Great Circle

It’s my absolute pleasure to introduce some of you to Rosa Say. Many of you will already know her and may have known her longer than I have. I could blab on all her day about what a superlative human being she is, but there’s some info about her at the bottom of the post … and the best way for you to get to know her is to begin reading her piece …

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It seems to me that you can only win a war in two ways. The first way is to vanquish your opponent, the who (or what) you are at war with. Without a complete vanquishing, there is always the possibility that a victory is only one in a string of battles, right?

So unless you’re into vanquishing, with total, crushing domination and all that sort of thing, there is just one other way to win a war, and that is by refusing to fight it. By simply stopping. That’s what happened for me. When I say I won the war on work, I stopped fighting it, and started to do it better.

I can’t give myself much credit for this. For you see, my stopping wasn’t really planned, it just happened, with me figuring out I could stop fighting in an aha! moment that came to me about a year after I left the battleground. I thought I was in more of a cease fire, and that I’d eventually have to pull on my fatigues, lace up my boots, shoulder my rifle and go back. But then, I didn’t. I was too busy, and loving every moment of it.

This is the short version: After working within the corporate battleground for thirty-one years, I took a year off to enjoy being a full-time mom before my youngest child would graduate from high school. Over the years I had become of those “high-powered, veteran executives” who didn’t know that working could be any other way. I saved up to finance my year off, and once my nest was empty, I planned to go back to work. Picking right back up where I’d left off would be relatively easy, six-figure income and all.

However during that year off I wrote and published my book, Managing with Aloha (which Pete very kindly reviewed here at Great Circle) discovering it would launch me on a new career as a workplace aloha coach. Pure goodness. It just doesn’t get better than this; a six-figure income isn’t nearly the “all” you might think it is … when you get more you just complicate your life more.

Now I don’t believe that I will ever retire. In all probability I will work until the day my body simply gives up and tells me that life as I know it now is over. Work is not a place, or a job, it’s the getting-things-done that gets done in your head. What I do at work today is as close to pure joy while working as a person can get. I’m having way too much fun to stop.

Work itself is not the war. The war was working for another boss that isn’t me, myself and I.

You see, winning the war on work is deciding you will stop working for a paycheck, and only work for profit, because YOU and your ideas are the marketable commodity. You are what “making a living” is actually all about.

I stopped fighting someone else’s business war, and created my own work, where it would never, ever resemble another battle in any way whatsoever. Corporate gigs have their moments, and I don’t regret very much of mine, for those jobs grew me. They helped me understand I could invent and not just produce, create and not just concoct. They gave me content and context, and a profound appreciation for what I have now instead!

Today my fatigues and boots are used for yard work. Right now the deep purple catalaya orchids are in summer bloom, and I’ve got a bumper crop of avocado and sunrise papaya. Turns out I can grow more than just emerging managers and leaders!

I left the rifle behind. Vanquishing is just not my style.

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Post author Rosa Say works a little, speaks and writes a lot; she is the author of Managing with Aloha Coaching, where you can “Learn to put Managing with Aloha in practice in our value of the month program: Live, Work, Manage and Lead with Aloha!” She is also the managing editor of Joyful Jubilant Learning, home of the Ho’ohana Community, where collaborative learning gets jubilant! She is the founder of Say Leadership Coaching and Ho’ohana Publishing; sign up for her monthly newsletter, or pick up her feeds (MWAC and JJL).