How engaged in your work are you?
Are you part of the 33% or the 67%?
According to an article on HRDive, “employee engagement in the U.S. and Canada continues to slump, with 33% of employees saying they were engaged with their jobs.”1
If you aren’t fulling engaged in your work, I must ask, “Do you work to live or live to work?”
Define The Life You Want
You can have the life you want AND do work you enjoy and are engaged in. The question is, do you want that bad enough?
How do you define the life that you want to have?
This is a personal question. It deserves attention.
If you go through life without a purpose, you might end up like the patients nurse Bronnie Ware got to know. If you don’t know who Bronnie is, she is the nurse who wrote the best-selling book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”*.
The top regret of the dying that Bronnie heard was, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Does that sound like you? If it does, you can decide TODAY to make a change.
Define what your true self and true life look like.
Download the workbook to help identify what you want in the 9 areas of life.
- Money or Material
- Self-Confidence
- Adventurous
- Spiritual
- Career-Related
- Lifestyle
- Health (Physical & Mental)
- Social
- Family
Creating The Life You Want
In America, most of us have met the first two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Physiological and Safety).
After meeting those basic needs, we long to move up the hierarchy to meet our Psychological and Self-fulfillment needs.
We do that by creating the life we want to live.
How do we create that life? We look at what we’ve identified as being important(see the above-mentioned workbook) and by trying to come up with a plan to live it out.
Paying For The Life You Want
We need a way to fund our lives; the current one we are living or the ideal one we hope for and want.
Once you have defined what is important to you, figure out how much money do you need to accomplish in your life.
Do you know how much money you need to live on? Most people don’t have a clue. Why? They don’t track their money.
Most American consumers tend to have more month left at the end of their money.
Look at what you need to live the life you want. Do you need that big house? That expensive monthly car payment? Do you need to go on a big two-week vacation every year?
If you haven’t tried budgeting, here is a budget template (PDF and XLS) you can download.
Enter your information into the template and see where you can save some money.
My Story
When I was considering taking a job closer to home 18 years ago, I was trying to figure out how I could afford to take a $3000 pay CUT.
When I factored in having a 5-mile round trip commute vs. a 72-mile commute, that 67 miles over the year meant close to 15,000 fewer miles on the car. At 30 MPG, that was 500 fewer gallons of gas. At $2 a gallon, that was a saving of $1000. In 2022 the gas savings alone would have covered the pay cut.
Factoring in the lower cost of car insurance, less “wear and tear” on the car, oil changes, etc. Just in commuting costs, I saved $1600 back then.
To find out how to save the remaining $1400, we looked at our dining out (since I was 2.5 miles from home, I ate lunch at home more than going out). We also looked at me growing my side web design business since I “found” 10-12 hours a week by not sitting in rush hour.
After being at that job for three years, I quadrupled my commute to 20 miles but took a job that helped me advance (and paid a lot more). Then in July 2012, I went to work for myself.
I did not jump into the life I have now. I planned to get there. I saved and saved to make sure that my family and I had the resources to live the lifestyle we wanted.
How can you create work that honors what you want out of life? What is the cost to have that life? What is the cost of NOT having that life?
Can You Do It?
The simple answer is YES. You can create the life you want to have.
Will it be easy? No.
Nothing in life that is worth it comes without a price. Usually, that price requires some blood, sweat, and tears.
I’ve done it, and you can too.
Need a mentor to help you? I’m here to help.
Resources
48 Days to the Work You Love* by Dan Miller is an excellent book if you are looking to move from your existing job into another job.
If you are looking to see if becoming self-employed or starting your own business is for you, check out Dan Miller’s book: “No More Dreaded Mondays.”
If you need help with your finances, Dave Ramsey’s materials have helped me tremendously. The Total Money Makeover* and The Total Money Makeover Workbook*
*This page contains affiliate links meaning I may earn a commission if you use those links. I only recommend items I truly believe in.
SOURCES: HRDive
Thanks, Eric, for passing on what you’ve learnt in your journey to creating the life you want. Thanks for the included resources too! Encouragement to stay on track in my creating in my life 🙂
Colleen, you’re welcome. We all have experiences that we can share. I would rather learn some things through other people’s experiences, rather than going through it myself.