The Hopeful Career
#5 Career Growth through Hopeful Perseverance
by Dér Stépanos
Dingilian, Ph.D. © 2007
1,000 may fall by one side, and 10,000 by the other side, but you maintain your path. This is paraphrasing of a verse from the Bible. We often find ourselves in this predicament. We see companies shutting down on the one hand. On the other we see people complaining about their work, about the politics, the low morale, and lack of appreciation. We try to persevere, but we cannot help but get caught up in the despair and complaining that people express around us. Yes, it can be dreadful – it makes us angry, keeps us from focusing on our work, and it drags us down! What do we need? Hopeful perseverance! It is not enough to want to persevere and maintain our focus on our job and career. But we also need to do so with hope and not simply grudgingly!
This hopeful perseverance is initially more difficult to generate, but in the end it is easier to maintain. As a constant reminder, “hope” is not a psychological term; it is a spiritual one. Therefore, in order to generate hope to persevere in our job and career, we need to have a purpose that is higher than our job description but still embraces our career. We need to see beyond our momentary complaint and even our attempt to persevere in the face of this complaint! We need to see the joy, the smile on the face of our family members, the appreciation of our friends, and our sense of spiritual integrity. This latter, our spiritual integrity is extremely important because even if there is no one out there who appreciates us, by building spiritual integrity, we begin appreciating ourselves in a lasting and meaningful manner. We are not simply patting ourselves on the back; we truly are looking for the God given eternal in our life. We discover the source of our hope, and the riches that no one can take from us. We are able to generate hope because we sense the progress that we are making in the face of the overall situation causing people to lose their jobs, companies moving away, co-workers complaining, and us having to work under greater pressure to maintain our job.
True, we will have to work harder and face greater stress. But when we are able to generate hope in our job and career, our time spent becomes more worthwhile, and even spiritually gratifying. A 1,000 may fall by the one side, and 10,000 by the other. But we remain in our career growth path through hopeful perseverance!
* * * * *