Real Work, Real Soon

Many of the methods, concepts, exercises, and explorations included in the Working on Purpose workshops come from having trained with and learned from some masters in the field, or from taking specific courses in order to learn a piece of the puzzle, or thorough research  and investigation, trial and error and other disciplined methods of exploration.

With others it felt like they introduced themselves. This is the case for our slogan for this new website: ‘Real Work, Real Soon’ landed like a punch to the solar plexus when my wife, Denise, and I were passing time on a five hour drive by coming up with possible slogans. ‘Welcome to the Future of Work!’; ‘Heroic Career Planning!’; ‘Careers not Jobs!’. All suitable enough suggestions and then came that familiar feeling in the gut. As soon as I verbalized ‘Real Work, Real Soon’ I knew my job was to explain to Denise, our erudite website developer Alix, and, as you have guessed, myself, why that is the slogan, and what does it mean?

That’s the case with such epiphanies, we have them, we know they are ‘the thing’ then the work is to understand them. That took a few days.

My concept of ‘Real Work’ is work that we do to further our work purpose. It may be an entry level job that we have no intention of staying in for any length of time in order to fund the next stage of our plan to eventually deliver the  contribution declared in our Work Purpose Statement. Or it may be the work that is directly delivering that contribution. For me, ‘Real Work’ is work that we have consciously chosen as part of our overall career plan. ‘Just-a-Job Work’ is work that we perform for a number of reasons: to make a living, to get out of the house, to get out of school, make some spare cash, etc. ‘Just-a-Job Work’ involves tasks we perform to accomplish someone else’s work purpose. No problem with that and, as always,  it helps if we are conscious that that is what we are doing. And that we approve of that other person’s (or company’s) purpose.

The goal of all Implicit Career based programs, including ‘Working On Purpose’ is to have clients develop a purposeful and strategic career plan and anything that comes out of that plan can be considered ‘Real’ as the work purpose is based on the real person identified in the third module - ‘Getting Real’.

‘Real Soon’. What is that all about? I asked myself. Why am I saying that? Sounds a little brash. Well, it just may be brash, and it is also accurate. By the end of  a ten hour Working On Purpose workshop clients have become substantially clearer on the person they intend to be and the impact they intend to have through their work. Those intentions are what I am referring to when I say ‘real’. And our research, along with independent studies have shown that this intervention results in individuals finding work, both real and just-a-job, two to three times faster than they would have without it.

Thanks for helping me work that through!

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