Can you take your soul to work? - Career Management
Categories: Medical CareerKEY CONCEPTS
* Preserving Your Soul in Corporate America
* Discovering Your Life’s Calling
* Infusing Meaning into Work
* Being Creative in the Workplace
* Building a Rich Soul Life
Many professionals spend 60 or more hours a week at work. If work is a place where you just bide your time and wait for weekends and vacations, where you just make money to do and buy the things you want, you will feel cheated at the end of your life and perhaps resentful while you are getting there. David White in The Heart Aroused explores ways to preserve your soul in corporate America. While saying it is too elusive to truly be defined, he tries to describe the soul: “It is the indefinable essence of a person’s spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress.” (1)
He thinks most people check their souls at the door of their workplaces and then wonder why they feel empty during day. “We simply spend too much time and have too much psychic and emotional energy invested in the workplace for us to declare it a spiritual desert bereft of life-giving water. The belief has been that we can drink only on weekends or vacations and must proceed to shrivel slowly as the desiccating years roll by. … We are eventually compelled to bring our work life into the realm of spiritual examination. Life does not seem to be impressed by our arguments that we can ignore our deeper desires simply because we happen to be earning a living at the time.’ (1)
Stop checking your soul at the door
How can you stop checking your soul at the door and take it to work? Here are some ideas to help physician executives reevaluate their reasons for pursuing medical management and preserve their souls in an increasingly corporatized American health care system.
1. Figure out what you are meant to do as your life’s calling
Think about these questions: What do you feel called to do? What will make you say at life’s end, “I made a difference; I spent the time well; if you are a religious person, I did what God called me to do?” “Preservation of the soul means the palpable presence of some sacred otherness in our labors, whatever language we may use for that otherness: God, the universe, destiny, life, or love.” (1)