My Journey From Employee To Entrepreneur: Part 3

How I Discovered My Inner Potential (Personal Brilliance)

If I can remember correctly, my first love was teaching. I remember wanting to be the teacher in my classroom. I daydreamed about sitting behind the same desk my elementary teacher was sitting behind, shuffling papers and helping kids learn a new skill. I would say my second love was reading. I knew that if I was going to be a great teacher I had to be knowledgeable. The school library became my playground. I became energized reading dictionaries, encyclopedias, news articles, magazines and any printed material I could get my hands on.

I’ve always had paper around me. Something about the sound the pencil makes when the led touches the paper, made me feel like I could do anything. It’s clear to say that writing became my third love. I wrote everything from poems to short stories. I even tried my hands at writing skits. It was when I started writing lyrics that I found my fourth love. I love music. I love all the components of music. Everything from lyrics to melody and beat to recording it. I love it all.

Then came the internet age. This is where I found my fifth love of computers. I guess you could say I was a bit weird seeing as how I loved hearing the sound of the keys on the keyboard when they were pressed. What can I say, I like buttons! I loved the fact that the computer supplied all my previous loves. Music, reading, writing, and teaching can all be done using a computer. But with a computer, I had come to realize that the possibilities were endless. That’s when I got my first dose of the internet. I am proud to say, it has been named my sixth love.

It was when I spent 24 hours without sleep browsing the internet, soaking up loads of information one click after another, that I realized I was addicted. I was addicted to the internet. And yes, for those of you who don’t know, it is a real addiction. Several people suffer from it. Let me just say, my list of loves didn’t stop there. When I joined the workforce, I quickly realized I had discovered another love. I loved helping others. 4 years in the customer service industry can prove that. Helping others solve their problems was my seventh love.

After a while, I realized a major problem in my life. Four years of job hopping because I was trying to find a job that was fulfilling and provided emotional, intellectual and financial satisfaction. Every job that I got, I found one more thing that I added to my list of cons. It was one morning that I had realized I hated working in corporate America. I hated dealing with cookie cutter training programs at companies that tried to cram 4 weeks of information into my brain in one week, ending with a test and later finding out that 80% of the information was never used out on the floor.

I hated the micromanaging I was put under by executive staff members who lack the most important management and leadership skills. It seemed they needed to be retrained by real leaders. But the hate didn’t stop there. I hated the fact that many company leaders cared more about the money they were making than the lives of the hard working employees that worked under them. Having to lose a job due to schedule and transportation issues, seemed childish to me.

I hated the dress codes, short lunches, mandatory overtime, getting out in the snow and cold weather, point systems and many other things. I hated being judged for not having a college degree. I hated the lack of respect that I was getting because I didn’t have strong corporate connections. I hated the favoritism within the companies. All the rules and regulations made it feel like there was no room to breathe. It was almost as if I had become completely disgusted with traditional employment all together. And when I say disgusted, I don’t mean figuratively. I mean that literally.

You see, every morning before I go to work, I would get this intense gut feeling as if I were not supposed to be there. That gut feeling was followed by a strong sense of devastation. I got tired of feeling those feelings. I saw this personal problem as an opportunity for change. It all started with awareness. That’s when I began to think about all the things people told me about myself. About how intelligent I am. About how understanding and inspirational I am. Also, I was told about how I make learning fun. That’s when I decided to find a solution to my problem.

I began surfing the net hours upon hours a day while my husband and son were away at work and school. Sad to say, I couldn’t find the work of my dreams. I didn’t even know why that work was. So, I took a breath and started over again. But this time, I started looking for answers from within. I wanted to know who I was and what I was born to do. That’s when I stumbled upon what is now one of my favorite quotes by Mark Twain: “There are two great moments in a person’s life, the moment they were born and the moment they find out why.” That quote was my mission and my inspiration. I took to the internet to find out who I was.

I started with astrology. Now, I know what you may be thinking. Astrology isn’t real. But I know what it is for me. I don’t use it as a daily psychic reading. I was looking for clues to my identity. And let me just tell you, I found what I was looking for, specifically in the career/money section. My research didn’t stop there. I wanted to know about my personality. That’s when I began to take personality quizzes online. Those quizzes told me so much useful information about myself. I took so many that I lost count after the 5th one. They were short quizzes and fun.

In the search results, I saw links that looked similar to other personality information. That when I stumbled upon the Myers/Briggs personality types. Now let me just say, I took this test a total of 3 times in one day and a few more times over the course of 3 years. I was checking the accuracy. But I ran into what I thought was an issue. Each time I took the test, I got a different personality type. So I began getting frustrated because I felt I needed this information to access the rest of my identity and complete my quest of finding my true purpose. That’s when I noticed something outstanding. All the temperaments that I kept going back and forth between, all had the letters “NF” in them.

I think you know what I did next. Yup! I googled “NF personality”. And let me tell you, I was very pleased with what I found. And yes, I soaked it all up. I also found something called “Numerology”. I thought to myself, why not give it try, seeing what else I can find out about myself. I began to think that if the astrology and personality type quizzes and tests were not accurate, numerology would be because as they say, numbers don’t lie. I found out that my life path number is 1. It means a natural born leader. How awesome is that!? I discovered more information about myself and what I needed to learn and do. So I set out to do it.

I began eating right and stressing less. I began training my mind to think outside the box and observe everything around me. I exercised parts of my personality and made improvements to my lifestyle. There was still the issue of work and money. I knew I had to do something about that. I knew what my fears were. I feared failure. I hid behind procrastination. At one point, I had become overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to earn an income without re-joining the workforce. My husband came to me and said, “Don’t worry, you will figure it out. You are very intelligent. Just give it time”. I replied “if I’m so smart, why can’t I make money from it? I must not be smart enough!”

He continued to be verbally supportive, even when I was emotionally unstable about the situation. When I told him about my feelings before I went to work when I had a job, he told me that maybe that’s not the job for me. That maybe God don’t want me to do that job. The funny thing is, he wasn’t the only person telling me that. So I got back to working on my personal development. And that’s when I decided to create the work of my dreams using all the parts of my personality. So I created a step by step system. After the system was complete, I wanted to test it out to see if it worked, if I missed anything, if I needed to add something or improve a step.

It started out as 12 steps. I began to ask myself, would I really want to go through 12 steps to find and earn money from my purpose? No. I wanted to simplify it a bit more. So after some tweaking, I narrowed my system down to 10 steps. That’s was fine. But I still was not satisfied. I asked myself another question. Would the people that I help achieve this goal want to do it in 10 steps? Probably not. So I did some more simplifying. And this time, I was very pleased with the final results. I now have a simple 5 step system to finding one’s personal brilliance and living a purposeful life doing work that’s fun, fulfilling and financially rewarding.