Member-only story
Humans 101
What Happens When You Choose Passion Over Fear
My higher self knew I’d regret staying in the corporate world
Last year at this time, I was in a meeting. This isn’t surprising because I was always in meetings at my corporate job. My team and I sat around a table in a small conference room. We were discussing how our group fit within our larger business unit and whether we had a “vote” or a “voice” on specific issues. This would be a reasonable enough conversation to have, except we had been having the same exact conversation for over a year.
I could hear an internal voice whisper to me, “You are not supposed to be here.”
I silently replied, “This company has been really good to me. I make a lot of money; I have great benefits. Sure, I haven’t been inspired in a while, but I should be happy to have this job.”
The voice, let’s call it my higher self, challenged me “Is there another position in this company that you would find more inspiring?”
Surely I should be able to think of some role that would be more appealing than my current one, but after considering for a moment, I realized there wasn’t. “No,” I conceded.
“What do you think, Lisa Marie?” An actual voice, a co-worker, asked me — jolting me out of my inner dialog.
“I need to connect with my counterpart in the organization so we can plan a collaborative workshop where we can prioritize requirements and get on the same page with a unified vision,” I spouted on autopilot.
This response seemed to satisfy my team, although frankly I wasn’t sure what I even said or meant.
“You’re right,” I said to my higher self. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
In his legendary interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth, author and mythologist Joseph Campbell says: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on kind of a track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”
