This will be my first blog post. I am very excited to have the chance to reach a wider audience, so this first post was important to me. There are so many areas I could have covered but being in coaching and speaking with clients I came across a theme that seemed to come through. When I was speaking with various clients and what their idea of success was community was mentioned. I was curious about this idea because I have always thought that success was a personal thing. Trying to achieve success so that help ourselves that that we can; provide for our families, have a life that will allow us freedom, or not have to worry about housing, food and other creature comforts, basically everything you would find in the lower bases of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you are not familiar with this concept here is a link, it is very interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs . What I was interested to find was while these were there, clients kept skipping over those and jumping to the middle of the pyramid “Love/Belonging”. Although they were calling to community and recognition. The harder you worked and the more success you achieved the more the community would allow you to belong. I don’t want to say love because that is not what was being discussed but belonging. I was very interested in this concept when I began to think more about my personal journey and added in the idea of community I began to see that, more than anything, I was looking for a place to fit in in this world. I no longer wanted to be a person in the shadows. But what I was also able to see in my self and in my clients was that we were choosing career paths that were considered more affluent to gain that recognition. As if we were trying to prove something to the world. For example, choosing to be a lawyer over a teacher or chef even though our passion was not for law, or working in a family business when you really want to be a police officer or writer. But here is the thing, being a lawyer can meet the safety block of Maslow’s pyramid, but would it satisfy the psychological? If we are good enough as a lawyer, we can meet the belonging block but not meeting the fundamental psychological block are we happy in our life? It begins to feel like a temple build on pillars of sand. Now I am not saying that community was never a part of why we chose our profession and that it should not be a factor. What I am interested in is are we choosing a career path because of that status our society had placed on certain careers through; media, money, and education, that we forget to choose a path in life that will satisfy our soul’s/heart’s true calling in life? Or are we skipping over the psychological aspect thinking that if we meet other needs that we will be happy. Maybe we are, but for how long? We can cannot be truly successful in life if we hate what we do in life. If we hate going to work or hate what we have chosen to do, do you really want to; get out of bed in the morning? Go to work? Are you anxious, depressed, confused? Do you stay in the job because it satisfies your personal needs and the needs of your family? All very noble reasons, but what are you sacrificing? Your health, family time, vacations? So, is there a better path? I am not meaning to provide and answer because everyone is different. I want people to think about this and start a dialogue and to be more aware of the role society plays in the creation and formation of our ideas of happiness and success.
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