A friend asked me where I am with my Vision. Well…I’m always working on it in my head and by talking to people about their Visions. I do think all of this mulling and marinating is necessary and good BUT I am also concerned that I am using this and being very busy with my “real work” as an excuse. It seems easier sometimes to put my paying work first. I mean who can blame me in this economy? My parental rational mind says “hey you are lucky to have work and while you do.. work!” but something else is saying…”you need to take a look at where you are specifically with the book and committ to some next steps.”
If you have any experience with this I’d love to hear it. Does your Vision ever compete with your “real work”?
(first posted 4.13.09)
My vision doesn’t compete with my real work because for some insane reason, I always put my vision, or my hopes and dreams, after my real work. As if it is the reward for all the pain and struggle in my real work gives me the right to have any type of dreams. It comes from some old thinking that says that work has to be a dirty four letter word that includes struggle, pain, disappointments and making myself smaller to fit into the corporate world. So my hopes and dreams always lose – not much of a competion. Even writing this down reminds me that I live a vision whether I’m conscious of it or not. Either I’m living my life under the assumptions above that I have to be smaller than I want to be in the corporate world. That I have to have a marketable skill beyond my analytical talents and perservance and creative intelligence to pay the bills and support my family or else we, my husband, child and I will go hungry and without a home. It comes with the same voice that tells me that I need to let go of “childish” dreams that I could make an actual contribution beyond the petty, bureaucratic contributions I make in my job. I’d love to live a vision for my life but how can I get to it if I’m under the Puritan ideal of work before play and somehow a vision for my life would be play? There must be some kind of dualistic thinking here and I have no idea how to get out from that idea. How to dismiss the dual thinking that my vision is separate from my real work?
My vision always competes with my “real work” for one very good reason. Work pays! ….which is why i easily loose track of my larger visions. However, I have found that the closer my “paid” work comes to my vision work, the easier it is for the two to cohabitate. i used to think i had to work on one or the other. Now i know that by learning more about my day job, the more i prepare myself for future goals and projects. I am easily distracted with work, but I stopped worrying about the time frame for my bigger vision and accepted the process as part of the road to achieving the vision.