Do you work at a job or at tasks that feel out of alignment with what you’re really meant to do?  Do you feel that your best skills and abilities are going unused?  If you do, please consider using them.

When I’ve talked to people who have worked at jobs that used less than their full abilities, I have learned this:

1. They didn’t enjoy the work
2. The work required them to use talents other than the talents they were naturally gifted with.
3. Their days move slowly when they’re working.

You see, work is only work when your heart would rather be doing something else.  When you’re doing the “work” your Heart would want you to do, it often doesn’t feel like work – even though it may require significant amounts of effort.  Most often, it feels like play.  People who do “work” that makes their heart sing report that they can’t wait to get up in the morning.  They enjoy their day.  They feel like their days fly by, and the work seems somewhat effortless – like it’s a part of them.

Interestingly, I find that when people do what makes their heart sing, they are able to make more money and achieve more recognition than if they were to follow the traditional success models.

All too often, teens are told:  “OK, you’re graduating from High School.  It’s time to get serious with life.  What do you want to do with the rest of your life?  Choose a career that pays well.  Choose a career that allows you to achieve status.”  Many teens go on to study Law, Medicine, Engineering, Economics, Political Science, etc., for the money, success, and status these jobs will bring.  What is often left out of that advice is “Do what makes your heart sing.  Do what makes you the happiest.  Do what allows you to become the next greatest version of yourself”.  When they graduate from College, they find themselves working in careers that allow them to be “successful”, but not necessarily happy.  The world is full of successful unhappy people.

Does that description fit you?  Do you feel like you walk through life with your shoes on the wrong feet?  Being in the wrong career saps you of your confidence.  It saps you of your belief in yourself.  Since you are not working at the tasks you are best at, you can be left feeling weak, lacking in confidence, and feeling like you “just don’t fit”.  It robs you of the belief and confidence you need to go out and do what you DO want to do.

For all you teens out there, I have this advice:  Take time to learn what you LOVE to do.  Enjoy it.  Do it better than anyone else, if that feels right to you.  Find a way to get paid for doing that.

I will close this article with one of my favorite stories, pulled from the book “Soar with your Strengths“, by Donald O. Clifton and Paula Nelson.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.  (By the way, I encourage you to purchase the book. It’s full of life truths).

Let the Rabbits Run:  A Parable

Imagine there is a meadow.  In that meadow there is a duck, a fish, an eagle, an owl, a squirrel, and a rabbit.  They decide they want to have a school so they can be smart, just like people.

With the help of some grown-up animals, they come up with a curriculum they believe will make a well-rounded animal:

running

swimming

tree climbing

jumping

flying

On the first day of school, little br’er rabbit combed his ears, and he went hopping off to his running class.

There he was a star.  He ran to the top of the hill and back as fast as he could go, and, oh, did it feel good.  He said to himself, “I can’t believe it.  At school, I get to do what I do best”.

The instructor said:  “Rabbit, you really have talent for running.  You have great muscles in your rear legs.  With some training, you will get more out of every hop.”

The rabbit said “I love school.  I get to do what I like to do and get to learn to do it better”.

The next class was swimming.  When the rabbit smelled the chlorine, he said “Wait, wait!  Rabbits don’t like to swim”.The instructor said “Well, you may not like it now, but five years from now, you’ll know it was a good thing for you”.

In the tree-climbing class, a tree trunk was set at a 30-degree angle so all the animals had a chance to succeed.  The little rabbit tried so hard he hurt his leg.

In jumping class, the rabbit got along just fine; in flying class, he had a problem.  So the teacher gave him a psychological test and discovered he belonged in remedial flying.

In remedial flying class, the rabbit had to practice jumping off a cliff.  They told him if he’d just work hard enough, he could succeed.

The next morning, he went on to swimming class.  The instructor said “Today we jump in the water”.  “Wait, wait.  I talked to my parents about swimming.  They didn’t learn to swim.  We don’t like to get wet.  I’d like to drop this course”.

The instructor said “You can’t drop it.  The drop-and-add period is over.  At this point you have a choice:  Either you jump in or you flunk”.

The rabbit jumped in.  He panicked!  He went down once.  He went down twice.  Bubbles came up.  The instructor saw he was drowning and pulled him out.  The other animals had never seen anything quite as funny as the wet rabbit who looked more like a rat without a tail, and so they chirped, and jumped, and barked, and laughed at the rabbit.  The rabbit was more humiliated than he had ever been in his life.  He wanted desperately to get out of class that day.  He was glad when it was over.

He thought that he would head home, that his parents would understand and help him.  When he arrived, he said to his parents “I don’t like school.  I just want to be free”.

“If rabbits are going to get ahead, you have to get a diploma”, replied the parents.

The rabbit said “I don’t want a diploma”.

The parents said “You’re going to get a diploma whether you want one or not”.

They argued, and finally the parents made the rabbit go to bed.  In the morning the rabbit headed off to school with a slow hop.  Then he remembered that the principal had said that any time he had a problem to remember that the counselor’s door was always open. 

When he arrived at school, he hopped up in the chair by the counselor and said “I don’t like school”.

And the counselor said “Hmmm, tell me about that”.

And the rabbit did.

The counselor said “Rabbit, I hear you.  I hear you saying you don’t like school because you don’t like swimming.  I think I have diagnosed that correctly.  Rabbit, I tell you what we’ll do.  You’re doing just fine in running.  I don’t know why you need to work on running.  What you need work on is swimming.  I’ll arrange it so you don’t have to go to running anymore, and you can have two periods of swimming”.

When the rabbit heard that, he just threw up!

As the rabbit hopped out of the counselor’s office, he looked up and saw his old friend, the Wise Old Owl, who cocked his head and said “Br’er rabbit, life doesn’t have to be that way.  We could have schools and businesses where people are allowed to concentrate on what they do well”.

Br’er rabbit was inspired.  He thought when he graduated, he would start a business where the rabbits would do nothing but run, the squirrels could just climb trees, and the fish could just swim.  As he disappeared into the meadow, he sighed softly to himself and said “Oh, what a great place that would be”.

Do you feel like Br’er Rabbit?  Do you feel like a runner who has been trying to develop swimming skills?  Don’t spend another minute thinking yourself a failure.  Instead, consider the success you can achieve when you do what you LOVE to do.

Something to think about….

Yesterday I watched a small bird, flying very fast, disappear into the canopy of an oak tree. So dense were its leaves that it was impossible to see what happened next, though I can tell you it remained inside.

I wondered how the little bird found its opening through the leaves at such a speed, and then managed to gently align its fragile body on the branch it chose to land upon, all within a fraction of a second. Not to mention the impossible to imagine flying maneuvers required: the banking, the curling, the vertical and horizontal stabilizations, the deceleration and landing.

Memory? Calculation? Not in that tiny brain. Instinct? Maybe, but how does instinct know which way the branches of a tree have grown when no two are the same?

That little bird just knew. It had faith, in spite of not being able to see how things would work out, that if (and only if) it stayed the course the details would be taken care of; that an opening would appear and a twig would be found. In fact, had she slowed down enough to carefully and logically inspect the tree first, the prudent thing to do, she would have lost her lift and fallen to the ground.

Kind of like reaching for your dreams. Neither memory, nor calculating, nor instincts are the deciding factors, but faith coupled with action.

Tallyho,

The Universe   ©www.tut.com

My first thought was WOW!!! How many times do I fail simply because I think I won’t be guided, or that our success/failure is strictly up to us? How many times do we fail to act because we fear failure? How many times during the day do we trust (or have faith) that guidance is available to us at each and every moment? How many times have I failed because I failed to trust the intelligence inside myself, and instead chose to inspect all possible alternatives before making a move?

I am reminded of a mother bird. How, the first time the bird is pregnant (if that’s the correct term for what happens to a girl bird), does the bird know when, where and how to construct a nest, know to sit on her eggs to keep them warm, know to gather worms for food, etc? When the mother bird needs to know how to build a nest, something (the Universe?) provides the information. The bird knows how to pick the best locations for its nest, knows the proper materials to gather, knows the proper construction methods, and knows how to make the nest adhere to the branches. Once old enough, the baby birds will eventually trust their wings and fly. The required knowledge, somehow, is given to the birds when it is needed.

It really works this way regardless of species. I am reminded of a recent documentary I watched where a turtle buried hundreds of eggs in a sandy beach, then left the eggs unattended. When the eggs hatched, the baby turtles clawed their way through the sand to the surface of the beach, then made a mad dash to the water where they would survive. There were hundreds of baby turtles making that mad dash to water. It wasn’t a short dash to the water. They hatched a considerable distance from the water’s edge. Who taught them to seek water? Who taught them how to find the water? The knowledge they needed, somehow, was given to them when it was needed, just minutes after birth. Intuitively, they all headed in the direction of the shoreline.

I am reminded of Monarch Butterflies.  North American Monarch Butterflies nest each winter on a Mexican mountain range.  In spring, they migrate thousands of miles northward to live throughout North America, then return to the same Mexican mountain range for winter. They do this even though the entire round trip journey is longer than the lifespan of any one butterfly.  No butterfly is present for the entire round trip.  What knowledge guides their path?  How do they know the direction to fly (and when) for a 3000 mile journey they’ve never made?

Furthermore, I look to the heavens. The heavens (stars, galaxies, planets, etc) move with mathematical precision. Great scientists such as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Max Planck, and others have developed precise mathematical formulas to predict the movement of the heavens.

Can it be that way with us? Why do we think that of all eternity, of all of the space-time, we’re the exception? Whatever it is that provides the inherent on-board intelligence to move the planets, grow blades of grass, teach a young bird to build a nest, teach a baby turtle how to find water, guides the migration of Monarch Butterflies, etc., must surely be there for us. We can’t be the only exceptions to this rule. Most of us though, as filtered through my own experience, don’t believe that the inherent guidance is available to us, when and where we need it. We’ve learned that our success in life is up to us alone. We don’t always follow up on our intuition and internal guidance. We’ve learned to think of ourselves as “flawed”, “sinners”, “unworthy”, etc. We’ve been taught that we’re the exception. Perhaps we should unlearn that lesson.

I’ve heard great musicians say that they simply write down what they hear. Great writers often talk about the fact that in order to write, they need to simply get quiet, relax, and let the writing flow from within. Take a moment to think of the one thing you’re really excellent at.  Does that thing that you’re really excellent at come naturally, or did it only happen as the result of being taught?  Perhaps it’s a combination of natural ability and teaching, but is the natural ability present?

Can you trust in that divine intelligence to guide you, as the bird in the above TUT quotation did?  Can you trust Spirit / God / Divine Intelligence to be there for you?  Can I trust it to be there for me?  I believe that this is our quest.  The quest to learn and experience Divine Intelligence / Divine Guidance / Spirit / God, to accept the plan that’s been implanted within us, and to shine.  I pray that I can learn to fully accept and trust this gift of guidance, and I pray that you may also live with the awareness of this guidance.

Bees can fly 12 miles without getting lost. Albatrosses, 25,000 miles. And flying insects, without eyes, have no trouble whatsoever finding their “soul mates.”

Imagine what I can do for you, when you listen to the voice within.

The Universe ©www.tut.com

Something to think about….