Why your path to finding fulfilling works requires a spiritual lens

So if you clicked on the link to read this article you’re probably a little skeptical, but you’ve made it this far, so I ask that you stay with me. I’ll be honest, I debated with whether I should launch the new focus of the podcast with an episode on spirituality and your journey to finding fulfilling work - the fear that it would turn people off, that some may think of me as this new age, hippie dippy woman full of fluff and no substance, but I hope if you’re thinking that to prove you wrong. For those of you that don’t know me, I will say that I’m as practical and pragmatic as they come and for me, exploring spirituality and it’s connection to everything in my life is a newly articulated concept, and I’m on the journey with you discovering the power and the possibilities of it. 

2020 was a year that almost knocked me down. The global pandemic and the changes to how we all interact as humans aside, I had a lot of change, some I sought out and some I didn’t. I changed jobs after nearly 6 years at a company I once loved, I had a break up that pushed me to question my own ability to trust myself and my own gut instincts, and like everyone else I had this fear of the potential of this life ending virus looming over me and my family. Through leaning further into gratitude, movement, meditation and focusing on simple pleasures along with investing in therapy to focus on being kinder to myself, trusting in the things I can't control and knowing experiences are happening "for me" vs "to me" I’ve discovered the power of leaning further into spirituality, and it is the grounding and the foundation for the conversations to come on this podcast and our journey together. I truly believe that without this as our starting point and our base, we won’t get all that far together. 

Let’s be clear on one thing before we jump in further - as author Marianne Williamson in her book Return to Love says, “Your playing small does not serve the world.” In fact, everyone is better off when you are living to your highest potential and you know what - despite what anyone may have told you, you deserve to take up all the space in the world that you desire. As women of colour (WOC), we are the product of our environments, the cultures in which we’ve been raised, our minority status. The experiences and the trauma our parents, grandparents and ancestors went through are not easily brushed off or escaped. We can't separate our lived experience from our day to day work and navigating the negotiation of when and how we can and cannot bring our authentic and whole self to our work is very real for all of us. We don’t always have role models, roadmaps to success, clear pathways that afford us the freedom to make choices on our terms. We often find ourselves in environments where success feels unattainable because we don’t see ourselves represented. Our journeys as WOC look and feel different, but that does not mean that our worthiness is any less. Let that sink in for a moment. Imagine the possibilities for your life if you stopped playing small. 

And here’s the thing. Where there is something in your life that feels unfulfilled for you, there is deep inner work to be done. I believe in the core of my being that if you’re struggling to come across work that fulfills you, if you’ve found yourself chasing career paths that paid you a lot of money but left you feeling empty or fulfilled your parents expectations of what you should do, but failed to give you that feeling of being lit up at the thought of going to work each day that there is inner work to be done. If you’re struggling to land that opportunity where you don’t feel like you have to settle post graduation or post lay off, there is something deeper than you not doing the hard work to network, deeper than you not using the right type of resume or deeper than you thinking you just didn’t have the luck that others around you might have. I truly believe that if something doesn’t come easy for you - be it love, relationships, career fulfillment, financial freedom, health, that it means you have to embark on a journey that requires you to do the inner work, and that’s why it’s important for me to start our time together on this journey to career fulfillment in a place of reflection and connection to something beyond that which you can immediately control. You can call it a relationship with God, you can call it the Universe, you can define it as spirituality - whatever you call it, I really don’t care. As author Katherine Woodward Thomas in her book Calling in the One says, "I have no interest in converting anyone". So long as you’re open to hearing how going inward, getting really quiet and doing the work to uncover and even deconstruct the things you’ve been told you need to land that dream job or that fulfilling path, then you’re on the right track. 

I’m also not naive enough to think that everyone will get it or agree. Part of the journey of understanding what you really want comes from the trial and error process, from falling down and from perhaps even going down a path that may not be the most fulfilling long term choice. Sometimes you hear things when you’re ready to receive them and right now may not be the right time for you to hear this, and that’s ok. But if you are ready to change your thinking on how to find that alignment of your core values to work that lights you up, that brings you deep fulfillment and puts that pep in your step (even if those steps are fewer because you’re just commuting to your home office these days), then listen on. 

It’s important to say, most of us are in positions that are very different from that of our parents and previous generations before them. We have an abundance of choice and opportunity and much of the options come in our willingness to access that which is in front of our faces. You might be a child of immigrants like me. My parents, immigrants from Pakistan who moved to Canada over 40 years ago didn’t have that much choice in the decisions they made around a career that aligned with their hearts desire. They would likely read this and roll their eyes wondering what Canada has done to their kid. They chose opportunities that would put food on our table and each choice to move jobs or change career paths was mainly rooted in economic gain, no matter how small. Because of the sacrifices my parents made, I recognize that I now am a sufferer of first world problems. You may be in much of the same boat. My generation and those after me arguably have had access to all this education, knowledge sharing and information at our fingertips and from that we get on a quest to discover the right path and perhaps jump around to find that perfect fit, but let’s have an honest moment here and say it like it is all this is exhausting and overwhelming. 

I’m here to say that it doesn’t have to continue to be exhausting and overwhelming, but it will require work. To be honest, you’ve got some work to do to reframe the process for yourself because you've been fed the wrong advice for a long time, you have been following the roadmaps and pathways of someone else’s dreams and you’re expecting it to be easy or comparing your path to someone else's. You expect that dream job to fall into your lap, for your parents to have the perfect vision of what your career needs to look like, for money to somehow be the only driving force that keeps you in pursuit of your goals, and that you won’t go through a journey to get there but you will, and it’s going to require you to get out of your own way and allow what’s meant to be to come to the surface.

If you know me well, you know I dabble in self-improvement and as such read a lot in this arena along with surrounding myself with people who do much of the same. Since as far back as I can remember, my hero and the best friend in my head has been Oprah Winfrey as it was through her platform that I started to think about self improvement and more importantly, my relationship with God in a very different way. I grew up Muslim and to be honest, must of the ways in which I was taught to engage with God was through a lens of guilt for not doing enough to engage God or show God I was a true believer. The language I used to talk to God was not one I really ever understood and the pathway I had been taught as the only pathway to connect wasn’t one that ever resonated with me. Not a great recipe for finding abundance in the relationship and not the way I approach it today. I credit my values, compassion and the ways in which I look at the world through a lens of service and giving back to my Muslim upbringing, but I credit much of my growth to date around spirituality to Oprah who so passionately used her platform to get people to recognize that doing the inner work was just as important, if not more important, than doing the outer work in life. She may have detoured a few times and even in the late 80’s when she carted out 67 pounds of fat on a red wagon from her umpteenth weight loss challenge on her show, she never lost credibility points with me. She made conversations about God and spirituality feel accessible and beautiful. 

Very recently I was listening to Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations podcast on Love and Connection and something she said stopped me in my tracks. It’s that “if you use your life to serve the world, you will discover the myriad of ways the world offers itself to serve you.” I believe in the core of my being that if you find a way to be of service to others, the path to fulfillment will be full of moments that light you up. I also believe that each of us was born with our own individual talents and gifts and when those gifts are used to service others in even the smallest of ways, you are leaning into your purpose. You using those gifts and talents to support the experiences of other people is an active act of service in a way that allows your life to be about someone else other than just yourself, it removes ego from the equation, and that my friends is something most of us are never taught about in connection to finding fulfilling work. If you make it about other people and how you can use your God given talents to uplift, to serve, to evolve others, the pathways to fulfillment become so much more accessible. 

For me, life has always found a way to humble me when I’m on the wrong path. And it’s often where I’ve found myself in jobs I’ve hated, working in pursuit of a fancy title or bigger pay cheque. I've taken big risks in my career path more than once because of it. Going back to school at the age of 30, quitting my 6 figure job in senior leadership at a company I once loved that I found myself feeling stifled and frustrated within in the middle of a global pandemic no less - all because nothing was in alignment with my bigger purpose and where service was either non-existent or found only in fleeting moments. So trust me when I say, I speak from experience and I’m on this journey alongside with you. 

I’ll also have a very honest moment with you and say my current job isn’t my dream job, it’s quite far from it, but taking this role was a very intentional decision to serve a bigger dream baked in service and the desire to inspire and teach future generations of HR talent. I intentionally pursued the opportunity I am in now to provide me a depth of knowledge in a very unique and complex environment that I couldn’t replicate elsewhere, so that one day soon I can take all this knowledge, education and passion and feed it back to HR students, to change the ways in which they see the possibilities for themselves, their influence and their impact in the world. I also took the role so I could separate my identity from my work and create space for this work, to have a job that didn’t define me, but paid my bills and allowed me enough financial freedom to do the work I know I was born to do. 

And that’s where my next point comes in. In order to find that fulfilling work, that career to love, you must create space for it. We spend so much time working to make an income and provide ourselves with the life we want, don’t make finding that which you are passionate about an option – make it a priority. Schedule time in your calendar. Find whatever formula works for you and stick with it. For instance, at least once a week remove yourself from distractions and make no excuses to spend at minimum an hour on the work – and it's going to take a good amount of work to get you there. Lots of self-reflection, lots of research and lots of time focusing on banishing those “but, I can’t” excuses. You don’t want to be the one with all that potential that never fully lived up to it because you were too busy making a pay cheque. 

And by space, I don’t just mean creating it for that which you can control. I mean creating space to also get really quiet and to go inwards. Creating space to ask yourself the questions that you’ve probably been taught to quiet. What are those moments where you feel the most alive, where time disappears and you go into a zone of forgetting about all the things that make you feel unsure. Where you don’t question yourself. What is that voice deep inside of you asking you to notice, to pay attention to? As author and one of the newest best friends in my head, Glennon Doyle says, "who were you before the world told you who to be?" That little girl within you had dreams and desires and had ideas of what your life path was supposed to look like based in the purest moments of joy and in the simplicity of childhood, bring her back. Sit in silence and see what comes to you. 

And here’s some straight talk for all of us - one of the most important steps in your journey is rooted in learning to tame your inner critic. As WOC we are often not given many passes, we don’t have the ability to say I’m having a bad day or I’m not myself today without going internal and beating ourselves up or getting into a game of comparison to those that have more privilege than us. We feel like we always have to be on. Yet, we have so much to celebrate about ourselves that should be the driving forces of our joy. We don’t have to dig very deep to find the things that make us unique, we have richness in our cultures and beauty in the art of difference that defines our existence. We have journeys that look and feel different, and we must start to tell ourselves we are worth the effort, worth the energy, worth the commitment and worth the access. And that’s not an easy thing to do for many of us who are brought up to believe our lives are not complete without marriage, children and deep sacrifice. For those that are taught to make our parents proud, who carry guilt as children of immigrants, or as those who carry the deep desire for more, we have to unlearn a lot of things about what’s possible for ourselves and it starts with how we speak about the possibilities of our lives, on our terms. I’m not saying any of this is easy, but a little kindness and grace for yourself will go a long way, because you know what? You were born worthy, your presence on this Earth is a gift and half the battle of enjoying the experience is learning to go inward to trust in your innate worthiness. You could stop accomplishing tomorrow, could never have done a thing to make yourself or your parents proud and you would still be worthy, you would still be that blessing to those that get to be in your life. Remember that. 

Lastly, and probably most importantly, and by design most difficult to lean into, you have to surrender to the process. My dear friend Susan who is a true confidant and sister in my life recently posted something on her social media feed that struck such a chord with me - it was a quote from Pastor Steven Furtick that said, “God’s timing is designed to teach you to trust.” Let that sink in for a moment. Trust requires an element of surrender that means taking it out of your hands and giving it to something bigger than yourself.

I also genuinely believe that you have to meet the Universe or God halfway. That you can lean into manifestation through your thoughts, but that your actions must demonstrate your faith and core belief in the possibilities. Surrender requires you to be an active participant in your own journey to fulfilment while also not trying to fully control the process. If that's a hard concept to wrap your head around, it's probably because you will have to exercise patience and push past many moments where you don’t feel like it’s happening fast enough for you or where you feel like it may never happen for you at all.

This may not be such a lesson for me in my career path anymore, but trust me when I say I’m deep in the lesson with you in other ways. I’m 41 years old and single with no exciting prospects in reach in the middle of a global pandemic where meeting strangers is kind of a non-existent thing, trust me I get the struggle of being patient. The vulnerability it takes to even say that out loud to virtual strangers on the internet is beyond that which I can explain, but I’m actively engaging in going deeper into surrender to trust the timing too. 

I’m always amazed at my younger self for expecting the journey to be easy and for the answers to fall into my lap. This bright eyed optimism only served me so much and for so long. I hope it does come easier for you, but if it doesn’t I hope you found some food for thought here, some insight and perspective that will allow you to ask yourself the questions perhaps no one else is giving you space to ask when it comes to finding that fulfilling career path or that job you’re not having to settle for. If it’s not clear by now, I will remind you that this journey with me isn’t about career planning basics, it’s about strategy that will allow you as a WOC to level up and will ask you to take risks to move your life in the direction of all its possibilities. As Glennon Doyle says, “The braver I am, the luckier I get.” And here’s to all of us being a bit more brave tomorrow than we were able to be today.