Live Life, Love Work
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Live Life, Love Work

Kate Burton

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eBook - ePub

Live Life, Love Work

Kate Burton

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About This Book

The secrets to reclaiming your personal life and enriching your professional lifeā€”for the overstretched, overworked, and overanxious

With the boundaries between professional and private life increasingly blurred by mobile technology, most people are simply finding it tougher to enjoy life either at home or at work.

For those looking for a way out of the frustrating maze of daily life, bestselling author and respected communications coach Kate Burton offers the keys to achieving, in both one's professional and private life, a renewed sense of ownership, possibility, and meaning. In Live Life, Love Work, she poses such essential questions as "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" before offering readers an inspiring "Brave Action for Change."

  • Each step outlined in the book is linked to a discussion of one's physical, mental, inner, or spiritual world
  • Other books by Burton: Personal Development All-in-One For Dummies and Building Confidence For Dummies
  • Burton delivers custom-built corporate workshops and seminars for that boost motivation, self-awareness, communication, and health
    For those interested in enriching both their personal and work life, Live Life, Love Work offers practical, insightful tips on how.

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Information

Publisher
Capstone
Year
2010
ISBN
9780857080325
Edition
1
CHAPTER 1
SETTING OFF
002
We often recognise what is ā€˜rightā€™ in our lives only when we experience what is going ā€˜wrongā€™. It can be a painful experience to notice that we are stuck, that some intangible ā€˜thingā€™ is missing or blocking our way, that something is not fitting just right. This is a valuable warning signal that our energy is not flowing and therefore we are not going to operate at our best or be at our happiest.
This chapter will help identify challenges that we face where our energy could be stuck or blocked - and ways to free it up. Ultimately, the aim is to remain calm, strong and at one with ourselves as we travel rather than be shattered into thousands of small pieces under pressure; to take ourselves to an edge that allows us to stretch and grow by following what is right for us as individuals.
Everybody I interviewed for this book had their own good times/bad times tales to share. In the good times they felt integrated and whole; in the bad times they felt stressed and shattered. Right now you may be experiencing either extreme.
For many people, intense back-to-back working with long hours and no recovery time is their normal routine. They become like the proverbial boiled frogs, those little creatures popped into a pan of cold water. The heat builds up and up, and they donā€™t notice the gradual increase until it is too late and theyā€™re cooked. Each year these people work that bit harder and longer until the work itself loses its excitement and the rest of life gets seriously infected. Often a crisis stops them in their tracks.
Remember that we are offered more opportunities based on our track record and thus set the pattern for our lives. If we want to create a new pattern, we have to make clear to others the new direction that we are following, rather than accepting more of the same.
Instead of being a boiled frog, you can choose to be the hero of your own life.

QUIT BATTLING AND SEIZE THE MOMENT

All of us will hit turning points where we have a strong sense that things arenā€™t working or where they can be better, and those points come at different times in our lives. Clearly age has an impact. As I get older, I have learnt from experience and been through the personal development that enables me to recognise that I want more from my work than money; I want a healthy, sustainable quality of life.
With age we also recognise that life is actually a very short time span. Even if we live to be 110, that wouldnā€™t be sufficient. One life is never going to be long enough to visit all the awesome places and do all the things we could do.
Each generation learns from the previous one what it wants and doesnā€™t. My own daughter, recently graduated from university, has a job in Europe that enables her to work with an international set of colleagues, build on her language skills, and be socially responsible. She knows she doesnā€™t want the kind of work that chains her like a young puppy to the same desk and computer in a faceless office.
Todayā€™s young professionals are well travelled and confident. They donā€™t want to become part of what David Bolchover calls a generation of The Living Dead in his book of the same name, where ā€˜presenteeismā€™ is the name of the game and you are measured by hours at your desk rather than your contribution. Whatā€™s harder to work out is what they do want and that may only become clear as they travel.

Mapping your heroā€™s journey

As we mature, we discover that life offers us many different roles to play at any one time - lover, spouse, friend, student, employee or business owner, product developer, computer whizz, artist, reader, writer, fundraiser, gardener, adventurer, homemaker, fighter pilot, healer, parent or child - plus many more. One life comprises a unique combination of roles which donā€™t always fit together smoothly.
Our navigation through life and work can be likened to the stages in Joseph Campbellā€™s famous ā€˜heroā€™s journeyā€™ from his classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Back in the 1940s, Campbell pointed to certain consistent patterns and structures in myths and stories which contained a central character - the hero, along with mentors, allies and villains.
Campbellā€™s work was subsequently developed by Christopher Vogler in his book, The Writerā€™s Journey, into a 12-stage framework which is often adopted to guide the development of fiction and film scripts. Most classic films and tales from The Wizard of Oz and Gladiator to Homerā€™s Odyssey or Tolkeinā€™s Lord of the Rings can be mapped onto the framework.
Essentially, the journey begins in the heroā€™s home, then takes him off on an adventure in which he does battle until finally returning home, weary yet triumphant, as a stronger character. As you consider how youā€™d like your life to pan out, here are the most important stages that unfold in every heroā€™s story:
ā€¢ The call to adventure- our hero begins in the ordinary world where he often denies or refuses to hear the call to adventure. He stays in his comfort zone until he can stay there no longer.
ā€¢ Meeting a mentor - our hero meets someone to help him, a teacher or guide who will show him the way forward.
ā€¢ Crossing the threshold - our hero takes the first brave step. He has accepted the challenge.
ā€¢ The road of trials - our hero undergoes a series of ordeals that test him to the limit and meets a mixture of allies and enemies on the way until he achieves his goal or reward.
ā€¢ Returning to the ordinary world with the elixir - finally our hero heads home, personally transformed by the experience.
The story of your experience at school, wrenched from home and out into the world is an example of a heroā€™s journey. So too is any stage of your life where you undertake a new journey - accept a new job, leave home to set up with a new partner, take up a new hobby. It involves heeding that call to the next adventure, and bravely stepping over the familiar threshold into the unknown.
The first and most difficult step is to make a commitment to yourself to own all of your life, being fully responsible for yourself and the results you get. Only then can you reclaim your personal life and enrich your professional one.
As lawyer Steve realised, ā€˜I have to make a commitment to myself, to own my life, because nobody else is going to take responsibility for it. Lawyer is only one of the hats I wear, and I was investing too much of my life into that one role. When I saw how some of the partners in the firm were just waiting for retirement to live, then I woke up and realised that my life is about what happens today, not in the future.ā€™

Exercise

Your heroā€™s journey today
You are the hero in your own life; nowā€™s the chance to develop your personal script. The starting point on any journey is to begin to assess your home surroundings and what is calling to you.
Imagine for a moment that the short story of how you live one aspect of your life and your work was captured in this book. What would it say about you? Here are some prompts:
ā€¢ Think about the different roles that you take on in your life, not just work ones.
ā€¢ Consider some of the best of times and the worst of times for you.
ā€¢ Where is there any conflict or tension for you at work?
ā€¢ How content are you with your home life? What might be even better?
ā€¢ What is calling you to an adventure right now?
ā€¢ What is the threshold you need to step over? Is this barrier within you or about the people around you?
ā€¢ Who are some of the allies, enemies or mentors you have met or would like to meet on your journey?
Now spend just ten minutes writing about your life and work as it is today in just a few paragraphs including a current challenge or possibility for you, which has some energy and importance. Take a blank piece of paper to create your story, or jot the highlights here in the book. (If words donā€™t work for you, collect some coloured pens and create your story in a drawing.) The story is for your eyes only, so itā€™s OK to allow the words to tumble out without being perfect.

My story todayā€¦

003
004
Looking at your story, consider whether yours is an attractive and enticing life; one that others would like to lead. What else do you notice as you read your own story? Consider how youā€™d like it to evolve as you travel through the book so that later you can write it as your legacy story in Chapter 5 - the tale of what you have actually done.
As heroes in our own lives, there will naturally be tension between our different roles because we have a finite amount of time in the day and our energy gets spread wide. How many women struggle to be a wonderful homemaker and business person, a caring daughter as well as a traveller of the world? How many men feel they need to be the good provider yet dream of a life adventure that takes them far from home or a secure job?
Playing many different roles simultaneously on the worldā€™s stage causes overload in a solo act. You are left wondering who you are to the point of freezing in your tracks, putting your life on hold and doing nothing - until you have the money, your children are grown up, your elderly parents no longer need you. The problem with this approach is that we have one life and no second chances. Months of stretching in different directions turn to years, turn to decades.
The only sane way forward is to stop battling and accept reality, by acknowledging the tensions each role brings. Stop ā€˜tryingā€™ to perfect each one simultaneously; there can be no perfect balance between all these roles at the same time; the peace comes from a deeper place within yourself.
Thereā€™s a paradox at work whereby the goal-setting, goal-getting measures of achievement also involve us surrendering to what is happening around us rather than being able to control it all. If weā€™re aiming to raise the ā€˜successā€™ bar all the time, going for bigger and bigger challenges that are potentially exhausting, itā€™s worth starting from a simple place of contentment, going with the moment and moving gracefully over one foot or three foot hurdles to help prepare you for the challenge.

ACCESSING ENERGY

Getting in touch with your energy involves exercising new parts of yourself. When you are operating from your core position of strength without interference, all your energy is aligned and moving freely; all your senses are focused outwards from a strong central point. When part of you tries to split your attention by heading in a new or contrasting direction, then it creates an inner tension and your whole system needs to adapt.

Exercise

Feel the energy
Letā€™s pause a moment while I invite you to stretch out one of your hands. Look at your hand with the palm uppermost and stretch all five digits of that hand as far out as is comfortable, really watching, feeling, moving your fingers and thumb. Get a sense of the space between each finger and the energy shifting out to the very tips of the fingers. When you are doing this, the energy through your hand is flowing freely from the core of your palm. Itā€™s strong and aligned. Experience that as you move your fingers back and forward.
Now try bending each finger in turn towards the centre of your palm, and see what happens to the stretch. Notice how comfortable it is to isolate one finger and stretch out the others. Maybe when your thumb moves in towards the palm, the stretch is still reasonable. As you bend your ring finger or middle finger, for example, I suspect itā€™s not quite so easy to keep the other four digits fully stretched out - you will be bringing in some tension; the energyā€™s no longer flowing so freely.
Consider your hand as a symbol for the whole of you and your life. If you want to have hands that are flexible, then clearly you need to exercise each part, regularly stretching to the edge and then relaxing without bending too far backwards. Each and every part of your hand needs to work as a complete system,...

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