4 Challenges to Overcome that Leads to your Life’s Work Success

The road to your life’s work is the ongoing process of taking the best of what’s in you and expressing it fully in the outer world. It’s a never-ending journey filled with challenges and obstacles. These obstacles we call “roadblocks,” or “detours.” The challenges and their potential detours represent the inner as well as the outer terrain you must traverse in pursuit of your work. Awareness of the detours and the challenges can help you stay on course.

Challenge #1: Know who you are. The first challenge is to know who you are and why you are here on this earth. Unless you are up to this challenge, you have no chance of realizing your life’s work. You’ll be left taking a reactive rather than a creative approach to your work. The first roadblock is denial- an unwillingness to deeply examine your life and to discover your unique visions, talents, and gifts.

Challenge #2: Be yourself in this world: The second challenge is to shape your life’s work, or vocation, into a viable career role or set of careers. Unless you are up to this challenge, you may allow your creative visions to languish in the realm of might-have-beens. It is important that you select a career role that gives you the freedom to be yourself at work. The second roadblock is that of approval- of compromising your visions or values for the sake of gaining approval.

Challenge #3: Organize your efforts for maximum results. The third challenge is that of finding a vehicle (or vehicles) through which you can effectively advance your life’s work in the marketplace. Being up to this challenge means persisting until you can either find the right organization to work for, or create your own. The third roadblock, or detour, is to settle for taking what is easily available rather to persist until you get what you really want.

Challenge #4: Make the changes necessary to make it happen. The final challenge is to make the changes necessary to realize your life’s work. You’ll want to develop a plan for making the transition from what you are doing now to what you ultimately do. You’ll want to acquire the knowledge, skill, and experience you need to succeed. The final roadblock is lack of confidence in yourself, that is, in your ability to learn and remain patient through all of the tests.

And remember that:

The purpose of the whole (work) is to remove those who are living in this life from a state of wretchedness and lead them to the state of blessedness. ---Dante