This is part 2 of the special series “Discover the Work You Were Born to Do”, by author Nick Williams.

By the end of this article, you will discover: 

• The characteristics of the work you were born to do.

The work you were born to do is a choice - rather than a ‘have to’. You want to do it - not just because you need the money - but because it is fulfilling and uplifting for you, and you’re enriched by doing it. But how do you know when you have found the work you were born to do? What is so exciting about it?

Here are the main characteristics that will help you to recognise the potential of the work you were born to do:

• It doesn’t feel like work in any traditional sense.
• You work for love AND money: you generate income in a joyful way.
• You contribute what you uniquely have to share.
• You experience a deep sense of fulfilment.
• You develop an equality of head and heart.

… You keep un-wrapping your gifts - growing and evolving into who you were born to be - and becoming a unique, whole and individuated person in the process.

Let’s look at these ideas in a little more detail:

It doesn’t feel like work
 
The work you were born to do will have joy in it; you’ll experience inspiration and it will flow from you. You’ll find it intrinsically fulfilling and nourishing. So in the traditional sense, it won’t always feel like work because you enjoy it so much!

It can even feel like “cheating”. I hear many people say, ‘I’d do this for free’ - and at times - the experience of the work we were born to do can be so meaningful that we may even think, ‘I would pay to do this!’

You work for love and money, and you earn money and generate income
 
Although the true purpose of work is contribution, working for love doesn’t mean we have to live in poverty. The reality is quite the opposite. Living the work we were born to do opens the doors to a life of abundance and prosperity. Most people think they can earn money but only by sacrificing happiness and meaning in their lives - yet we CAN have both.

The reason why more people don’t work for both love & money - is not due to lack of opportunity - but because they lack the practical skills to achieve it, and because their past conditioning teaches them it’s impossible anyway.

When we love what we do, we infuse our work with that love, and we become attractive! That’s why love is the best marketing tool around: it pulls to us what we need, including money, precisely because it is so attractive.

You contribute your unique gifts and talents and experience deep fulfilment

Fulfilment comes partly from what we get from our work, but the greater part comes from what we give through it. Our work can be a gift and a blessing to our wider community.

We each have particular talents and are able to do things in a uniquely creative way: no one can do what you do in the way you do it; you are a special corner of creation!

When we give our unique contribution, the world is nudged one tiny step closer to Heaven. If our work is important to us and contributes to the world, it will have ripple effects that we can hardly imagine.

You develop an equality of head and heart
 
This is essential to creating success and having that success seem meaningful because our heart is our connective tissue to life, and where we will find our direction.

The work we were born to do resides in (and emerges from) the heart of our being - not from our personality. Our heart is where our inspiration and personal magic reside, where our love and passion flow from, where our deep joy and fulfilment are felt, where tender emotions and vulnerability are found.

In contrast, our head is clear about how to do things, what techniques and strategies to use, what action to take, how to create income, become more skilful, learn new things, and how to make progress in practical ways.

Both sets of faculties make up our full repertoire of skills. You’ll find mysteries at work as well as logic. Action initiates magic, and magic inspires more action. You can be tender-hearted and still be tough minded.

You keep un-wrapping your gifts

You too possess particular gifts that were meant to be unwrapped and shared with the world - an act that’s fulfilling for you and uplifting for others. Some you may have opened already; others remained wrapped up. The work we were born to do is about discovering and unwrapping our own particular gifts, not just the once but again and again.

Our deeper Self is like a tissue box: as we pull out one layer, we’ll find there is another underneath and more still beneath that. This is how we are. As we discover the many layers within us, we will gradually shed the conditioning we’ve grown up with and live in ways that are true to our core values and beliefs.

We will keep on giving birth to more and more of ourselves. So don’t take your own gifts to the grave with you! Please share them with us all and become who you were born to be!

About the Author:

Through his books, and live talks, workshops, personal coaching and on-line learning programmes, Nick has inspired tens of thousands of people to discover the work they were born to do. Nick then helps them to live that either through employment or by being entrepreneurial through their own business. He also helps them develop the wisdom and courage to harness their inspiration, talent and their fears as forces for growth and creativity.

Website: www.nick-williams.com
Blog: http://nickwilliams100.typepad.com

Source: www.askacoach.com

The Internal Business Process Perspective

This perspective refers to internal business processes. Metrics based on this perspective allow the leaders of the organisation to know how well their business is running and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements. These processes need to be designed and measured with the customer experience in mind.

For example, how to collect and manage customer feedback is a critical process for any business. This isn’t just about how to address complaints well, but on a bigger scale, outline management responsibility in a measurable way. How does customer feedback influence future strategic direction of the business and the design of its products and services?

In addition to the strategic managment process, two kinds of business processes may be identified: a) mission-oriented processes, and b) support processes. Mission-oriented processes are the special functions related directly to the higher-level and customer-centric strategic objectives of the organisation. The support processes are more repetitive in nature, and hence easier to measure and benchmark using generic metrics.

Examples of support metrics could include on-time delivery of the product, regular internal communications like newsletters being consistently produced as agreed, or responding to all potential/existing client queries within 24 hours.

Coaching Exercises

Here are some questions to ask about your business. There are many more to be asked, so this is just a starting point.

1. What are your high-level internal business process objectives?
2. When do they have to be achieved by?
3. Is there a particular order in which they need to be achieved?
4. How are you evaluating these as important?
5. How are you measuring these objectives? In other words, what data and reporting mechanisms do you have in place?
6. What strategies do you have in place already, or which could be designed, to address each of the objectives? In some cases, there may be more than one strategy required to achieve the desired outocome?
7. For each strategy, do you have any dates identified to achieve them?
8. For each strategy, what are the measurement criteria and how specifically are you going to collect the data?
9. Who is responsible for each strategy? What reporting do you need from them?
10. For each objective, and for all stakeholders related tot he achievement of that objective, what learning and development objectives must also be met?
11. For each objective, what customer objectives must also be met? These may link to the financial objectives as well.
12. If you have already been measuring certain internal business process objectives, and have been able to identify that one or more of them is underperforming, which related financial, customer, internal business process and/or learning and development objectives are also underperforming? This information may help you in identifying root cause of the problem, and from this awareness, you can explore new choices and actions to implement to correct the issue.
13. If you’re unsure about the objectives, the data, causes of problems or opportunities to improve the situation, whom wihin or outside of your organisation could you be turning to for assistance? This is potentially part of your own learning and development.

As always, if you need any further personal support in response to any of these coaching exercies, please consider using the askacoach.com service.

All the best,

Noel

Noel Posus - Master Coach
www.askacoach.com