And it all comes from the same FUN activity!
Whatever your career or business and your satisfaction level with it, I am sure that you remember your parents and high school guidance counselors pounding the "You have to go to college" message into you. You might also recall the disdain all these fine folk expressed, overtly or merely through tone of voice, for the blue-collar workers. Their jobs, because they work with their hands, were being offshored, but you - with your shiny new BA (or MA) - were a knowledge worker. YOU were golden.
Fast forward some decades. Sure enough, the good-paying blue collar jobs of the Midwest were offshored and the sorta-good-paying factory jobs of the South were taken over by illegal immigrants. Huge transition from fathers being able to support their families to fathers stuck in permanent unemployment, with no unemployment help, or re-employed at much less $, no benefits. A world of constant anxiety, no security and no self-esteem.
Sounds like your guidance counselors, parents, pundits, everyone really, was right. If you want money, security and good health (from lack of stress and from access to medical care and quality food), then you need to go to college. Case closed.
But...... what about the people who listened to that advice more recently, with college costs having skyrocketed? Huge education debt that is acting as an economic and personal sea anchor, preventing young people from buying homes, starting families or even moving away from their parents.
Compounded, of course, by the end of that lovely fantasy that knowledge work can't be offshored. It was always logically true that knowledge work is the easiest to offshore. No new factories to build. All you need is a cheap call-center or a wired world where everyone from accountants to radiologists can do their work with a Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican accent. Not to mention Hungarian. My own work of deep transformational healing can be done from anywhere on Earth with a high-speed Internet link. And not just by highly-skilled and experienced healers like me. There are companies in the Puget Sound area who are hiring minimally-trained health coaches and hypnotists to work in crowded call-center environments at minimum wage! Obviously, the quality isn't going to be as high as what I do with my academic degrees, certifications and years of experience, but this is exactly what has been happening to most of the knowledge-worker occupations.
So here is the actual reality: A college degree is no longer the passport to the middle class, a road out of poverty and a road out of just-getting-by, that it used to be. That equation is dead. Unless you have a college degree in something immensely crucially essential and in demand, and which pays well, you may be feeding your mind, but you are wasting your money if you go anywhere other than the least expensive public college you can find. [American Public University, entirely online, is very cost-effective, and I recommend it as one of a handful of quality for-profit colleges.]
Guidance counselors are still playing the "college for all" song. So are all the "mean well" politicians. But that is not the road to follow. If you have someone in your family who is wondering how to get:
* Solid, steady income that cannot be offshored, ever, and which no recession will ever make a dent in AND
* a huge positive impact on your health because you have that steady security, and you can choose to either run your own business or work for a company AND
* the satisfaction of creation with your own two hands,
.... then, my friend, you need to get them an apprenticeship in one of the eternal trades: plumbing, auto tech, electrician. There are a few others, like chef and HVAC, that I can highly recommend, as well as craftsman carpentry.
Don't recoil in horror.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Enquiry Into the Value of Work (Matthew Crawford) sounded this alarm some years ago. In my work with clients, I sound off on the value of creating things with your own two hands, as much as possible throughout the day, as the road to better physical health and to peace of mind. The anxiety-stilling impact of doing creative work - anything from building a bird house to painting, coloring or crocheting - has been documented in medical studies as well as psychological. The more you can create over the course of a day, the less tempting baby-back ribs are, the less self-control you have to exert to not eat dessert, the less onerous and more joyful exercise and movement becomes, the less interesting alcohol and tobacco addictions are, and the more "Damn, I'm GOOD!!!!" experiences you have in the course of a day.
Because I will assert to you with no equivocation whatsoever that the clothing you make yourself makes you feel like a queen, the doghouse you create yourself makes you feel as powerful as the Emperor Akbar and the book you write from the heart, or the paint you swirl on a paper or canvas is as sweet to your eyes as a priceless Turner.
It's as close to the godly act of creation as we mere mortals ever get. You need that fabulous feeling. You DESERVE that fabulous feeling. You can get that fabulous feeling.
And when your grandkid the plumber arranges for you to never have a 4 hour wait for a stopped drain again, that feeling is priceless, too!
Start today!
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Know what else you deserve? You deserve to have all that procrastinating that you just can't figure out end too. Every single time you waste time on Facebook instead of making progress toward your deeply felt dreams, you deserve better! Every single time you decide that you will never succeed at what you want, you deserve better!
Accept my gift of a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch), and discover exactly what has really been holding you back or stopping you from achieving the life you really want. Visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz, and we'll schedule your free session. You need more than just "motivation" and inspiration. You are plenty motivated to get what you want! You just lack the specific tools to get back the barrier. And I am very, very good at blockage-demolition! www.soaringdragon.biz victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com
