The Journey of Creating a Life & Career in Alignment
Image by Food Photographer Jennifer Pallian @foodess on Unsplash
I thought it would be fun to take you along on the path of creating a life & career in alignment, through my journey I share in my book Wholeness Within, and give you insight into the key mindset and identity shifts I learned along the way, so you can confidently define and claim the career path and lifestyle that lights you up.
We are all unique, so the stories I share in this blog series touch on universal experiences that you’ve most likely experienced, and how these impact us in confidently stepping into our ideal roles.
We receive a ton of misinformation in society as to what would actually fulfill us in our lives and careers, and that’s what I share in this post.
It’s undeniable that we are all unconsciously influenced by societal programming that tells us which common path to take would make us most happy.
There is one recognizable path that truly infiltrates our collective, and that is this: go to an esteemed university, get a job at a reputable company right after graduation, move closer to a city for opportunities, get married, have a baby, move to the suburbs and don’t forget to put off all your dreams of fulfillment until retirement. All the while, sacrificing your happiness to put a roof over your head!
As an immigrant that came to the US from Scotland when I was just a baby, I felt this pressure even more. An underlying message of needing to stabilize and cling to safety was always running in the background, and it was part of the constant guidance I received from my parents. To deviate from this known path was out of the question.
So I tried the traditional path, as so many do. When I first started working in corporate, I abhorred the idea of going every day into the office, resigned to do work I wasn’t excited about, with its sea of gray cubicles, with no window to the outside world. It was quite the opposite of what I was expecting as I was leaving university - I was yearning for more freedom and this felt like the opposite.
Instead I wanted a life of travel and adventure, fueled by creativity in the work I was doing. I wanted to deviate from the path from this prescribed path, ‘the matrix’ and see what else was available to me. So I started learning methods that would allow me to unhook from this pervasive mindset that the corporate path was the one I needed to succeed.
I turned to the law of attraction, something that I had been introduced to in high school, when a friend gave me her copy of the book, The Secret. It essentially taught me how to define my desires, and consciously create them through my mindset and visualization. Most of these desires in the book centered around material items: wealth, cars, success.
I visualized a job at the global company’s London office, where I’d have the freedom I was seeking, and the ability to jet off every weekend to another country in the UK and Europe. I’d be surrounded by worldly people, working on stimulating projects and advancing my career. That was what I believed would make me the happiest person.
I used the techniques in the book, and at first I was met with resistance at the company. But I knew this was just a test I had to pass. I was told no one early on in their career as I was at that point, just a year in, had ever made a transfer internationally at the company. I even had a contentious meeting with an HR Director who told me it would be impossible, and I stood my ground letting her know it would be happening. I loved how bold I was in the pursuit of this dream.
And with my intention and manifestation activities, it soon did materialize! I heard from a recruiter in the UK office that a dream opportunity was available on their London team they were just building out, where I would be working onsite at one of the world’s largest technology companies. It was better than I could have ever imagined.
This is the moment I realized how truly powerful I could be in creating my reality. I had created this outcome out of seemingly nowhere at just 23 years old. My dear manager at the time gave me the book The Four Agreements as a parting gift. This book was also about conscious creation and personal freedom in your life, but instead, with the goal of inner peace. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had created this dream from a place of misalignment within myself. In fact, I just traded one matrix program for another, but I wouldn’t learn that until I arrived in London for myself…
I hope you enjoyed this lesson around looking inside yourself instead of externally to define what you want most out of life. Sure, it’s perfectly okay to be inspired by what you see others doing for their fulfillment, but always look within yourself to make sure it really is what you truly want. Once you’ve done this inner check, you can look to use the tools of law of attraction and personal integrity using The Secret and The Four Agreements books, to bring it into reality.
I will see you in the next post!
This is a distillation of Chapter One: The Matrix, in my book Wholeness Within: Insights from One Woman’s Journey of Creating a Life & Career in Alignment.
