Finding Your Right Livelihood 3

Continued from here

Finding Right Livelihood and Overcoming Blocks

You see the theme here? It’s about bridging the gap between what excites you, what you’re good at, and the way in which you can make money doing it.

Often it’s surprisingly easy to bridge that gap – because building the bridge simply needs a little creativity and imagination. But of course, as I said in my previous post, you may also need to overcome the blocks which hold you back. (Read more about how these beliefs operate here.)

And that’s why you need to be open to any possibility.

Having a clear vision is the first step in creating that mindset; we’ll explore how to create a vision for your life in the next post.

Another thing you can do is deliberately open yourself up to new possibilities, coincidences and little miracles – simply by taking action.

For example, you might choose to start a random conversation with everyone you meet. Suddenly someone comes along who turns out to have some information you need or offers the perfect opportunity. This is how the Universe works… coincidence, synchronicity, chance. Little miracles. It’s not your job to understand. It’s simply your job to accept that it is so.

A great way to make this shift in your thinking is to put yourself fully into your life. To put yourself fully into your life you might like to consider exploring shadow work – it is the most powerful system for unblocking mental problems that hold you back.

Video – shadow work – how to integrate your shadow

Shadow work allows you to jump in and try new things. It means you stop resisting the unknown. It allows you to make an effort to be fully present in the here and now. It lets your passion lead you in life. It means that you trust your hunches or intuitions. It means that you’re open to talking to strangers. It means that you notice opportunities when they present themselves. And it means you think, act and behave with a positive attitude. What a difference that can make! (Considering trying it out? Get some more information on this here.)

Do you, for example, consider yourself lucky?

Well, it turns out lucky people create their own good fortune. And – more importantly – “unlucky” people actually create their own misfortune. An experiment by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire shows this very clearly.

He and his colleagues asked a group of people to describe themselves as lucky or unlucky, and then invited them to an interview, supposedly to discuss taking part in a psychological study.

What the participants didn’t know was that the study was already underway as they went to the interview. The researchers had placed a $10 note on the sidewalk at the entrance to the meeting place, and they surreptitiously recorded who noticed the money and picked it up.

You won’t be surprised to learn, I’m sure, that only a few of the people who describe themselves as unlucky noticed the $10 bill.

And yes, you guessed it, most of the people who considered themselves to be “lucky” saw it and picked it up. Read more here.

The lesson is clear: open yourself up to what the world has to offer and the world offers a lot more than you could ever have imagined.

Richard Wiseman sums this up very clearly:

“My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, they make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, they create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and they adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

3  Allow Yourself To Listen To What Your Heart Is Telling You

You already know in your heart the answers to all your questions about what and why you’re here.

To be more successful, you simply have to stop trying to work things out with your mind, and instead follow your gut instincts, your intuition, and your heart’s promptings and longings.

So how about simply asking yourself what it is that you love to do, hearing the answer, and then start taking steps to do it? This will connect you with your joy and open the gates of inspiration.

When you allow yourself to be led by your heart, you’re naturally in a much more joyful place, and you’re much more motivated to explore possibilities. And the more you do what you love, the more opportunities you’ll create for greater inspiration and more profound joy.

As you explore the possibilities which open up, you’ll eventually come to understand your passion and life purpose. After that, life becomes less about finding your mission and more about living it.

And then you move into joy….

4 Remember There Could Be More Than One Thing That Matters

When we talk about life purpose being expressed through a job about which you’re passionate, it’s important to remember there are many routes to reach the same destination. Most people’s path of personal development is like a Quest, a search for meaning. Most people who quest successfully will follow a diverse and rich path fill of different experiences, all of which contribute some element of knowledge and wisdom.

In fact, thinking there might be only one way to express your deepest self can limit you in many ways. It closes possibilities off to you. You need to open your mind in as many ways as you can.

As Shannon Kaiser puts it, “The notion we have only one thing we are meant for limits us from fulfilling our greatness …. I have six different job titles. I’m a life coach, travel writer, author, speaker, teacher, mentor, designer, and each thing I do brings me joy but none of these are my purpose, they are my passions. Let go of thinking there is only one purpose for you and embrace the idea that our purpose in life is to love life fully by putting ourselves into our life! This means we jump in and try new things; we stop resisting the unknown, we fully engage in what is happening right here, where we are … The feeling that something is missing goes away when you lead a passion-filled life.”

5 Take Action

Discovering what you’re passionate about in life can be a matter of listening to your heart, but it can also be matter of taking action.

Simply put, the more things you do, the more likely you are to discover what you enjoy, what excites you, and what feels right for you. And if this sounds like a trial and error process, maybe it is.

But every time you try something new you gain a little bit more insight into what excites you and what does not. As Mark Manson says:

“Let’s pretend there are no useless websites, no video games, no TV. You have to be outside of the house all day, every day until it’s time to go to bed — where would you go and what would you do?

“Sign up for a dance class? Join a book club? Go get another degree? Invent a new form of irrigation system that can save the thousands of children’s lives in rural Africa? Learn to hang glide?

“What would you do with all of that time? If it strikes your fancy, write down a few answers and then, you know, go out and actually do them.”