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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
Are You Making A Living or Making A Life?
Welcome back!
Have you looked carefully at the connection between what you do to earn a living and the quality of your life?
Do you work for your living? Does your work feel like something you have to do to pay your bills? Does your job leave your drained and exhausted?
Or do you work to make your life? Does the way you earn money enrich your life, filling you with a sense of purpose and fulfillment?
Isn’t it ironic that what many of us call making a living leaves us stressed, unhappy, and unfulfilled? Making a living gets in the way of making a life.
Is Making A Living Costing You Your Life?
1. How Much Does It Cost You To Work?
No one has done a better job of asking this question than the authors of the profound book, Your Money Or Your Life. Although people go to work to earn money, it costs money to go to work. And sometimes the amount you earn in your job is simply not worth the amount you earn by working.
Do the math. Add up what you spend to go to work. Count the cost of commuting. How much do you pay for your car, gas, insurance, registration, and parking fees? How much do you spend on buses, trains, taxis, ferry fares, and bridge tolls.
How much do you spend on work clothes, tools, equipment, and specialized training for your job?
How much do you pay for lunches, coffee, and dinners out because you’re too tired to cook? How much do you pay for childcare?
Add up all that you pay to go to work and ask yourself, “How much does it cost me to go to work?” You might be astonished at how much you are paying for the privilege of making a living.
If you say you have to go to work because you have to pay the bills, first figure out how many of your bills are the direct result of going to work. It’s a vicious circle. You work to pay the bills you incur to go to work.
2. How Do You Feel?
The next question is to ask how you feel? Does working for a living cost you more in life energy than it returns in satisfaction and fulfillment?
How do you face each day? Do you dread going off to your job? Do you drag yourself home each day, worn out and exhausted from working for a living?
Do you tell yourself you have to go to work because you have to make money to pay your bills? Do you drive off to work with a bumper sticker announcing to the world, “I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go?”
Are you marking time until retirement? Is TGIF your theme song? Do you live for the weekends when you don’t have to go to work?
I remember once waiting in line to pay for some items. The clerk at the register went through the motions of her job with the energy of a slug. I asked her if she was feeling well. She said, “It’s Monday,” as if that was enough. I asked, “Do you feel this way every Monday?” She said she did because she hated Mondays. Monday was the day she had to go to work. I left the store thinking about the high cost of her attitude. Her Monday misery was costing her one-seventh of her life.
3. Changing your Attitude About Your Work
So, what do you do if you have a job that drains your energy? One option is to do what my unhappy clerk did. Wallow in your misery and tell yourself you have no choice.
A second option is to change your attitude. No matter what the job is, and no matter how bad it is, your attitude is completely up to you.
In her book, How To Control Your Destiny Through Your Attitude, Joan Gustafson identifies the life-changing results in her own life of changing her attitude. One method she used was to monitor herself for the “3 Cs” of Complaining, Criticizing, and Condemning.”
Indulging in these 3 Cs will deplete your own life energy.
4. Making A Life
The third option is to put your energies into work that makes a life, rather than simply making a living.
If you know that working to make a living is costing you your life energy, it’s time to claim your birthright to feel abundantly alive. The solution is to connect your work with your life purpose. In future issues, we’ll return to the connection between living according to your purpose, creating wealth, and feeling abundantly alive.
This article was originally published in “Abundantly Alive Now! Newsletter” on September 14, 2004.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2004-09-14.htm
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© 2004 Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Debt or Alive, Inc.
2248 Meridian Blvd.Suite H
Minden, NV 89423
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