The Seven Steps to Concious Career Building

1. Abundance: conscious careers begin with abundance; a visceral feeling of trust in life, self-esteem, and the value of being who you are in the world. What do you do easily, naturally, effortlessly? True, powerful positions can be achieved through scarcity (the feeling that I am not enough or that I do not have enough), but they take one away from one's authenticity. What profits a man who has gained the whole world?

2. Feeling: passion is the fuel that drives us. What do you care about? What makes you indignant enough to change yourself and/or the world? What would you do spontaneously - even if you weren't being paid for it? If passion is not consciously present, symptoms are. Symptoms (defined here as anything on any level that bothers you or moves you) are the harbingers of passion. If you are in abundance, you do not need to mask or deny symptoms, but can work deeply with them, listen to them, and let them lead you to your core.

3. Focus: this is where most vocational programs begin; defining your goals. But if you are not aligned with your sense of abundance and feeling, goals may be chosen out of scarcity, not out of being aligned with your greater sense of being. Trajectory might be better than goal here. You are responsible for choosing a direction, for making commitments, and for following through, but you want to be open to deeper forces at work in the making of your destiny. Setting a direction is more effective when it is done in timed increments instead of idealistic "forevers." What is the one (two or three) area, that if you focused on it in the next six-months, no matter what else happened (barring acts of God), you would feel supremely good about yourself and your place in the world?

4. Sharing: to share instead of struggle, to understand that work exists within the greater eco-context of relationship and community, to focus on making a contribution instead of eking our a living from the world, these are the transformational possibilities of the heart. The heart is the seat of prosperity, and here is the place where you learn the laws of giving and receiving, of creating prosperity instead of obsessing over profit, of developing win/win situations in all transactions with others. To hold anyone out of our compassionate embrace is to hold out a part of ourselves. A key question, then, to ask in vocational development is, "Who, where, and what is my community," for another name for a community is a "market!" To work from the heart of sharing (to give and to receive) is to transform the outworn presuppositions of the market-place, and to make your work a reflection of your health, authenticity, and love.

5. Creativity: If the job you want does not presently exist, you can create it! This is the more than the entrepreneurial spirit, this is participating in the process of creative manifestation. In this realm, you learn to re-envision your work and the purpose of your work. What is the highest possibility you can imagine for your project, product, or service? Do you have a vision of the world as it could be, not a concept (i.e. freedom, justice, equality) but an actual visceral sense of what could be. What would the revisioned world look like, smell like? To paraphrase Edward Kennedy speaking at his brother Robert's funeral, "Some people see the world as it is and ask, "Why, my brother saw a world that never was and asked "Why not." Have the courage to vision, to dream, and to build from the deepest place within you. "In dreams begin our responsibilities."

6. Spirit: if petitions to Spirit (in whatever form you relate to a Higher Power) have cured cancer, brain tumors, and the like, then God should be able to get me a job! Why not invite the spiritual dimension into our job search? Not by asking Spirit to manipulate things in our favor, but by opening our own plan to "The Plan." As Hilda Charlton used to say at the end of every one of her meetings (when she asked people who needed jobs to stand up and receive prayer), "There is a place that needs you and a place where you need to be. See these two coming together."

7. Mystery: ultimately, we don't know! No matter how many "steps" we follow, there is a mystery underneath and around our lives. There are forces at work that we cannot even begin to conceive of. More often than not, we draw the circumference of possibility too tight around our limited ideas. In this final moment, we take a leap of faith, we embrace the unknown. We move actively into meeting our fate instead of passively resigning to our destiny. Your Life is a work of Art, a craft to be carefully mastered, for patience has replaced time, and you are your own destination!

You may also want to ask yourself these questions:

•  What is the priority, project, product, or service that you would like to develop through this course?
  
  
•  What has been your experience around goals and goal setting?
  
  
•  Name at least ten resources that are currently available to you to further your project. Now name at least five more.
  
  
•  What has been your experience around translating a vision into action? Around networking?
  
  
•  What community (market) do you feel related to? What are their primary concerns? How might you share energy with them?
  
  
•  What are the major obstacles that have stymied the manifestation of your priority in the past? What is the "message" they have been trying to communicate?
  
•   How is your whole (spiritual) Self related to your current area of focus?