“They don’t need to pay you more, because they know you are trapped.”
That was the moment I knew I had to leave finance.
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Since I was little, I had always wanted to work on Wall St.
For a middle-class kid living in a sleepy little city, Wall St. was all promise. It was glamorous, exciting, interesting, and pure.
I could indulge my love of economics and market, and advance on my merits, all while keeping myself in the manner to which I was determined to become accustomed.
Or not.
To quote an earlier post,
Michael Lewis, in “Liar’s Poker,” depicts a world of self-serving, corrupt, arrogant, and hierarchical amorality at the heart of Wall St. It is the residue of crony-ist grift, and I lasted three years, start to finish, from graduation to quitting in disgust lest the ooze reach my desk. I was also terrible at it, because it wasn’t the work I was meant to do at all. I was lying to myself.
But it was the day that one of my senior managers, an affable and perfectly-coiffured Ken doll whom one of my colleagues described as “a political monster,” explained to me, in fewer words than I will use, that compensation in the financial world is based on leverage and lackey-ism, that I made the decision.
In essence, he said: if you are willing to compromise yourself and play the game, to grovel and stay small until it’s to someone else’s advantage to advance you, then your reward will be that they will move the carrot a little closer.
But they want you to know they don’t need you, and if they believe you need them, they will make sure you know they know.
(I watched this play out cruelly in the analyst pool, when one of my colleagues’ wife was very ill, and the managers made sure he knew that they knew how badly he needed the job. I couldn’t figure out whom I had less respect for - him for taking the abuse, or them.)
So when Bob, we’ll call him, said, “they know you bought a house so they’ll never give you a raise,” I cried, and then I pulled myself together, looked in the mirror, and decided that there was no prize in life worth being treated like that.
And quit. Without a backup plan.
(What blows my mind, even now, is that there were those in my life who thought I was making a mistake - imagine loving someone and still thinking she should tolerate such an environment?)
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But also:
A couple decades later, not too many years ago, I was sitting on the couch feeling angry that I hadn’t created a cushy life of material luxury. I was struggling to get traction in my work, feeling cramped and trapped, while other people seemed to have second homes and vacation plans and cars with fewer than 150,000 miles on them. My frequent-flyer-points-to-odometer ratio felt all wrong.
I couldn’t see the way forward; I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t understand that my successes up to that point were the road map, because it didn’t look like all the business plans and coaching models and self-help books.
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The Navigating Your Healing Journey program of Shamanic coaching was something I created for myself, without realizing it. The first iteration of my professional life had been premised on the unexamined assumption that I had to choose between a life I loved, or material success.
And because of that, I spent a long time working towards the wrong kind of life, and it took a series of apparent catastrophes and hard choices to cut loose those anchors, and then wallow in the doldrums.
There have been many passages in the dark.
But I make a living now, a real living, doing work that I love, on my purpose, on my path. It’s not always easy, because it’s a one-woman show a lot of the time. But it’s always right.
I was always richer than I thought. This was waiting for me; I just needed to step into it. And the next place, and the next; they are already there, waiting. Life keeps unfolding, keeps making sense, keeps getting easier, even when it’s harder.
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You are richer than you think. You have resources at your disposal that you are not tapping into, and you are carrying around baggage you don’t need.
Everything that hurts, and everything that’s hard, right now, is the information you need to get on your way. I can help you decode that.
I can find the remedy that starts the journey, and I can help you find the heading, and I can help you navigate the course.
But you have to take the first step. Schedule that Embark Call. It’s free, and if you click that link before midnight on Thursday, February 29 (lucky that it’s a leap year!), you are guaranteed a 20% discount on this work.
It’s changed my life, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It’s given me access to the resources that were waiting for my claim. I’m offering it to you: the Irresistable Invitation to Surrender. Will you accept?