December 21st, 2009
no case of the mondays
sneak peek of my office. pictures coming!
I noticed this thing that happened over the weekend, on Saturday. Basically, as Saturday afternoon wound into Saturday evening, I started to mentally run through what was coming up next. The thought process was something like, “Okay, so let’s see: today is Saturday, tomorrow’s Sunday. What’s going on tomorrow? Anything I need to get done before Monday?”
There was this immediate dip in my mood and then, following that, remembering that in fact I am not teaching this upcoming Monday, and this caused an immediate lift, a sense of palpable relief. My work for the past year has been to notice that dip as the weekend started to wind down, and to remind myself not to give it too much power.
It occurred to me that I’ve been doing that dance with the weekend for a loooong time–far longer than I’d like to admit to the blogosphere, in fact. Some weekends I was able to not give Monday too much power, and other weekends, I was far less successful. There are a lot of dimensions of this that I could write about and will go into some other time–for now, I want to write about how strange it feels to realize that there is nothing for me to “push against,” work-wise, any longer.
Does that make any sense?
There’s this “thing” about work–people like to complain about their jobs. In fact, it seems to me that jobs are an easy dumping ground for most of life’s problems. Jobs become the thing that constrain our time and “suck our souls.” As a coach, I’ve noticed that each of us–that includes me–have our defaults for where we’ll put our blame/drama, and work is often enough the place where we put that blame/drama because job titles don’t get hurt feelings when you call them names, the way our loved ones would if we were blaming them (though for all of us at times, that can be another source of blame).
This Monday is the first Monday of the rest of my life. I have an entirely different set of questions to confront about my working life, namely about what it means for me to be/feel productive. There is no longer that thing to “push against,” in the work realm, so my work now becomes making sure that whatever tendencies I have to create drama or complain don’t get pushed into some other area just to fill the void.
I’m also sort of in awe of the spaciousness of that void–of how big it got. I don’t yet have words to explain what it is like to see what I’m passionate about move into center focus, instead of being something I work on on the sides. I’m already noticing that it feels really weird to manage my computer time–the computer is often enough a source of both work and entertainment. Where do the two overlap?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the steps it took for me to actually let go of my teaching job–because it was really, really hard–and realized that my coach and I approached it all in a very methodical way designed to be as in integrity as possible. I wrote down each piece and what I’m going to do is this–starting on January 1st, 2010, I’m going to post ten consecutive steps towards Stopping the Job Suckage.
For humor’s sake (when your job sucks, you need a little humor) we’re going to call it the Stopping the Job Suckage Challenge, and because I think it’s funny, I made badges:
Right-click and Save-As to download these images and then put them on your own blog or Facebook page. Link back to this so that people will know what in the world you’re talking about:
http://www.yourcourageouslife.com/blog/2009/12/20/a-case-of-the-mondays/
Over the course of ten days, I’ll outline the ten steps that you can take to a.) help your job suck less right now (maybe even to the point where you’ll discover that you like it, after all), and b.) help you start moving towards what you really want to do if you find that that’s still where you’re at, and c.) help you to handle that process with as much personal integrity as possible.
I followed each of these steps and have felt incredibly grateful for it–my last night of teaching was a night where I found myself actually wanting to slow down and be totally present to the process. I have never before left a job with that feeling–in the past, I have been counting down the hours and minutes until I “could finally leave.”
What would it be like to actually look forward to going to work in the morning? It’s actually possible to take steps towards that. I have already heard from a lot of Courageous Year participants that starting a new line of work is something they’re wanting to do in this new year ( registration for The Courageous Year ends on January 1st!) and I’m excited about helping others find work that feeds their souls. I believe that if we were all approaching work differently and finding ways to help work feed us, the world would be a very different place.
By the way, part of Courageous Living is–absolutely–doing work that feeds your soul. There are ten days remaining to get a $200 discount on the April Courageous Living Retreat in San Francisco, CA (total cost: $400 if you register a deposit by January 1). In addition to beautiful sunsets, our own private house, catered meals by an amazing chef, walking to the beach, and all sorts of Courageous schwag, health counselor Valerie Tookes and photographer Vivienne McMaster will be participating in the retreat as well as offering free consults or a mini-photo session. Learn more on the retreats page.
Come Alive ~ Courageous Living Retreats from Kate Swoboda on Vimeo.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:39 am
This makes me laugh. I work in an elementary school, and for a few months, several of the teachers were bitching about the climate, the kids, the paperwork, etc. Our principal finally called a staff meeting to officially declare the building a “Suck-free Zone.”