I could do anything… Part III

“Being negative is often the best way to sneak around a stubborn strain of resistance that’s blocking your imagination. Now you have invented a perfect nightmare of a job, which will show you exactly how to design a heavenly one! This nightmare job will be the map that guides you straight to your deepest wishes and needs, those wishes and needs you thought you couldn’t remember. Let me show you how:

Take every detail of your Job from Hell – the hours, the activities, the environment, the attitudes of coworkers, even the weather, and especially the feelings you’re having – and reverse them exactly. Find their exact opposites. If you said that in your Job from Hell you’re working with a spoiled celebrity, change her to a wise, considerate, obscure philosopher. If you said that you’re commuting, change it to ‘I work out of my own home.’ Get the idea? Then pick up the pencil.

Take your job from Hell, and write down the exact reverse of it on a blank piece of paper. If you’re version of Hell equals no time off, try ‘I only work six months a year.’ If your Job from Hell has you isolated in a desert trailer court, put yourself in the middle of London or Paris and go dancing and eat great food. If you hate typing and filing, figure out what would be a wonderful contrast.

You see, you’ve done much more than let off a little steam. You’ve exposed what is most important to you, by drawing up the negative and then printing it, like a photograph, to see its opposite! There it is; you’ve created a picture that proves you know more about what you want than you ever realized. Regardless of whether you started with a positive image or negative one, you now have a picture of a dream job.”


Shared from Barbara Sher's "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What it Was"