Work, Service & Money - come explore this Trinity with me

Where shall I start, oh how shall I start

These topics are all so close to my heart!

I am definitely not someone with any form of writer's block - rather writing is the primary medium I have used since I was a child to communicate with my own soul. 

In fact, when I had been severely depressed at one point in my life, a dear mentor who knew me well gave me a simple advice - don't go anywhere without a pen and notebook. I took it to heart - and I credit much of my miraculous recovery to that one simple piece of advice. I just kept writing my heart out - I kept writing my thoughts out - and slowly and surely I began to script, author and craft a beautiful and fulfilling life for myself.

Now back to the topic of this essay - why am I confused about where to start writing? Because I am fiercely passionate about each of the four subjects that I would like to weave together in this conversation - Work, Service, Money and God. 

I fear that I will not do justice to the sacredness and complexity of the topic at hand. I love words, but my skill with words might not be enough to communicate what I want to on this particular intersection of subjects. 

I fear that I will be misunderstood and judged (which frankly I can live with), but I fear even more that the essence of what I wish to convey will be misunderstood and judged. 

What if I land up doing a disservice to the topic instead of being able to communicate with clarity the beautiful harmony of this trinity and the possibilities it can open for you?

So even as I am writing this now, I am beginning to make an alternate plan - a plan to have this conversation as an interactive session instead of an essay. I think I will feel better if I can interact live with you and actually engage with your questions and clarify doubts as they arise. 

So I will include a signup form for a live interactive call at the bottom of this newsletter, but since I have started typing (and you have started reading), let's actually turn this into a newsletter worth reading. 

Let me tell you a story - the story about what has inspired this ‘to be essay’ which has now turned into a live call 🙂.

It is a very recent story from last weekend's career crafting retreat - a retreat where I landed up conducting an unplanned session on this very topic with a group of amazingly soulful people.

So the backstory of the retreat is that I help people craft their careers using an inside-out approach. As a coach and facilitator my mission is to invite and empower people to reclaim their inner sovereignty and operate from that foundation to create outer excellence. 

What is inner sovereignty? It is about being the supreme authority, the main driver, the lead artist, and the chief craftsman of your own inner territory. The territory comprising of your thoughts, feelings, mindsets, choice muscles, inner programming, mental models and belief systems. 

Since most of our inner worlds is filled with a lot of garbage and nonsense from the past - conditioning and programming that our brains were subjected to which we did not consciously choose, our inner work journey has a huge component of ‘lets call out the lies that our brains have bought into’ and ‘clear out that garbage’ so we can begin to operate with more conscious choosing and with more degrees of freedom.

Hence in my career crafting retreats we have deep sessions where we examine and redefine for ourselves the basic mental models related to concepts that are closely related to our career - like work, success, money, failure etc. 

In last weekend's retreat we had an amazing mix of participants, people with several years of experience - each with rich, soulful, and diverse journeys. We had senior leaders from multinational corporations, we had academics with PhDs, we had changemakers running charities, we had entrepreneurs, and we had leaders working in NGOs. 

It was an eclectic mix of people -  a mix that I believe had been brought together for a purpose (actually more than one purpose). I was amazed at the synchronicity of the connections and experiences and how the experience and lived reality of one participant was exactly what was needed to either challenge another person in the group, or gift to them a perspective that was missing in their own worldview (and so far lived experience). 

We had one session dedicated to healing our relationship with money, and one of the questions in my worksheet was - “ How do you see the connection between work, service and money ?”. When we came to this question - the discussion took on a life of its own and so many diverse beliefs started surfacing. 

Beliefs like - 

“If I receive payment for my work it is not true service”

“Service means I have to put the cause above me”

“Service means I have to sacrifice my own needs”

“Corporations are greedy”

“A charity cannot be a business” 

“Service has to be related to self-sacrifice”

.....and more. 

I led the group to challenge these beliefs and we did our usual work of busting lies and myths that our brains might have been conditioned with so far. I was in fact quite happy with the progress. But there was more to come...

Later at night when we ended our formal sessions at 10 pm (yes we do work till late in our retreats - hard inner work but engaging and fruitful hard work), some of the participants still stayed back and continued discussing on a new topic. 

That discussion had many multidimensional threads to it but the essence of it was, ‘But where is God in all this?” - I stayed on and listened to some of it and then retired for the night. A part of me really wanted to jump right in - but it had been a long day and I usually don't use the word ‘God’ in any of my workshops. 

I always hold God in my heart with utmost love and respect and SHE comes along with me to teach and facilitate, but I don't really acknowledge her in public you see. I am worried SHE (and my beautiful relationship with her) will not be understood properly.

But on that night, a part of me was feeling sad. My role was to help my participants craft their own work life and careers with beauty and freedom and joy and contentment and love. If their own relationship with their divine could be brought into their journey to make it more beautiful, graceful, meaningful, powerful and resilient - then why not just bring ‘GOD’ into the equation as well?

I don't believe in propagating or canvassing for any particular religion or conceptualization of God. Rather, I myself have deeply benefitted from engaging with Gods who came from three different religions. I love them all, and I hold them all close, as I hold close the God of Nature and Earth herself. 

What I do know is that my relationship with God(s) is a huge contributor in my own career crafting process. So if I could help facilitate my participants to include their own Gods into the way they looked at their career crafting journey, then should I not do it?

I slept with that dilemma - and then I got up at 4 am and started drawing a beautiful model that enabled me to bring this all together for the participants in a cohesive way during the next day. They loved it as well and even asked to take a picture of it because they said that it brought them a lot of clarity. The drawing itself is sketchy, I don't believe it does justice to the subject - yet, so I will not share it here, but I will attempt to explain it as best as I can when we meet in the live call.  

At the center of the model is something I call a ‘Purpose Based Entity (PBE)’. Beside it, as the main (or one of the main) creators or nurturers of the PBE is YOU. All the other elements of this model are organized around these two central characters and we then map out the flow of abundance, energy, resources, love and appreciation in the myriad forms that it can occur.

The purpose of the entity can be helping puppies, saving wildlife, educating underprivileged, educating privileged, educating your own children, providing homes for others, nurturing a home for your family, providing healthcare for masses, or nurturing your own health. 

We don't judge the purpose based on the number of people it seeks to impact. We don't judge you either for being willing to care, nurture and look after yourself. 

We don't judge working towards your organization's purpose, we don't judge capitalistic organizations for their capitalistic purposes. This was one of the big big breakthroughs of this model for me. As a group we could finally shatter the paradigm and belief of judging ‘organizations’ as ‘greedy’. We could also stop judging ourselves or others for working as part of profit making organizations.

We let go of the judgment that spending your time to save puppies is holier or above spending your time working in a corporate organization. How? Because someone else is working behind your back to feed and clothe you while you work with the puppies. And if your ‘charity’ accepts donations, then some pure souls are busy investing their time working at a ‘corporate organization’ so that they can donate their excess money to your charity. Or they then pay tax to the government which is then funding your charity.

We don't deny the possibility that you could theoretically bring in more attention to a cause you are championing by sacrificing yourself or even setting yourself ablaze for the ‘cause’. However, we acknowledge that this might not always be the best that you can do for your cause. There might be other ways of furthering your cause in an even better way. 

We open to the idea that if you are the leader (or a key contributor and resource) of your Purpose Based Entity (PBE), you can usually serve it better if you take good care and nurture and nourish yourself well instead of being a burnt-out, adrenaline-fatigued, tired rag doll. 

We take a holistic look at the various facets of abundance and look at money as just one facet - but a useful and practical one that reduces uncertainty (and the associated stress that insecurity can cause) and enables and lubricates transactions and exchanges of resources in a timely and organized manner. We look at all the ways money can help you and your PBE directly, help you help your PBE and also help your PBE help you. 

We release our judgments about money, and open up to play with her as yet another vehicle of abundance and a facilitator of creation in our universe. 

And it goes on......there is more to it ...much more......

I told you, I could not write this as a linear essay - at least as of yet! :-).

So wrapping up the writing part now and we can take this further on a live interactive call. Register your interest here https://forms.gle/XghukC7KkWQSA5UD7 and I will get back to you with a time / date and zoom link to join in live.

And remember BYOG! - Bring Your Own God!

If you are an atheist - you are most welcome too.  The trinity of ‘Work - Service - Money’ can stand without a concept of God as well, but if you already have a beautiful empowering conceptualization of God that is helping you in your life then please don't leave her out. Do bring HER or HIM or IT with you!

And meanwhile here are some pictures from our weekend retreat - the one that seeded the idea for this post and call. And before I say bye, let me share one more miracle that happened in this retreat. An amazing synchronicity arranged by the universe. The 4 legged cutie you see in the picture is a doggie I knew in IIMB campus (where I live). Sometime back we had assumed that he had got lost or chased out of campus because we didn't see him around anymore. Turns out he was adopted by a family who live outside campus. They had come to the resort to specifically celebrate the doggie's first year anniversary of homecoming. And I just got so lucky that I came to the same retreat on the same weekend to conduct my workshop. 

Register here for the live interactive call - https://forms.gle/XghukC7KkWQSA5UD7 . 

Do add contact@craftingourlives.com as a contact so that our email with the call details does not get lost in your spam folder.