impRAWvise 

I wish I could say that I have figured this one out, but there is still work to be made on the topic, therefore I am just sharing my own thoughts and feelings on the matter, encouraging you as well to dive deep within yourselves and find what matters most for you personally as an unique and amazing individual and made to be thriving human being. I have studied cinematography, photography and documentary filmmaking as a part of my Bachelor and my Masters Degree. I love photography, editing and visual arts, but I only worked on a project based level in this area. Once I realised that for me personally, I couldn’t at that time see or find a way to make it work for me, as I need both stability and predictability not just financially but also as a strong pillar of my career, as well as once I integrated some dysfunctional limited beliefs about how a creative life would look like, I just make a choice for myself to pursue another field of the profesional environment. Its was very hard to accept it, and see my focus change and adapt, but some of the things that came out of this decision to shift gears in this direction were and are still very valuable up to this day.

I decided at that point that I need to expand my skills, and not just that but also find and focus on one main skill that could bring me that so called stability as well as predictability when it comes to my career and my profesional life. Therefore, starting with a modest knowledge of German language, as a second foreign language for me, I found potential I could develop in this direction and started to get immediately results. Through out the years I have been learning and expanding my skills and I became proficient in German language, by self study, as well as by participating in German language courses, which at that time, for about 3 years were actually funded by the corporation that I was working at, which was pretty cool and amazing, especially for intermediate and advanced level courses. With time and with more experience gained, more interviews, more people, more talks, more changes, I became more and more confident in my skills. Which is something that of course comes with not only time and patience but also with experience and perseverance. Until, after almost 7 years and an exchange of 5 companies, in the corporate environment, I suddenly realised that hey, wait a minute, this was all supposed to be a temporary fix, not a long term solution, so here it goes, at 33 years old, I am having another existential crises about the profesional evolution of my career. As a coping mechanism at this point, a headstand, as an integrated part of my yoga practice, is something that can prove to be useful in the moment, but there is still work to be done.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love German, I have learned a lot of useful and great things at the corporations and in the corporate environment that I have been a part of for the last 7 years, I have also been through challenging situations, some of them leading to me leaving the company, some of them leading to succesul changes that were sustainable on the long run for both sides. But still, with all the benefits, such as stability, predictability, sometimes even a sense of belonging to a great community of like minded people, and of course my favorite, the work from home policies where I get to experience work with my favourite co-workers in the whole wide world, my dogs, its still not my life’s purpose to climb the corporate ladder or even work in a corporation environment for the rest of my life. After testing trying to get a second degree (in Nutrition in the previous 2 years) and realising that its very hard and complicated to actually graduate from this kind of school when you also have a day job at a corporation, it became – the corporate job, even more of a safety net for when things fall apart, as they did with the Nutrition studies (because no matter how passionate you are or how hard you work, you can still not be in two places at once, or get more hours in the day without eventually losing your physical health, mental health or even both). And this is something that no amount of yoga, which is a great practice, can actually fix, you just have to learn, adjust and adapt.

Before I couldn’t really express my truth on this matter, but now I know that it is not my life’s purpose. The corporate environment is certainly a safety net and a vehicle for obtaining and validating what I need in order to live my life on a day to day basis, but its also ok to want something different in the long run. I used to think that I should just be grateful for all these career opportunities and so on and so forth, and I definitely was and still am, but that doesn’t change the fact that what I really want to do with my life and as a future vision of my life, includes my passions and what I love the most: visual arts, nutrition, yoga and wellbeing, and even though I do not know exactly at the moment how to picture it exactly or how it will look like, at the right time and in the right context, it will for sure became my day to day reality. Sometimes it’s ok to acknowledge and celebrate what we have and what we accomplished in our lives so far while also still having dreams and desires for our future as well as finding the right balance between the two. I honestly believe that when we position ourselves in that space of both possibility, opportunity, as well as gratitude for what is, then true magic begins to unfold. Or as Marianne Williamson beautifully defines it: “A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love — from a belief in what is not real, to faith in that which is. That shift in perception changes everything.”