Do What you Love for the Rest of your Life

Freedom is the ability to choose” (Griffiths, 2001, p. 197). The world if full of options we can choose from. We have endless possibilities for everything we do: where to park, who to marry, what career to choice, where to live, which purse to buy. Because we have these choices, something is inevitable: change. We have the option to change everything around us: friends, jobs, home décor, car, believes, careers, etc. More often than not, change is perceived as uncomfortable and unwanted. Many times, change is imposed, instead of wanting it. In his book Do What you Love for the Rest of your Life, Bob Griffiths (2001) said, “As with most significant and worthwhile things in life, change is scary” (pg. ix). So, it’s completely normal to feel fear in a situation that requires us to make a decision, whether to change something or not. Pulitzer Prize-nominated science writer Rush W. Dozier Jr, once stated, “Fear is our most primal emotion.” But again, change is inevitable and as the saying goes, “the most constant thing in the world is change.”

Change doesn’t only happen in an intellectual level, but also in an emotional level. This is the reason why there are no clear directions as how to achieve change or a good description that happens when we experience it. All of us go thru change – small, big, difficult, pleasant, life changing, life threatening – it’s a necessary part of life. It’s necessary for human evolution, for personal growth and to acquire knowledge. The key is how to manage change in order to take advantage of the concept, instead of viewing it as an unexpected obstacle in our lives. All changes in our personal or professional lives go through one step that we call “transition,” even if we don’t know it by that name (Dai Williams, 2001). These transitions are what make us forget what we did in the past and adapt to new ways of doing things, of saying things or thinking things. In this paper, I’ll discuss how we manage personal and professional change