PS To My Story “Who is Milisa Burns?”
Just to be crystal clear, by sharing my story in my first post, I am not trying to suggest that to make more room for yourself, you must change what your life looks like on the outside. For instance, I am not here to suggest you change your work. Rather, I am so curious to know how changing your mindset (i.e. how you see yourself and the world around you) might offer you new opportunities to grow and learn and make more room for yourself.
I have chosen to focus on being in service to professional women in stressful work environments for a personal reason. I was such a woman through my twenties and I suspect I could have been much happier then if I had had a different mindset. I really wonder how I would have been different if I had had a coach or had access to some "coaching tools" through a website like this. Some of the questions I ponder include...
- What if I had known what my strengths of character were and how I could leverage them? (see the VIA Strengths assessment at www.authentichappiness.org)
- What if I had known how to dispute my pessimistic thoughts and think optimistically more often? (see Dr. Martin Seligman's book, Learned Optimism and a 2 minute video where he explains optimism.)
-What if I had realized how creative I could be and how happy that made me?
-What if I had understood the importance of reflection?
-What if I had understood the importance of being playful?
-What I had had a coach to see me as creative, resourceful and whole and to encourage me to grow as big as my potential? (See this 4 minute video by Well Coaches, "How Coaching Works".)
I can't go back in time. So, I know I will never know the answers to those questions. But I am so curious to know how asking those questions and others, might be helpful for you now.
As I said, I am not trying to suggest that you should be in a different work environment or in a different career. (That is not my role and I would never presume it was.) Instead, I am really struck by Dr. Martin Seligman's assertion in his book Authentic Happiness that "Recrafting your job to deploy your strengths and virtues every day not only makes work more enjoyable, but transmogrifies a routine job or a stalled career into a calling. A calling is the most satisfying form of work because, as a gratification, it is done for its own sake rather than for the material benefits it brings. Enjoying the resulting state of flow on the job will soon, I predict, overtake material reward as the principal reason for working. "So, I now also ask, what would the world be like if we were each able to transform our work into a calling?
