Coming Into Your Power
by Bonnie Bonetti Bell

Have you ever considered the possibility that your career pain — a condition marked by the interminable blahs, the Monday-morning dreads, and the recurrent thought, "Is that all there is?" — might actually be growing pain? Or that it is your untapped power that is draining your energy?

For over 12 years now, I have worked professionally with a broad range of people in some form of career pain, and I have yet to encounter this thinking. I usually hear something more along these lines: I blew it… I got the wrong degree… I didn’t get a degree… I had a terrible childhood… I had a privileged childhood… I moved to the wrong city or the wrong company… I chose the wrong partner… I don’t have a partner… If I made more money I could make a change… If I didn’t make so much money, I could make a change…

What saddens me as I sit in my chair listening to you is how readily you jump to negative conclusions about yourself and the world around you; how little you value yourself; how strongly you believe in the negative voices inside and outside of you; how afraid you are to change.

You don’t seem to know how amazing you are, how rich in gifts and talents you are, how ready you are to expand your horizons or how possible it is for you to do so. Your angst is not terminal condition; it is Life asking you who you are. It is asking you to wonder about who you are rather than shut down in fear.

As a species, at least at this time in history in our part of the world, we seem to have lost our individual and collective ability to wonder. Wonder is not reserved for childhood; that’s just where we encounter it first. Wonder can be practiced and developed, like any other skill.

What if your angst is telling you that you’ve grown, that you need a bigger or different stage on which to expand who you are? What if it’s Life’s way of asking you to come out and play? Maybe it’s calling you from engineering to a home-based communications business, or from bookkeeping to doggie day care, or from teaching to writing, or from legal secretarial work to opera singing. Maybe it wants you to stay home with your children, or to publish a book on learning, or to go back home to Indiana to transform an historic home into a bed and breakfast.

This is what angst had in store for some of my clients when they came out of their pain and into their power. What might it be saying to you?

©2008 Bell Investment Advisors, Inc.