My flight to the job I love

In 1989 when I got a job at HP, it was my dream come true. I was 22 years old, and although it was such a simple accounting job, it was everything I wanted at the time. My starting salary was $2,000/mo. I remember feeling as though I won the lotto! Sooo much money!

My journey in the fourteen years at HP was a blessing. I was able to learn a lot, contribute a lot, raise my daughter with the flexibility the company offered me, and buy homes, cars, etc with the income it eventually afforded me. It was truly a blessing.

But in 2003, I knew that journey was over. I had gotten what I needed from that experience and was ready for whatever was next.

What was next though?

I took a class called “Creating the Work You Love”. I often talk about this class, because it truly changed my life. (Well, lots of things have changed my life, but this is one of the big ones.) At the time, I didn’t exactly know what “work” I wanted to do. I just knew it wasn’t what I had been doing. So, when the teacher (Rick Jarow) started the class with, “I know there’s something you want to do, but you are not sure what that is…” I thought to myself, “How does he know that?” Well, the whole class was like that for me. He just seemed to know what I felt and what I was thinking.

I could explain my whole experience of that class, but that will take a whole chapter of a book. For now, I am only sharing one part of the class that I am reminded of today.

In the class, we were walked through a meditation/visualization. To be honest, while I had a spark of an idea of what I did want to do, I had nowhere near the confidence I needed to actually make the move. However, in the meditation, we were asked to imagine ourselves as an animal, any animal. So, I imagined myself to be what I had imagined myself to be ever since I was a kid. Then he asked us to imagine ourselves as that animal in our favorite setting. Well, that was easy, because my favorite setting is the beach.

As a kid, who didn’t enjoy her childhood, I always imagined myself as a bird--maybe to fly away, or to simply be free to go wherever I wanted. I don’t know. I just knew I wanted to fly. But in that meditation, I actually wanted to stop myself from imagining myself as a bird. Instead, I thought to myself… I don’t want to be a bird now. Birds fly. I don’t even like flying in a plane. I like to be stable, on solid ground. So instead, I imagined myself sitting in a tree. I was a bird, sitting in a tree, looking out at the ocean.

When the meditation was complete, the teacher explained what each part of the visualization meant. I don’t even remember it all. But one thing very clear to me was at that point in my life, I wanted/needed a career change. However, like that bird, I was simply too afraid to fly.

With that, and many other amazing things I got from the class, I found the courage to leave my job at HP and start planning for my new inspirational center, to be named For Your Journey. Since I had come from a company who was big on branding, and because I am very methodical in how I do things, I decided that getting a logo and creating my website would be the first best start. So that is what I did. I found a graphic artist who listened to my ideas so that he could come up with what I wanted. I told him that my business would be called For Your Journey, so for the logo... maybe a path, or a sunset or a dove or a beach scene would be good. More than anything though, I had imagined a picture of a path (a journey).

Now this happened many month’s after that class I had taken. But if you can imagine my total shock as I opened the email with the initial sketch of my new logo… a bird flying over the ocean! My graphic artist had no idea what he gave me, but I knew right then… I was no longer afraid to fly, because I was flying! I had begun my new journey and from here life would forever be different.

So much has happened since then. And as I much as I share, there is still much more. Most exciting so far though, is where I’ve landed these days. Who I am now as a person is so much greater than who I could ever have imagined myself to be. I inspire people every single day because I found the courage to fly. I live in pure joy in doing what I do, and can only imagine even more as I continue on this journey of mine.

This is how life is supposed to be. We are supposed to be happy. We are supposed to love every part of our lives. We should even love our jobs. And I definitely do, thankfully!