cause-and-effect observations discovered in experiments in quantum physics have given a scientific authenticity to this movement. Surprisingly, quantum physicists such as Fred Alan Wolf have joined with spiritual leaders such as Rev. Michael Beckwith as advocates of The Secret and “the law of attraction”.

 

Dr. Wayne Dyer’s (http://www.drwaynedyer.com/) recent bestseller, The Power of Intention, Learning to Create Your World Your Way, similarly explores and extols the new consciousness of the power of intentional applications of the mind in creating our reality. His multi-media package of the same title was recently featured on National Public Television. The Power of Intention ranks high among the required reading for anyone looking for inspirational “hope” in the “new thought” movement, a synthesis of “new age” and the new mind/reality consciousness. Barack Obama’s campaign emphasis on hope-filled change with his repeated affirmations, “Yes, we can!” appears to have tapped into this emerging consciousness, appealing to a renewed and youthful populous that is shifting away from the negative, fear-based politics of the Cold War, Viet Nam, and the Middle East, toward an expectant embrace of unity and diplomacy.

 

Regardless of political trends, there is a cultural and spiritual awakening underway. And it is being promulgated by students, clergy, philosophers, economists, corporate executives, teachers, coaches, scientists, physicists, and popular talk-show hosts. There is, indeed, real power in our intention, especially through practiced visualization of our thoughts. Our thoughts create our own reality. We attract what we get in life through what we focus on with our mind and spirit.