Do Work, Money and Passion Mix? Part 1

DOWNLOAD THE MP3 | LISTEN ON iTUNES

Doctor Neha: Hi and welcome everybody. Today our special guest is Christin. She’s a brave soul willing to ask her communication questions, so hopefully you can get some nuggets of learning too. Welcome, Christin.

Christin: Thank you. It has been a pleasure working with you.

Doctor Neha: I’m honored to have you. What have you been thinking about?

Christin: In doing work with you, I really enjoy it. It inspires me, it feeds my soul and it energizes me. It takes me to another place that I truly enjoy. So when we talk about working professionally from a place of inspiration versus something that drains you, how do you reconcile that passion that you have—that love that almost comes naturally to want to learn more about something—vs. work where you feel as though you’ve only done something that will provide an income for you or stability for your family?

Doctor Neha: Such a great question. What you’re saying is, is it possible to come from inspiration, not obligation, and make good money?

Christin: Absolutely.

Doctor Neha: The short answer is yes. You know, I started my career as a mechanical and biomedical engineer. I worked at Motorola for a year and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t have enough people contact. I found myself always wanting looking for a meeting—and the engineers don’t like meetings. And so I found myself as one of those atypical engineers. I started to realize I was craving human contact. I love solving complex problems, but I needed it to be about people. So the natural next step was to go to medical school, and now I’m solving complex problems with people.

What I realized when I started doing that was I’m a root cause kind of person. So sometimes in an acute situation—someone got in an accident and their bones need to be reset because they’re broken, taking out an appendix is the right thing to do or antibiotics are exactly what someone needs for pneumonia—everything’s occurring on a physical level. I also got really clear that there were times when things weren’t happening on a physical level, but we ignored them for so long that they became physical. That’s when people would come in with recurring headaches, insomnia, anxiety, panic, depression, a lot of ailments that sometimes can be physical, but a majority of the time aren’t solved on that level. And you know it, because your headache is not an Advil deficiency. But that’s how we treat it, right? So when I started seeing this gap about how people had chronic disease and they would keep coming in over and over again, I realized it didn’t feel satisfying to me to only address the physical level. I wanted to also understand how their mental, emotional, social, spiritual level connected to how they felt physically.

Now, work is something that takes a lot of your time, your day, your energy and money. Money is just an exchange of energy. So how do you find your passion? What I would tell you is to figure out yourself first. So what would heal you? For me, I had a really hard time communicating, even when I was little. So I was bullied. I had all sorts of situations where I didn’t feel like I could speak up. So I kept silent. I would just shut down and be quiet. But doing that over a long period of time is really toxic for my physical self. I developed thyroid issues, not surprisingly in my throat. I felt heavy and low energy a lot of the time. I felt anxious if anybody wanted to have a conversation that I thought might blow up.

So I realized that what would heal me is the ability to communicate, then the next step was how can I use that thing that heals me to serve we, to serve others. I started to see that my patients were really relieved and helped and came off their medications once they understood where they were blocked. And where the origin of their stress was. So that was the heal me first, then serve we and then impact world. Every day I wake up and believe that makes a difference. I mean I do all these videos and try to help people, putting them out in the universe hoping that it can help someone. So when you believe that your work doesn’t feel like work anymore, it feels like it rejuvenates me while it serves we and connects me and changes the world—then the world becomes closer and closer to the world I want to live in.

Now, the part about money goes down to self worth. So once you heal yourself and you believe you have something to share with other people, it’s about asking yourself about your relationship to money and what you learned about it when you were young, what your parents taught you about it, what your community taught you about it. If you think it’s bad, you won’t ever want to take money.

If you believe money is an exchange of energy and you always feel that you’re under-promising and over-delivering, that whatever you’ve told someone you’re willing to give them, you give that and more, then you feel good about it when they pay you. Personally, I get paid well to do what I do and I feel good about it because I feel valued and I feel that the companies that hire me are getting even more than they ever thought possible. So it feels like a win-win. And it makes me believe in myself even more because then I can redirect whatever additional money I have to creating more products and reaching more people. So when I create videos and I put them out, it runs me a few thousand dollars a month to do it. That’s just service work. That’s just anyone who wants to can go get hundreds of videos. I love doing it, but I also need to have the reality of funding it.

So the question for you is “what would heal me, serve we and impact the world?” The way you figure it out is by telling me a time in your life when you felt that something you did or said, or an interaction with someone, sharing something, accomplishing something mattered. What mattered to you? Describe one experience.

Christin: Hmm. Nothing comes to mind at this moment, but it’s whenever I felt as though I’ve had a good connection and a person was able to move from one place to the next. So when I first came to this new company I wanted that touch with people and the relationship. No one’s asking me out to coffee for a meeting to get to know me. So I reached out to everyone else and said, “Can I get to know you?” So it was that interaction I was looking for. And to really look at our concerns, our goals, our objectives in a collaborative method. So I look back on my past work environments, and when we worked with medical students, it was always great to be able to have an exchange with them where it was impactful. It either solidified their career path, impacted their career path and informed their judgment, or gave them a long-term perspective on their life. That’s when I really felt an exchange. But it wasn’t necessarily because of the industry or the contact, it was because there was an exchange between that person and myself.

Doctor Neha: All right, so I got a lot of information from that. Thank you for sharing. So it really sounds like your currency is people and not just small talk, but deep and meaningful connection. You care about unifying, bringing people together, not dividing them, not only with each other, but on what matters to them personally. So in this part, your challenge in healing me is to be that woman in the world who gets good money from doing what she loves as a role model to other people that this is possible. That’s number one. Number two feels more about mentoring, motherhood, coaching, leading. By the quality of conversations, there’s an alchemy you want to have happen with you and another and that re-energizes you.

Christin: Yes.

Doctor Neha: Have you ever done coaches coaching, training or anything around psychology, coaches training?

Christin: With someone else? I had a life coach.

Doctor Neha: Was that a good experience?

Christin: Yes, oh yes it was. And I’ve had a couple people say, listen, why don’t you go into life coaching? It’s been a suggestion from other people.

Doctor Neha: So it’s really about tapping into what matters to you. With those conversations, you were really clear. It wasn’t that they were med students; it was that they were humans at a place in their lives when they needed guidance, help, and someone to bounce things off of. So there are different ways to do it. And as you start to tune in to this, follow the crumbs. Anything that lights your heart up, sign up for that six-week course, that experience, that training. Ask for opportunities. You know, one of the things you just asked me, “How are you going to expand your team?” You know, that’s exactly it. When you resonate with something, be bold and ask questions. Notice what lights up your heart because that’s going to heal me so that you can serve we so that you will impact the world. So are you a mom?

Christin: I am a mom to three teenagers.

Doctor Neha: Oh my, talk about insane opportunity there. In that regard, when they’re teenagers, sometimes I think the best strategy is to ask yourself how they could inform you. Teenagers need boundaries, but they don’t want it from their parents. They actually would love it from like an aunt or a friend of mine—not directly from their parent. Of course I’m tapping back into my inner teenager. Is that accurate?

Christin: Yes, that’s accurate.

Doctor Neha: I think the best thing to do with teens is to surround them with people whom you admire, that you want them talking to. And then on your own path it’s about surrounding yourself with the coaches and the community that is doing what you love and then figuring out what it’s going to take to get you there. So was this helpful?

Christin: Absolutely.

Doctor Neha: So what are your takeaways?

Christin: My takeaways are to do with what’s been coming naturally to me. It is natural for me to sign up for different courses. And when I get offered different opportunities, I take advantage of those and step in and love the work, but I’ll go the next step and actually raise my hand and say, “How can I be involved and how can I be on the path?” Because it was natural to say, “Hey, Neha, what are you doing with your team? How can I be a part of it?” And whether that’s in the brainstorming of it, the forming of it, the process part of it, I do love the content. So those are my takeaways. To being my natural bold self.

Doctor Neha: Well, I will tell you there’s something called community that’s coming and no one’s really modeling it yet. Many of the people I work with are asking me if I would be interested in connecting everyone to each other. And I thought, why not? Anyone who’s on this path of wanting to know themselves better and learn about themselves, what a great group of people to put together—accountable, clear, curious, good listeners who have grace for themselves and each other—I’m in.

For you out there who might not fully believe that you can make good money and do what you love, we hope that today we’ve dispelled that myth for you because it’s all about healing me, then using that to serve we. How does that help other people? Once I master the thing that I’m most afraid of or the thing that would heal me the most, how can I use that to help other people in the world? And, ultimately, how can we use that to impact the bigger world? If each one of us gets in alignment with how to heal ourselves, how to help others, and how to change the world, we are going to make a big difference. And the last piece on that is what is your relationship to money? (See Part 2). Because there are a lot of talented people who don’t make any money at what they do, even though they do great work. Don’t let that be you. Until next time.

Awareness Prescription to Discover Your Natural Abilities

1. Describe a time in your life (an experience or interaction) that mattered to you where you were able to make a difference?

2. What did you value most about that experience?

3. What skills or abilities came naturally to you in that situation?

4. How might these natural gifts help other people?

5. Is there a creative way to bring those gifts either to your current place of work or to a new environment?