Your Career Is A Developmental Container

A perfectly designed one...

This newsletter is sponsored by Conscious Talent - where companies and leaders who value both professional excellence and inner work discover each other.

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It’s been about a month since I’ve been back in the game running a business.

One theme I have noticed throughout my consciousness journey is how my work circumstances support my spiritual journey. This isn’t just about giving me the lessons I need to learn, but also creating a supportive container for the growth to occur.

When I went through my first hard core dark night of the soul, I was fortunate enough to have co-founders to keep the business steady. If I’m being honest, I was pretty unproductive during this time. Each morning I’d try to will myself to former levels of output, but it felt like there was no gas in the tank. If I had worked at someone else’s company I would have probably been canned.

Thankfully my wonderful business partners Dan and Greg supported me. They understood what I was going through and were cool with me contributing the best I could while I navigated the tumultuous challenges I was going through.

When I finally crawled out of this, my next chapter was learning how to create from a place of healthy ambition. After decades of speed racing up the achievement ladder, this felt like relearning how to walk. I had to relearn basic things like how to post on social media without feeling confused or icky.

Embodying this new way of building things was probably a 2 year odyssey. A decent chunk of this period occurred during my time at Salesforce after we sold our company. Though post-acquisition life is often called “vesting in peace,” I wouldn’t exactly call this peaceful. Learning how to create from inspiration, love, and joy as my primary mode was often scary as shit. However, the grace provided by my circumstance created spaciousness for experimentation.

Last week I found myself researching the latest technologies in the recruiting space because these are the waters I’m swimming in with Conscious Talent. A part of me was looking at these high flying venture companies thinking:

“I know how to do this. I could probably be building one of these high growth AI plays right now.”

The thing is that building a venture backed business wouldn’t be very supportive for me right now. A few months ago, I entered another dark night period. I’ve been getting my butt kicked physically, emotionally, and mentally - all while parenting a two year old and starting a new business. It has been grueling. I’m here for it though.

There are so many unconscious saboteurs coming into view that are unwinding. It feels like I am taking off yet another weighted vest I didn’t know I was wearing.

Moving through this has required a lot of time, attention, and self-care. Conscious Talent is the perfect type of business for this period of life. I haven’t raised money from other people, I’m my own boss, and I can take things at a pace that honors what I’m going through.

Yet again, somehow my career circumstances are totally aligned to the needs of my spiritual development.

I’m not the only person where I’ve seen this clear pattern. I remember meeting a newer friend who was going through a debilitating spiritual awakening. Every time he tried to sit down to work, he felt so much anxiety or fatigue he had to stop. Coincidentally, he had started a small app just before this started that was generating passive income. So although he could only work minimally, his needs were provided for so that he could navigate his awakening.

This clear pattern begs the question - do we choose these circumstances, or are they designed for us?

Here’s what I have come to believe.

More so than getting us all the little things we want, our careers and life circumstances are first and foremost in service of our consciousness evolution once we accept the call. The call is our soul’s way of bringing us back into alignment with what we came here to do. We can fight and resist it, but eventually the difficulty in our lives can become so great, that we realize it’s much easier to start working with this force instead of resisting it.

On the surface level, it’s not going to look like everyone’s career is a perfectly designed container to support spiritual development. How come joe blow is killing it, making everything look easy without ever doing an ounce of spiritual work?

Well, we all have different karma and intentions for our lives. When you’re destined for a lifetime of consciousness work, it’s unlikely to be perfect smooth sailing. The friction is required for growth.

My recent podcast guest George Boyd has an eloquent way of discussing this deeper context that our careers play within.

He believes there are multiple types of purpose. Your intrinsic soul purpose is your spiritual destiny. This is how your soul came here to evolve. This purpose encompasses the lessons and spiritual evolution your lifetime is meant to fulfill. Then there is your soul expression. This is how you seek to contribute.

So you have an evolutionary purpose and a contributory purpose.

Our culture tends to skip over the first part and evaluate everything in terms of what we’re doing in the world. Because we miss the backdrop that these experiences are operating within a container designed for soul development, we fail to see the greater meaning of why things may be happening the way they are.

The other challenge with this perspective, assuming you are on a consciousness path, is that your contribution tends to be directly tied to your personal evolution. Without fulfilling the spiritual growth of your soul’s intention, you simply can’t contribute in the same way. This is why life starts to become difficult until you face the lessons it is calling you towards.

As you meet these experiences and work on your life at the consciousness level, you start to reach greater expressive potentials. All of a sudden you can do things you couldn’t before. Life organizes in new ways. The relationship between the intrinsic soul purpose and expression becomes more visible as awareness expands.

When we acknowledge this dynamic, our career is repositioned as a developmental container. Your work is the perfect arena for you to expand your awareness about yourself and the world around you. Through its benevolence, life’s intelligence designs the perfect circumstances to provide you what you need to support your growth. This not only includes the reflections unfolding in the world around you, but also the supportive environment needed to face them. TLDR you are held, whether you know it or not. This relationship and how to navigate it is the subject of my new book Conscious Accomplishment coming out soon.

As we grow, the shape of containers may change. At one point, I needed a venture backed startup. At another point, I needed a place of rest and relearning. Now it seems like my journey is served by a deeply aligned lifestyle business.

Aren’t we actively choosing these things? I think we do have free will. But as you develop, the best use of free will becomes moving into alignment. And alignment is not something mediated by the intellect. It comes from a much deeper place. So yes, you are choosing to follow a path, but the destination is defined by your soul (true Self.)

I can imagine there are people reading this feeling that this doesn’t add up in their life. Maybe they’re struggling financially while going through an inner work crucible. How come the universe hasn’t given me favorable circumstances while I go through this?

Here’s the thing - I never thought my circumstances were that favorable while I was going through it. During my first dark night of the soul, all I wanted to do was be productive and carry on as usual, but I wasn’t able to. But through this experience, I learned to redefine my relationship with my self-worth. I’m not sure I would have been able to without it.

Often the perfection of the circumstantial design for your growth in terms of events and support structures, only becomes visible in hindsight. The more times you go through this, the greater the realization of this dynamic is.

Why is understanding this dynamic useful? One of the main reasons is it can create a sense of ease and appreciation. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. This really is happening for you, perfectly. So just settle in.

With this knowledge, the questions becomes whether you will meet your circumstance effectively?

Here’s the invitation I’d leave you with.

How is your current situation in service of your consciousness evolution - not just the lessons, but the container you are meeting them from? Can you see the benevolence in the design?

Holding these inquiries can often shift you towards appreciation, instead of focusing on all the things you wish were different.

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