Do You Value Your Sacred Work?

What do you do when you know that you were born to be a helper, a healer a guide or a teacher and you know that this work is NOT valued by society and not paid enough for you to live on?

That was my dilemma at 22 years old.

I had no idea what I wanted to do for work, but I knew deep in my soul that I was born to work with people – in some way, to help to heal, to guide, to teach….

So, I shifted from my Biology major to a Psychology major. When I graduated, I got a job as a Teacher for pre-school intellectually delayed children.

I LOVED it!

I taught a class of 3-5-year olds, focused on language learning and other developmental tasks, co-ordinated a team of volunteers and college students doing their practical training in the classroom. As well, we went to the parent’s home in the afternoons to coach them about how to work with their children and how to manage their children’s behaviour (and their own adjustment to parenting an intellectually different child).

But we were paid next to nothing.

I looked at my colleagues. One was an older woman (45 ish – which was older for me at the time) who had returned to work after her children were teenagers. This work was her passion. She didn’t need the money. Another two colleagues were married to husbands that had jobs that paid a lot more (even if they didn’t have any more education). And then there was a new grad who was engaged to an engineer. This apparently wasn’t the job for a self-supporting single woman. I thought I’d never be able to move out of my parent’s house or get a car.

I was really angry.

I was angry that this work wasn’t valued by society and not paid enough. I was angry at the assumption that women would do this work who didn’t “need” money. I was angry that even with such a tiny paycheck, we were still expected to bring in special snacks and other things we needed for our work. And everybody did it without complaining!

When I went to parties with my university friends, we all talked about our jobs. My friends who’d taken computer engineering (popular in my time) where making 4 or 5 times my salary. We had studied for the same length of time. I was outraged. If I’d just studied something I wasn’t interested in, I’d have more money.

You know the rest of the story, if you regularly read my blog -  I decided that I needed to get paid more for work and so I began my long journey into career dissatisfaction and being purpose adjacent – doing work I was good at, but which ignored my soul’s calling. And because I was so good at fitting in, I eventually forgot who I really was!

I remained purpose adjacent and miserable, for many years until motivated by that misery, I reclaimed that my purpose was to help people see their own beauty, their gifts, their purpose and their genius and my soul’s niche, to help people shift from the survival work to their soul’s work. This, is what I do now, informed of course, by my own winding path to purpose and meaning.

But the same issues that I was angry about so many years ago, are still playing out today.

As the spread of Covid 19 continues, I’ve been feeling such anger at the way that the work of helpers, healers, teachers and guides – but particularly helpers, is not valued and remunerated. People that care for and help the elderly, and people who teach children aren’t valued in western society. And the vast majority of these people are women. They are needed but not paid much.  And our society falls apart without them.

We are seeing that dis-integration right now.

In the western world helping isn’t valued. I posted on this my Facebook Page this week:

"The Economy isn’t closed. Everyone is cooking, cleaning and taking care of the loved ones. It’s just not valued by Economists because it’s normally unpaid women’s work.”

Value. Our society doesn’t value helping.

So suppose you’ve been a lawyer, a physician, a marketing or human resources professional, a school principal, a management consultant, a software developer – how to you switch to a profession that isn’t valued by society and often considered to be something people only do, when they can’t do anything else? (Notice how that’s what’s said about teaching too – that teachers teach because they can’t DO….)

And let’s just talk about the elephant in the room. Most of the people in these helping, healing, guiding, teaching jobs are WOMEN.

So when you decide that you are transitioning to your sacred work and you’ve taken coach training, what stands in your way first, is NOT how to get business – it’s how to RELEASE all the pieces of society’s program that tell you that as a woman, as a helper, you have no value.

That’s what’s really going on.

Here’s another one:

Using your non-linear, creative, right brain isn’t of value and only using your logical, analytical, linear left brain IS of value EVEN IF that's not where your genius lies. (Read Daniel Pink’s argument against that in his book, A Whole New Mind.)

Here’s another one:

Helping is something you give, and you shouldn’t be getting paid for that.

Do you see the dilemma? If you were born to help, heal, guide and teach and this is your sacred work – you could be blocked from talking about what you do, or charging money for it, by your programming!

You may think that this is something you don’t buy into, but when you see a high-profile Life Coach, selling her programs, being fully seen and charging a boat-load of money what do you really think? I’ve seen the on-line hate these coaches get….from women.

When your programming is running the show, you’ll never do what you came here to do!

I think it's a tragedy that so many talented, brilliant, good people, born to be helpers, healers and guides that train as Life Coaches, never shift from their survival work, to their sacred work. They suffer. And the world loses out on their brilliance.

So how do you shift to your sacred helping, healing, guiding or teaching work in a world that doesn’t value your most brilliant gifts?

.....You value yourself.

.....You stop hiding and claim who you truly are.

.....You recognize that you weren’t born to fit in, and you stop trying to do that.

.....You do the deep work to connect all the hidden threads in your life of genius and purpose and release the burden of society’s programming and to know without a shadow of a doubt, what you came here to do…….and you dare to decide to do it.

.....You acknowledge that doing your sacred work has a bigger purpose – that it’s how you can make your small contribution to the renewal and the transformation of the planet.

Here are some of the things you need to do to get from where you are now to your sacred work:

1. Decide to make the shift from your Survival Work (how you currently pay the bills – whether it’s prestigious and difficult or not) to your Sacred Work (what you came here to do). This is an inner “no matter what” decision that needs to be made consciously because the pressure to stay exactly where you are, and not shift is overwhelming.
2. Decode your body & soul’s wisdom, so that you can navigate using your inner guidance. This takes discovering how your soul’s wisdom shows up for you, trusting that and using only that to navigate towards your sacred work. It you’ve never done this – it’s a roller coaster.
3. Unpack, Excavate and Free Yourself from the Programming that has been running your life, that doesn’t belong to you! First you need to see it, then you need to decide what belongs to you and what doesn’t. It’s only then, that you can unearth your buried and hidden genius.
4. Unlock your Unique Genius – your unique genius & gifts, your deepest values, your soul’s purpose that is threaded through-out your life, your core soul message. You need to discover and reclaim the YOU that you’ve been hiding, that you’ve been blind to, that you’re unconscious to and you may have disowned. You must bring all of you to this helping, healing and guiding work – because that’s how you’ll develop unshakeable confidence and value who you truly are, rather than who you pretend to be.
5. Define your Sacred Work. This is putting all your puzzle pieces together so you come up with a tangible, clear soul’s niche that people understand! With this clarity, your path forward becomes self-evident and all you need next is to do!
6. Do Stuff. Try stuff out. This is testing and tweaking what you do, how you do it, and for whom, then creating and trying things out – finding unmet needs you can fill, creating your tribe, and doing your sacred work in the world! Your actions will always inform your next step and you continue to follow your soul’s wisdom.

That’s what we’ll be doing in Unlock Your Soul’s Calling. It's the perfect place for Life Coaches to do the inner work needed to claim their sacred work!

Big love,