Thank you so much for your blog. I have found it so incredibly inspiring. I was reading John’s comments which completely ring home with me. I am also a banker and have been for three years now. I earn a great salary and have complete financial security. However I work at times 80+ hrs a week and I’m not even sure if I like banking! It all doesn’t feel right. However I’ve been locked in by own success at what I do and the silly bonuses they pay us. I feel there must be more to my life than this, but I feel scared to make the jump. I also come from a poor background and I feel the need to provide financial support for my parents and give back to them what they sacrificed for my education. However, I keep on thinking about starting my own business, I have a passion for food and I dearly want to get into this industry. It’s a risk and I’m not naturally a risk taker and yet I feel dead inside at the moment and stuck in a rut. Do I just go for it?! Has anyone else been in this situation?

I have spoken to the voice for years. I understand that it equates money with safety. It wants to be safe at all costs; which, of course, means that it would prefer that I make choices that it can understand. Work, home, sleep, repeat.

However, this pattern has been going on for years. Inevitably, the pattern comes to its conclusion when the Universe gives me swift kick to the bum, and I’m forcibly ousted from whatever situation/relationship I couldn’t extract myself from.

How I deal with this voice is to not coddle it. I coddled it and it waffled back and forth with this idea or that. Once I made a decision and said, ‘We are doing this. Let’s do it.’ Things get done; actions taken.

It’s okay to feel fear and move forward. Fear doesn’t always have to mean that you shouldn’t go forward. Sometimes fear means you need more information, or that you are about to make a huge breakthrough personally.

I have made many breakthroughs this way. But going through the process does not feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t always have to.

So right now, the discomfort is rising inside me, allowing me to move towards what I want and away from what I no longer need/want.

As of this time, I have two voices in conflict. The voice of my mini-me (ego) and the voice of my spirit (which says it is now time to move on). I know my spirit is the voice to follow because every time I have listened and done what it suggests I have always landed on my feet. My mini-me doesn’t trust this, and probably never will; it’s job is keep me safe and protected from danger (whether real or imagined). My spirit’s job is help me grow, explore, and expand into greater and greater aspects of myself that have been left in the shadows for so long due to childhood and adolescent emotional wounds.

This isn’t easy at all for me. I only wish it were. But I know what to expect.

When we stop and listen to the parts of ourselves that seem critical, they can turn out to have wisdom and valuable contributions. Then you can get your whole person on board, and stop fighting yourself. By aligning all the parts of yourself around a common vision they all agree on, you’ll have the power and focus to actually create it.

Right now you are stuck between a bunch of different voices pulling you in different directions. But you can get them all to pull in the same direction by creating a dialog within yourself where each part gets to be heard, and you reach a consensus decision where each part is valued. Then you won’t be spinning your wheels, and you’ll start going somewhere.

Inside of my head, my mini-me (my critical voice) says i should stay and save up money until I can have my own biz. However, I know this is a lie. All my mini-me really wants to do is make it’s horde fund (a nest egg that is supposed to be for a rainy day, but never gets spent; just counted with glee) bigger. I can’t live for tomorrow, or the promise of a horde fund. I know that I won’t spend any money to create a biz for myself; mini-me will convince me to stay by putting a goal like a carrot on a stick in front of my nose; when I get 5,000 dollars I will start my own biz. When I get that money, it changes the goal to 10,000 dollars and so on.

I feel like I am a hamster on a treadmill. I feel angry and trapped. The only way that things change is when the Universe forces me to move.

The discomfort is mounting. I have decided to leave before December of 2010.

My challenge: my mini-me believes that another job will make me happy; it’s already planning the new job I will go to that will guarantee happiness.

I understand the frustration people are feeling. I understand that job security is laughable. Yet I am still attached to the conditioned belief that says jobs are more stable and secure. However, if someone can stop my income by saying, “You’re fired!” how secure is my job.

I guess I hope to find the safe path to my dreams. Lol. I don’t think there is one.

I am hanging out in a job I despise because I have eight more months until I am vested. I *have to* find the courage to leave after that, though. The vesting will give me a decent nest egg so that I can take of for up to a year if necessary.

However, I am always “Mr. Reliable”, i.e. the guy who doesn’t take a lot of chances but really wants to.

To this day, I wish I had followed my dream after college but, when I tried, my parents got me so scared I would fail that I took a “safe” path. Now that I’m a bit older, I realize there is no “safe” path–just paths that delay the dangers awhile longer than others.

I think you just try it and see. There’s no way to know ahead of time if something’s perfect for you – life is an unfolding journey. Plan to make adjustments as you go and start going!

Emma

I initially read this because my husband is in a job that he is unhappy in. We have 2 small children and live on one income. It pays really well and has benefits for something in his field. It would be really hard to replace that if he left. He is really unhappy. Things are really tight financially and I am always looking for ways I could contribute without just working to pay for daycare, besides, I have worked since I was 16 and I feel confident when I can provide.

I have so many interests and so many passions. They have mostly been dormant all these years. I lived my life the way I was “supposed” to and not staying true to myself. I have just made the decision to start a business (bought a domain name). It is scary though because I do not know if it is what I really want to do. I am really excited about it. How do I know if this is it?

Rebecca

Congratulations, it sounds like you are in a place where you get to make a decision–your destiny rests in your hands. Do you stay safe, comfortable, and unhappy/unfulfilled, or do you take the risk to discover what else is out there for you and start to create a life you truly enjoy?

Your parents probably think that financial security will provide you happiness, but perhaps if you explain the cost that it has to your personal well-being, and that it isn’t actually leading to happiness, they might gain some understanding. Ultimately they want for you to be happy (I’m guessing), so if they get that you are truly making a conscious decision to go for that, instead of a reckless decision, they may be able to understand it. However, at the end of the day you have to live your own life as well and sometimes other people don’t understand what we do until much later, but we have to do what we are called to do anyway.

Fear can be mitigated by knowledge–start researching what you might want to do next. The more you understand the territory you are walking into, the more secure you will feel and the easier it will be to go forward. The real thing to fear is inertia or stagnation, where you are frozen by the fear. Let the fear motivate you to find out what you really need to do to create the income you want doing something you enjoy.

Emma