Personal Archives - Zen-Journal Corporate Coaching

And we dance, To a whispered voice;
Overheard by the soul, Undertook by the heart;
And you may know it, If you may know it

Neil Diamond, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Roles help us find ourselves

I’ve played many roles in my life: physician, professor, a college dean, a college president, a window washer, a retail store manager, consultant, and a guy who cleaned eyeglasses and hawked some anti-fog stuff for eyeglasses…yes, many roles and obviously not in that order.

You probably have played several, too. There is nothing wrong with playing these roles. But like we do in perfecting our golf swing or crafting the perfect cup of coffee, hopefully…eventually…we find a sweet spot. We find that one type of role within which we could stay in character for the rest of our lives.

Roles help reveal what comes easy to us. On a deeper level we call these traits, talents, and strengths. Over time we experiment with different roles to determine our interests. I see roles as hugely important because the results of these experiences ultimately inform us about our deepest work.

The rest this post is somewhat autobiographical. It discusses various phases in my life and the roles I played. It talks about the fractured process of discovering my strengths, talents, and ultimately, my deepest work and concludes with how you can avoid a similarly painful 40-year search for your deepest work.

The early years

The path to my deepest work has been anything but linear. As an aspiring actor in high school, I was the poster boy for ‘Most Likely To Succeed.’ My yearbooks were filled with remarks like, “Remember me when you you accept your first Academy Award,” and “Be sure to sign my yearbook so that I have your autograph for when you’re too famous to remember me.”

It seemed that my destiny was to be a performer; to impact others with my ability to delve deeply into various characters and bring the intimate detail of their struggle to the screen, small or large. With roles to my credit such as the overbearing Lord Capulet in Romeo & Juliet, the mentally challenged Charley in Flowers for Algernon, and other lead and supporting roles, I was poised for greater roles and larger venues.

That didn’t happen

The dream of becoming an actor never was never realized because I gave up on it, far too easily I might add, not long after graduating from high school. I acted in a few student films, one for my close friend Bill, who today is Billy Dickson, A.S.C., an award-winning television and film director/cinematographer.

My fellow actor and high school friend, Brad ‘Taylor’ Negron also went on to appear in numerous films, write and produce plays, and perform stand-up comedy. Another actor and friend, Michael Mendelsohn, today is a performing tenor in the San Francisco Bay Area with several light opera and theater companies.

The chief reason I gave up before mounting any serious effort, was largely that I had no support at home for anything but a traditional college trajectory. If I wanted to be an actor, I’d have to be enrolled in college; that was the edict from the parental units.

The gauntlet was thrown and the ultimatum issued; So I enrolled in Pasadena City College, about ten miles from where I lived. Unfortunately my schedule didn’t include any acting classes, only algebra, english composition, and other general studies. These courses didn’t interest me in the slightest.

I was miserable every day I was there. I hated college so much that I withdrew and bought a ticket to England to lose myself in another country. And though the time I spent in the UK was transformative in many ways, it was a substitute for doing what I really wanted to be doing. I was still the same directionless, unmotivated kid I’d always been, just on another continent; the unfulfilled longing to connect with my art remained a gaping wound.

Before this seems like a pity party, let me state that it’s no one’s fault but mine. For years I blamed my parents for my lack of direction, for my fractured life, but the truth was evident. I simply didn’t want it as badly as my friends did, and who are today in the arts.

I feel as if I owe my friends a deep apology (my parents and I have long since discussed this in case you’re wondering). It was my own directionless state that I chose to remain in; it wasn’t like anyone had a weapon pointed at me. (Actually that would happen later in a McDonald’s restaurant robbery in San Francisco, but that’s not important to this discussion.)

The young adult years

Fast forward ten years, and I found myself married for a second time, still substituting any kind of work for my unknown deepest work. I was a father of three, attending medical school (I ultimately did finish college with a bachelor’s degree in biology, though a bit later than my contemporaries) and I thought I was headed for an illustrious career in medicin. Certainly that had to be my deepest work.

I graduated from medical school, completed a residency in foot and ankle surgery, and for a few years all looked good. I wasn’t making much money as practice opportunities weren’t plentiful for new kids on the professional block – pre-HMO era. I loved the one-on-one time spent with patients and the intellectual aspect of medicine was certainly stimulating, but still there remained a visceral level of discomfort deep inside that I wasn’t able to articulate.

Needing to earn some additional money, and kind of on a whim, I answered an advertisement for a teaching position at a local college. I figured I could make some extra money teaching anatomy & physiology, a topic I was fluent in.

I loved teaching immediately. It was an immediate fit for me in that I found something I was as comfortable with as acting. My ability to lead students to explore new areas of knowledge and skill was a natural path. While medicine was intellectually thrilling, it lacked the fulfillment I had when acting and performing, and now teaching.

A part-time teaching position led to an offer for a full-time one. After some soul-searching and shedding a few tears mourning the loss of my anticipated medical career, I took the full-time teaching job. My youngest son, Jay, had just been born and I needed to provide some stability for my family.

I felt as if I’d betrayed myself

But in reality, I was on the right path, I just didn’t know it. In retrospect, if I hadn’t moved into teaching, I’d might never have found my sacred calling or my most meaningful work.

I’d been teaching for a while when I was appointed Dean. This meant less time in the classroom and more spending more time on administrative tasks. I took the promotion because of the money even though I immediately missed the engagement in the classroom. The Dean’s position led to being named President of another college a few years later. That job was more of a headache than anything else; it lasted only two years. Part of my job was to oversee the writing of accreditation studies -think multiple volumes of writing and supporting documents- that kept Title IV Federal Financial Aid funding in place for students.

This was to be the link that introduced me to writing as a profession. It introduced me to the corporate side of writing, something I’d not experienced at that time. When my second marriage ended, I was awarded sole custody of my youngest son and we moved from Silicon Valley to Santa Cruz on the beach. I got a job -just a time filler, or so I thought- with a national engineering firm headquartered nearby.

I spent the next decade honing my business writing skills, something I’d always done well, as a project manager writing and managing proposals for complex infrastructure projects over $50 million in construction value. I was successful in winning projects that included the US/Mexico International Border Fences, numerous light rail projects like the Las Vegas Monorail as well as the California High Speed Rail projects.

It was good work, it paid well, but it had little to do with my deepest work. I endured a toxic corporate atosphere for far too long and my health suffered because of it. For the next twelve years writing would become evident as a primary component of my deepest work and support my tiny family in the process.

I wrote for business clients, developed and taught online courses, and published books. I developed a loyal online and offline following, and over the next few years, enjoyed considerable success. In quiet moments I pondered how the transition from physician to Internet business owner was even possible. It seemed to me like a strange series of linked events, yet here I was living the reality.

I enrolled in online courses taught by experts that helped me drill into the deeper aspects of the work I enjoyed. I took several online courses of six months in duration and a longer 12-month program as well. I continued to explore those creative areas that seemed to put me in a place of peace and fulfillment investing well over $20,000 in my ongoing education over the next several years.

I knew that if I wanted to make world-changing contributions, I’d have to find and develop my deepest work.

At one time I produced and wrote an online magazine.

Bringing all the pieces together

After forty years of working seemingly independent jobs, a pattern emerged. I started to see that my years in acting, teaching, and writing were a natural expression of who I was and were activities that produced flow. When I engaged any of these activities, I was in-the-zone, totally absorbed in my art.

Here’s what I noticed about this pattern:

Acting and performing placed me in flow
My years working one-on-one with patients awakened both a sense of compassion and a desire to alleviate their suffering
Teaching and working with students one-on-one (another form of acting and performance) coupled with communicating critical information, allowed me to help others find their way to greater achievement
Writing and publishing books, eBooks, teaching online courses brought all of these activities together

From this pattern I derived a list of terms that I classified into types of work. I found they correlated to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs classification. In the list below, my terms -in bold text- are followed by Dr. Maslow’s classifications in italics:

Work – those activities that enable us to meet basic needs related to physiologic survival and safety
Meaningful Work – activities that tap our natural strengths and talents and allow us to meet the higher level needs of esteem, love and belonging
Most Meaningful Work – work that magnifies our ability to meet and exceed lower and higher level needs but also allows us to achieve the highest human need, self-actualization

I later added two additional types of work:

Toxic Work – that work that detracts from our happiness because it interferes with our abilities to meet the higher needs of esteem, love and belonging
Deepest Work – repetitive contributions to the world that are only made possible by engaging our Most Meaningful Work, leading us to prolonged periods of self-actualization

It occurred to me that before I knew my deepest work, I’d habitually settled for jobs that I’ve since classified as toxic work. They interfered with my ability to meet higher aspirations and needs for esteem, love, and belonging. I also considered those jobs that propelled me toward meeting these same needs and knew that these jobs were accessing aspects of my most meaningful work.

Now that I knew the difference, charting a course to make lasting contributions was a matter of working through the processes that led me there.

Evolving your deepest work

It took me 40 years of introspection, experimentation, and action to fully know my deepest work. I am convinced that each us has a sacred calling that’s coded into our very DNA.

Unless we do the work of discovering our deepest loves, favorite activities, talents, and strengths we will not reach that state of flow that accompanies self-actualization.

My deepest work weaves together all the most important themes I discussed above. It allows me to change the world.

Your deepest work allows you to change the world. When you know your deepest work, all limitations drop away and you’re empowered to change the world.

A chip off this old block

My youngest son Jay, who I mentioned earlier, is now 21 years old. He’s a talented musician and lyricist.

While he was growing up, I felt my sole purpose for living was to raise him to adulthood and see him occupy a place of autonomy and maturity. It was a responsibility and mission sacred as any in my life. Even now, when I write about it, it evokes much emotion.

I’ve said many times that during the darker times in our lives, it was he who saved me, and not the other way around; it was he who finished raising me instead of the reverse; that it was he who shared his innate luminescence and lit my path.

You’ll recall that I wrote above having no support in my aspirations as an actor. In Jay’s case, and for my older children as well, I decided early on to allow him to choose his path based on what he found that he loved to do more than anything else.

His music, his most meaningful work, his deepest work, is already evident and he is actively engaging it at 21. He has a lifetime ahead, as all of us do, but he possesses more direction at 21 than I did.

That is what I want for you

Your deepest work and your sacred mission might have everything or nothing to do with your current work. I know that astounds weird, right? The truth is that what you identify as your deepest work has a lot to do with what you’re excited about.

If you’re not currently excited about your work path, then you might need to reboot and reconnect.

If you’re ready to discover your sacred mission, identify your most meaningful work, and engage your deepest work, I urge you subscribe below and begin the process.

It doesn’t matter if your 18 or 80, retired, in a career, or in college or university, knowing your deepest work isn’t something you should go to you grave without discovering and fully embracing.

Sometimes, things do fall apart. pc: unsplash.com

In a post from 2016 I wrote about how our lives can, do, and will continue to fall apart.

In that post I wrote the following:

In our lives, things fall apart: We lose jobs, we lose housing, we lose people we love. In those times, we feel lost as well. We feel tossed here and there and long for a soft place to land. We are but blades of grass blowing in the wind.

Almost two months ago my father died due to complications of pulmonary fibrosis (PF). PF is a disease of whereby the lungs, normally elastic and compliant, become increasingly fibrous and non-compliant making gas exchange in the small air sacs (alveoli) minimal and results in excessive fatigue and shortness of breath..more like a continual panting.

For nearly six months my dad failed to meet the criteria for supplemental oxygen therapy and when he finally did, it was nearly too late. He lasted four additional months with his oxygen tanks following him around when we left the house and a long tube connected to a concentrator while at home.

As he faltered, I became more angry

I’d unthethered from anger as a general behavior in the past, but when my dad’s mental abilities started to rapidly fail due to his secondary diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Dementia, it tested my ability to feel compassion and translate it into kindness.

There were days when I was more compassionate than others and I often would regret becoming angry at something he had no control over whatsoever.

The backdrop to this was that I was his caretaker for his final two years of life. I’d moved into my parents’ home to cook, clean (debatable), and provide transportation as well as hopefully increase their quality of life, as both were in their mid-eighties and incapable of doing much other than watch television and shuffle around.

My dad enjoyed walking their miniature poodle around the neighborhood twice a day for years prior to his decline, but in the last two years was increasingly disabled. Everything fell to me to do around the house which left me little time for writing between doctor appointments, pharmacy and grocery runs, cooking three meals each day, and spend any time at all with my youngest son who lived on his own in Santa Cruz.

My social life was largely nonexistent. A relationship that seemed promising failed. My career as a consultant was continually interrupted by the inability to travel on demand. As a single, middle-aged man nearing 60, I often wondered WTF was my life becoming?

I certainly didn’t plan for this kind of life when I envisioned closing out my sixth decade. And that -right there- was the problem.

This was the real root of the anger I felt and, like a human, I took it out on those around me.

In his final months, the anger was displaced

In the final five or six months of his life, I could see that he was failing rapidly. He was increasingly concerned with my mother’s well-being after he was gone. He’d largely accepted his approaching death and would often speak to me in frank terms about his life, his accomplishments, and his concern about my mother in the early morning hours we shared together over coffee.

More than once he wanted me to make him a promise; that I would live with in the house with my mother and take care of her until she died. In fairness, I couldn’t make hime a promise I didn’t know if I could keep. I told him that I would always make the best decisions possible for her. It was the best I could do and I still feel it was the best way to handle that question.

I could feel my anger dissipating while being replaced with compassion, knowing that he was nearing the end. In his last month of life, I had come to the end of my own ability to care for him and persuaded my two sisters to visit and stay with them while I took some time for personal respite. I spent two weeks in England and France, writing, sleeping, and preparing myself for the coming days.

I arrived home on January 29th and he slipped away on February 4th, just six days after I’d returned. I am convinced that he waiting for me to return and resume taking care of my mother before he let go.

I felt like my entire life fell apart

As a former physician, I was intellectually prepared for his death and more emotionally prepared than my siblings for caretaker duty. I could interact with his physicians and nurses in a manner that most family members of terminally ill patients couldn’t.

About a week after his funeral I felt a growing sense of grief and emptiness bubbling up from my center. I wrote to my friend Susan that “grief had ripped something open deep within and all kinds of foul-smelling things were seeping out.”

For three weeks, in the early hours of morning when the house was quiet, I was overcome with grief, sadness, and cried like a brokenhearted little boy. The visual images that pervaded my thoughts in this time of overwhelming sadness and grief was focused on my dad’s physical struggle during his last month. I knew that if I could get past those images of physical suffering and mental deterioration I would most likely come back to some sort of normalcy.

I turned to Pema Chödrön for advice

In her landmark book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, she realigned my thinking when she wrote:

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.

They come together and they fall apart. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.

The healing comes from letting there be room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

My dad is always going to be missed

He is gone from my sight forever. I have no evidence to believe that I will see him again. If I’m wrong and I do, so much the better. But I don’t cling to old beliefs any longer for they are a false comfort.

I saw through Pema’s words that the normalcy I was craving was unrealistic; that what was better was acceptance – that this is but one loss. Though the most significant in my life thus far, the loss of my dad and its resulting patterns of grief is an example of how things fall apart.

How I respond is where the comfort is found

I can see now that, as Pema writes…”staying with a broken heart, a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness” and loss is where I need to be. The spiritual journey is always found in the midst of trouble and turmoil, not in a divinely delivered outcome.

The true path of a spiritual warrior is in remaining open because…

The off-center, in-between state is the ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit.

It’s a very tender, non-aggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

Things have fallen apart. But I can see now that they will continue to do so over and over again.

For now, my response to remain open, to allow room for the sadness, for the misery and for the joy.

That is where the spiritual path begins.

My Most Meaningful Work – A 40+ Year Path of Gradual Awakening