Are You Doing Your “Purpose in LIfe?”, Vol. 450, April 26, 2018

Over the past couple of months, I have been answering many questions on Quora, a forum where people can ask questions and other people answer them – from all over the world. One of the questions that have come up a lot recently is about how one can become “happy” in life. Another has to do with, whether the questioner should do what they are being expected to do professionally by their parents, or what they are naturally drawn to even if it will be less lucrative.

My own philosophy is based on the fact that I was raised by a man who knew by the age of 5 that he wanted to be a dentist. He didn’t come from a well-to-do family. Quite the opposite. His dad died when he was 12 years old. And, frankly, he father was a tailor and didn’t make much money to support his 3 kids and wife. Even with being drafted into the army during WWII, right after high school, he made it his business to get a college education. He attended City College of NY which was free to him as a resident of Brooklyn, NY. He commuted for an hour and a half each way to get to school every day. He noted this in a loving letter he wrote me, in response to a letter I wrote him inside of the first three weeks of my college education. A college education that he paid for, against his better judgment, given my difficulty getting through high school. I did indeed do very well in college, but that is an aside. My point is that my dad went onto dental school at Tufts University, with his two older sisters helping him to pay what was tuition of $900 in the early 50’s – a fortune for a student without any real means.

It was during my time working in his dental office, something he had to talk me into doing. I had a job I really enjoyed at the animal hospital that my parents used for our pets. He was going to double my pay. Interestingly enough, that didn’t matter to me, because I was fearful of working with a man who was excellent at pretty much anything he put his mind to, when I had so many challenges being learning disabled, uncoordinated, etc.

However, I learned so many important things working by my dad’s side. Things, that I could never know would be of any real importance during my teens and early twenties, as I didn’t know then that I would have a hypnosis practice. That didn’t happen till I was 40 years old and my dad having died 17 years before.

What did I learn? I learned that one needs to have a career, or better yet a “calling” to focus one’s means of making a living. For those of us who have little use for “red tape” and angry or pushy bosses, to create a living working for ourselves. Given that the vast majority of kids that went to my school had parents who had “jobs” working in corporate America, I realized later how lucky I was to have a father who was self-employed, able to make his own work hours and thus his own ‘play” hours. And, trust me the man did enjoy his playtime. During the winter he had three different games of tennis at three different tennis clubs, he played racket ball and square danced with my mother. During the summer it was tennis and walking the golf course, till the country club he belonged to made a rule that all golfers had to rent golf carts. That didn’t work for him since he wanted/needed the exercise he could get walking the course after spending the day in his small dental office. He also loved going to the movies and going out to eat. He wasn’t one to take long extended vacations given all the paperwork he would come back to – filling out insurance forms and reading x-rays. He loved the one-on-one interaction with all his patients doing all the cleanings himself.

What was especially cool was knowing that he had several patients that moved a few hours away, and still kept seeing my dad every six months for the dental care. Why? Because, he was a lot of fun, telling jokes and keeping his patient’s minds off the work that was being done, though he certainly explained, with diagrams what was being done before they had the work done.

Ethics is one of the things that I bring with me from him to my own practice. Never, do more than needs to be done, yet, take the necessary time to get the job done correctly.

I remember one evening toward the end of the workday when I glanced at the clock. I was handing him instruments to cement a crown, I do believe. It was then that he told me, “Suzy, no one does a great job while watching the clock.” That has stayed with me since I was 16 or 17 years old. I really don’t pay attention to the clock very much while I am working with my clients, because one really doesn’t know what will come up during the work, and the client needs to be in a better place by the end of the appointment then when they came in – at least as often as I can make that happen, that is my goal! Because, my clients don’t pay by the session, they pay by the program, time is not important. The appropriate conditions for as quick and easy a healing as possible is what matters.

So, if you are a person who is frustrated with not knowing the correct avenue for making a living, listen to your own heart… your own soul…because if you don’t, you will become one of the “robots” out there with an “empty smile” pretending life is great, except that you are doing work that you most likely don’t care about, and perhaps even working in a company that doesn’t share your values. I can tell you after working with many clients with this exact same situation, that this is no way to live. One spends way too much time at their workplace to be in an environment that doesn’t serve one.

Get real with yourself. Do the work necessary to figure out what you truly care about and the type of work environment that you want to create for yourself, and in so doing, you may just find that you have no need to retire, because you so enjoy what you do. You may choose to work fewer hours, but for those who found their true “calling,” retirement isn’t even an option.
There is much too much fun and interest in their chosen profession to ever think of retiring. I certainly know that is true for me!