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SKILLS, TALENT, AND PASSION TURN RUTS INTO HIGHWAYS

I once heard a motivational speaker say, tongue in cheek, “Pick your ruts carefully, you’ll spend most of your life in them!”

It sounds funny only because so many of us identify with that thought. Ruts can provide a nice living, even interesting work. Caution! Stay in them too long and you’ll start to disengage with your work. It becomes routine and boring. The stimulation is gone. Challenges that looked exciting when you first started become problems to be managed. In a 2013 Gallup study only 30% of American workers said they honestly “enjoyed their job and their bosses.”

Must be a lot of ruts out there.

No one intentionally starts by gouging out their place in life. We are attracted to work because it will fill either a financial need, a spiritual need, or a professional interest. Sometimes we go into a field because we’ve invested so much in training. Maybe our rut started out as an expectation of family. Within ourselves we intuitively sense our strengths, skills, talents and gifts. So we marry those things to the opportunity that seems to give us the greatest chance to become what Culture tells us to become – successful.

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Yet all our skills, talents, and gifts are orbiting a center that few people find. That center is their unique design, their passion driven purpose. Given to us are the tools to live that purpose and passion. However, when our talents and skills are used for something else we become very competent and yet very disengaged at the that same time. We do the work because we can, because we are entrenched in a place or company, and because changing is thought to be more painful than staying.

The Rut.

A better way to is to get in touch with our own passion for life. Align our strengths with a direction and work that means something to our soul. It has always been there and you’ve had glimpses. Find that and you change the Rut into your highway for a purposeful life.