Blog Talk About Career Ownership | Thinking Rich | Inner Experience

Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Improving And Contributing

To improve and contribute, reserve some time, attention, energy and value for investment in yourself and others.

The Right Work and Right Investment

Right work means doing only what is necessary and sufficient to provide your livelihood.

You live a full and balanced life when some of your time and attention is devoted to your inner experience, and when some of your time and attention is devoted to relationships, doing things you enjoy and investing in yourself and others.

When you can realize some or all of these other inner and outer experiences through your work, it is important to recognize that this “work” goes beyond livelihood, beyond “right work”. This kind of work also provides for right relationships, right doing and right investment.

Right investment means doing what you can to make improvements and to contribute to your own and others’ experiences of life and work. Right investment is made without an expectation of immediate return, and possibly without an expectation of personal return.

You can leverage your career, sometimes to take it beyond livelihood and sometimes to give you the resources – time, energy, attention, money, freedom, etc. – to create improvements and to make contributions that enhance yourself or others, and that enhance the experience that you and others have of life and work.

Your Personal Reflections on Balance

How consistent with each other are your inner and outer experiences of working and living?

How consistent with each other are your experiences of relating to others, doing for the sake of doing, working to pay your way and investing in yourself and others?

How can you integrate and balance your inner and outer experiences of working and living?

How can you integrate and balance your relating, doing, working and investing experiences in your life?

How well do you currently balance your relating, doing, working and investing habits?

Make a list of your relating, doing, working and investing habits. Monitor how much of your waking time and attention is devoted to each area. Set targets for a distribution of your time and attention to each area that is consistent with your personal values and needs. For example, you may discover that you currently spend 15% of your time in non-work relating with others, 15% non-work doing, 60% working and 10% investing; if relating and investing are important for your values and needs, you may set a target distribution of 25% relating, 15% doing, 40% working and 20% investing. You can then adjust your relating, working and investing habits to redistribute your time and energy.