“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver
You’ve always wanted to find a career you love, but maybe you thought it was impractical. Perhaps you think you should enjoy your work, but finding a career you really love just wasn’t the priority. Instead, you focused on money, what you were good at, or what was right in front of you. But there are really good reasons to find a career you love, and I’ve listed the best 10 here.
The 10 Best Reasons to Find A Career You Love
1. You get to do what you love every day. This is the most obvious reason, but really think about what it would mean for you. Less stress, less dread, less worry. Doing what you love can mean really just focusing on the fun. That doesn’t mean you will never have another bad day, or that there won’t be aspects of your new career that you dislike. There may be. But when you truly understand yourself and what you would love to do – what you’re meant to do, even – you’ll be so in the zone that you will see even the hard parts as being a service to the overall mission you’re trying to achieve.
2. You use the best of you to make the world a better place. When you find a career you love, inevitably you are using your gifts to make the world a better place. Your gifts are your innate strengths, the things you were born good at, the things your friends and co-workers come to rely on you for. Usually, we enjoy our gifts, and get joy from using them to help others. Almost always, a career you love will somehow involve your gift and use it to make the world a better place. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re working for free – you may use your gifts, change the world, do good and make a lot of money in the process. Plenty of people have.
3. You have time to travel. So many of my clients tell me what an important part of their dreams this is. And I’m guessing it’s an important part of yours too. If you dream of having the money and freedom to travel, doing what you love might be just the way to do it. Who knows what this is going to look like?! Maybe you’ll decide you love being on the road so much you’re going to go into international sales. Maybe you cash out of your current life and open a small B & B in Mexico. Maybe, like one of my clients, you quit your job and take a culinary tour of France for a few months. Or a million other possibilities. . . But one thing I’m pretty sure of. You’re not boring, and there’s a lot of world out there that you want to see.
4. You have time for your life. Finally! If you need to sleep an extra hour, go ahead. If you have dinner guests and you stay up a little late, that’s fine. If you decide that today’s a perfect beach day, don’t forget your towel! It’s not all about work anymore, it’s about life. And your work is there to bring you joy, energy and fulfillment – not drain you of ever ounce of power you have. All that you gain from the life activities you have no time for now will get put back into your work, re-energizing you to give even more.
5. You can see how much potential you really have. Ever wondered how much you really have in you? How smart you really are? If you find a career you love, you’ll know. Because when you put yourself into a career you really love, you’ll give it all your energy and nothing will hold you back – no emotional hang ups, no lack of energy, no ambivalence. When you’re really full steam ahead you get to see how far you can go.
6. You can create. Are you a creative type? You don’t have to be someone who paints or draws to consider yourself creative. Maybe you have a vivid imagination or are a problem solver. If you’ve felt the urge to build or create something tangible or intangible, doing something you love will give you that freedom and the joy to watch your creations come to life.
7. You can surround yourself with what inspires you. If you go to work every day and you feel like the energy in the office just brings you down, there is another way. A career you love means that you love it, right? You wouldn’t love it if there was some aspect that was just disagreeable to you, so by definition, you can surround yourself with people and things you love.
8. You will learn and enrich your life in ways you never imagined. When you surround yourself with what you love to do, you will find that everything new you encounter – whether it’s something new to learn, a new problem to solve or a new person or experience – will be about learning and enrichment. “New” feels like an opportunity rather than a chore when you love what you do, and we all thrive on learning. Your life will bloom!
9. You can make a good living while making a good life. At this point in your life you know that life is about more than just money. It’s not that your need for money has gone away. You still want and need it. It’s just that now, you value yourself too much to put yourself on the back burner any longer for money. You recognize that you can make a good living while also having a good life. Doing what you love is how you do it.
10. You finally get to let your true gifts of emotional and intuitive insight serve you as your superpower. Maybe this has been your secret weapon all along – in the board room, in the courtroom, in the office. Anywhere. Maybe your ability to understand people and what makes them tick has been what’s gotten you so far, but now, when you are ready to find a career you love, you can use this gift on your own turf, allowing it to guide you to make the decisions that feel really right to you.
Having work you love is about doing work you love to do every day, and about having control over your life – not only having the ability to say yes to the things you like, but to say no to the things you don’t like and don’t want in your life. Surprisingly, when we get right down to it, describing what we don’t want is much easier than describing what we do want in clear detail. But when you can get very clear about what you do want in your life, you will be amazed how close you are at that point to getting it!!
It can be easy to stall when it comes to making the change, so let me know, do you agree with these top reasons to find a career you love?