Is Your Work Life Delightful?

Delightful work is: amusing, attractive, captivating, clever, engaging, enjoyable, fascinating, gratifying, luscious and thrilling.

RobinHiggins / Pixabay

Does your work invoke any of these, or something less?

If you’re not engaged in work that you love, you have chosen less than you could have. If your career, job or business does not feel like a true calling, can you even expect it to be a delight?

Here is your wake-up call. If you aren’t in active pursuit of work life happiness, prosperity and freedom, get in the game my friend. Get in the game now. Know this: each of us has a special something that can be expressed as our unique, fulfilling work. In the engagement of that work we’ll be in service to others and financially prosperous.

Writer Frederick Buechner said it best. “Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

Have you always had this hunch that you were destined for greatness? That hunch was your deep gladness calling out to you from within. Your first step is to acknowledge that whisper of greatness and declare yourself in active pursuit of your delightful work. The path needs to be your own, but you needn’t walk it alone. Let’s boldly stride out on this path together.

My mission is simply to increase the number of folks on this planet who are in active pursuit of work life freedom and happiness. I’ll be your guide and together we’ll move all obstacles now standing in the way of your deep gladness. My name is Tom Volkar.

The world has a deep need for what only you can give it. This is your time. It’s your time to stand tall and pursue what was meant for you, with honor and commitment. Author of Coaching Into Greatness, Kim George, shares this very inspiring thought. “What is meant for you can’t be lost.”

What was meant for you is still there waiting for you to give it life first by making a bold proclamation. No obstacle, real or imagined can stop you once you commit. I’ll prove it to you.

Tell me what scares you the most. What stops you from pursuing your delightful work? Really. What do you run up against when you entertain the thought of creating a happier work life? What circumstance, belief or fear has caused you to settle for less than you could enjoy?

Be bold and share, and I’ll post it here. But we’ll do far more than post it. We’ll work together with other committed adventurers to show you how to move through it in active pursuit of your deep gladness.

For you brave souls who are already enjoying work that brings you alive, what once stopped you and how did you move forward anyway?
Stumble It! Stumble It!

Comments

  1. Egbert Sukop says

    “Luscious and thrilling work?”

    Tom, are you nuts? That’s not exactly what God cursed Adam with when he kicked his sorry apple noshing ass out of paradise: “Because you listened to your wife: Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” –Genesis 3, 17-19

    Thanks! Yeah, thank you so much! Leading a messed up work life like good ol’ doormat Adam and Sisyphus is alright if you listen to your wife, to your loving husband, to cousin Laura, or to your know-it-all brother-in-law Hugo. If you don’t listen to anybody but to your own gut, you do have a choice: painful toil or rather something more delightful—what’s it going to be?

    ‘Doing what I want to do’ is the most scary enterprise of all because it’s so utterly selfish. Where is the sacrifice in that? Exactly: sacrifice is unnecessary humbug! Unless you find it important to please people, that is. People pleasing and being happy exclude each other. Worse: while we pretend to be so ridiculously selfless, the people we’re trying to suck up to don’t give a rat’s behind about us, about the stuff we do, or about our noble and idiotic self-deprivation.

    Nobody cares about what you do. Nobody cares how much you suffer. Nobody cares if you are happy. Do you care? We are quick to perform worthless chores but it takes the utmost discipline for most of us to do what we want to do. Before we follow up on a joyful idea we clean the toilet bowl first. Insane! Trust me, dull diligence doesn’t provide valuable service to your community.

    “Giving back to the community” with sacrifice and harrowing labor is the idea of fools for fools. When you’re actively busy doing what you really want to do, you are at your best. And when you are at your best, your family, your clientèle, and your community get the best out of you. Truth is, there is hardly anything more selfless than the most selfish thing you can think of doing. Think Tiger Woods.

    Last but not least, when we’re limiting joy in life our income is likely to be limited also. Being insanely happy has no limits, and money based on happiness has more potential than our in-laws can stomach.

    Good luck, Tom! You’re doing the finest thing you can possibly do for an individual.

    Egbert

  2. Egbert, you’re right on my friend. Thomas Leonard’s first Law of Attraction is…Become Incredibly Selfish! Like you, he knew that when acting from our of authentic self-interest we become stronger, richer and happier. Then we are in much better position to be generous with others.

    Thanks for being all of who you are.

  3. Delightful Work – Huh?

    Is that like Aging Yuppie, Abundant Poverty or Boneless Ribs?

    The combination of Work and Delightful strikes a chord. After-all, if most of our waking hours are spent ‘at work’, wouldn’t it be grand if that work was delightful?

    Sounds good! Where can I get some? What’s stopping me? What am I afraid of?
    What obstacles have existed that blocked me from having delightful work? Looking at these in reverse order I have come up with some possibilities.

    One obstacle may have been my ‘higher’ education and the admonition of well-meaning advisors (aka – parents, teachers, coaches and clergy) to go to college. Get a good education.

    I took that advice to heart and spent seventeen years and thousands of dollars working on a couple of degrees. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the intention of those institutions of higher learning was to enable me to get a ‘good job’. Not necessarily learn anything ‘higher’ or wealth-producing. Especially not delight-producing!

    Maybe it was more accurately described as ‘hire education’.

    What about fear? The formal education prepared me for a job and trained me to be afraid simultaneously. Be afraid of failure. Be afraid of debt. Be afraid of risk. And, here’s a biggie, be afraid of what others might think of me!

    All that fear! Remember, in school we were always asked to ‘get the right answer’.
    Turns out, there is no such thing as the right answer. Unless, of course, you find the right answer for YOU.

    And the best way to find the right answer for me/you is to experiement with options until you come up with something that looks good, feels good and seems to work. i.e. it is delightful. Experimentation is all about making mistakes. Or, putting it another way, like Thomas Edison did, “… I have discovered many – 1,000’s – of ways that did not work …”

    Thus far it appears that education vs. lack of mistakes and fear vs. courage have been stopping me. A course-correction sounds pretty easy to come by. If you have any suggestions on that, I’ll be glad to listen.

    ‘Where can I get some?’ (delightful work) Guess I won’t find it in the help-wanted ads or at Monster.com will I? Just for the record, I have been working on this for a long time.
    Here’s what I am in the process of discovering. Do something that I absolutely love to do and then find an audience that is looking for that something. Charge them a fee for providing this something. Now that’s what I call Delightful Work!

    Stay tuned. Tom will undoubtedly share his unique perspective on this topic.
    Thanks Tom for creating this forum. I’m excited by the possibilities!

  4. Clem Gigliotti Jr says

    Three years ago, I would have told you that you’re full of phooey. I was so sold on the idea, instilled in me by the old-school dad who believed 60 hours of work a week was taking it easy and only playboys golfed on weekdays, that you had to be in some sort of anguish or pain in order to be considered pulling your weight, that I had no idea what life was or could truly be about. Thank God I woke up! Even still, danger lurks around every corner. Living a life in pursuit of that which truly is joyful, while also knowing that you have bills to pay, is a scary thing indeed. Too often the security of a paycheck and stability surfaces to engage us and tempt us back to a soul-less existence. Nevertheless, if we have made the right decision before, we are more apt to make it time and time again. And it’s not just the attraction of security that can be a pothole on this highway of delighful pursuit, but there are many rabbit holes and off-shoots that may appear to be in synch with that which we seek but are, in fact, nothing more than distractions that can hold our focus away from our true path. That is, after all, what Seth Godin is talking about when he tells us to quit doing those things in which we have no intention of being the best in the world, isn’t it? I will say, in a nutshell, my life is finally great. It’s not about money…it’s not about work….it’s about life. After all, the story of our life – in the end – is not our life. It’s our story.

  5. John, “Hire Education” you made me laugh; that’s a fascinating take on a cultural illusion that many still believe. How many times do we hear those who are clueless as to career direction say … “I’m thinking of going back to school”? Yikes, stop! It didn’t work the first time. Obviously I’ll be posting more on this very soon.

    You don’t need a course correction, my friend; you’re clearly on the right track with your fearless, make-frequent-mistakes attitude.
    You dedication to this pursuit inspires me.

  6. Well-said Clem. Many of us were influenced by old school parents who subscribed to this “no-pain, no-gain” idiocy. Heck, how could we possibly find pleasure using that equation? Thank goodness that many have since proven that struggle is not a prerequisite for success.

    I enjoyed pondering your provocative comments on life, work and our story. Its funny how folks keep telling a story about themselves that does not leave much room for joy in their work or their life. You’re obviously one man who has leaned to tell a better story.

  7. Tom,
    Upon reading your very inspiring post here’s my variant on this Oscar Wilde perennial:

    “I can resist everything except delightful work” 😉

    There are very few blogs where I chance upon them and read every single post from the start! Yours is simply irresistible to any warm blooded career changer.

    regards

    mark mcclure
    tokyo

    Take Actions last blog post..Be Careful What You Wish For – Start Now!

  8. tjedni horoskop says

    Every work have a good and bad characteristics.Important thing is to love your work and be patient.

Trackbacks

  1. […] ought to experience as much joy as we possibly can. Can we agree on that as a starting point? In my welcoming message I wrote: Delightful work is: amusing, attractive, captivating, clever, engaging, enjoyable, […]

  2. 43 Memorable Posts In The Blogosphere From 2008 - Spiritual Blog says:

    […] of Forgiveness for a Difficult Past at attractionmindmap.com 10 Things You are Not at PluginID Is Your Work Life Delightful? at delightfulwork.com How to Overcome Our 3 Biggest Enemies in Life at insightwriter.com 6 Steps […]

Leave a Reply to John Morlan Cancel reply

*