Talent is a capital and like any other capital you need to invest resources in it, for it to grow. This is why you have to work. Without people and things working there would be no opportunity, no experiences and no evolution. Therefore, work is the solution, not the problem. The real problem is the lack of sense and direction behind it. This is the root cause of all frustration and exhaustion. Whether you work 1h a week or 10 a day doesn’t matter as much as the reasons behind this work and the purpose it serves. Work is unavoidable, so the solution is never to reject it, for the attempt to avoid work, creates more work and procrastination ends up consuming more energy from you that it would have required you to invest in the first place.
The more you try to escape work, the more it finds you. Therefore, the solution is on the contrary to face it head on, by building and deepening your relationship with it, exactly as you would do with money. People struggle with these notions because they build negative associations around it when in fact money and work are only transitory expedients to other things more important. That’s why it is crucial to dismantle all the obstacles and blockages around these notions to recover a clear vision of what’s ahead. Work and money are integrated part of something greater and positive in your life your job is to identify. Without purpose, they are only these debilitating things that alienate and corrupt people.
The first step to reconcile with work is to identify all the unconscious associations related with it. Indeed, the notion of work summons preconceived ideas and imageries people are ambivalent or in conflict with. These mappings may be inherited, they may stem from childhood or your own career path. The goal here is to rethink and elaborate around the notion of work, to give you a chance to let go of all it is not, and get you closer to what it truly is.
The most obvious example is certainly the amalgam between work and employment. Indeed, for most people, the notion of work is triggering because it has been institutionalized by corporations. However, work cannot be reduced to employment nor its 9 to 5 pm social models or even hierarchical organization. Work is simply work, without what we have made it across cultural landscapes. It is a universal notion, that emerges from needs and necessities that have been clearly discerned and understood.
Secondly, the notion of work is often reduced to pain for everything you are led to work on, you are usually struggling with, and everything you struggle with; you are usually led to work on. This is because together with change and movement, work is a vector for evolution and by beating inertia, it necessarily involves facing different degrees of resistances. That’s why the notion of work can involve minimum effort to intense difficulty depending of the obstacles between you and your goals. However, it all comes down to meaning and even pain and stress are relative notions related to the purpose they serve. This needs to be clear to you.
To conclude, healing your relationship with work is about replacing all the negative distortions attached to it by positive ones, which is in itself a full-time individual job no one can accomplish for you. It won’t come from your boss, your colleagues or your manager. For work to be fruitful and constructive it needs to embody full meaning and signification, which can only stem from you. This is the first step in preventing any work exhaustion and burnout. You may work your own way, your own pace but at the end of the day, whether you are entrepreneur or an employee, you are always the first person you work on and work for.
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