Ask anyone that knows me and they know that I have a bad sense of direction. I have gotten behind the wheel to return home after an outing and have driven in the wrong direction more times than I care to remember. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention to familiar landmarks or maybe I simply was distracted by the drive.
Thank God for Waze! Waze is a GPS application that requires you to program your destination on a mobile device and it will guide you to that destination. And if, during your travels, you should make a wrong turn, it recalculates your position so that it may lead you back on course. It also alerts you to any potential dangers in the road!! If only we had a GPS for life; an instrument that would let you know that your life is off course and instruct you when you need to change directions. Well guess what? We do have that and it’s called intuition.
I have a bachelor’s degree in accounting and for many years, I was a happy accountant that enjoyed the autonomy of the work I performed. But somewhere during my journey on the road to upward mobility, my GPS told me that I needed to recalculate and change course. I no longer cared about the debits equaling the credits and I no longer cared about my employer’s bottom line. I could no longer ignore the familiar landmarks of dread and despair as I arose from my bed every morning to go to a job that I hated and I was tired of being distracted by “a good paycheck” or the fact that “I have a degree in accounting.”
What I did care about was doing work that mattered to my bottom line; work that would give me a sense of purpose and satisfaction. I listened to my GPS and course corrected and I want to encourage you to do the same. So if you spent years building a career that no longer serves you or if the plans you made at an earlier stage of your life no longer fit with the stage you are currently navigating, give yourself permission to change course.
