Be brave - stand back and take stock

Is your work working for you? Do you feel you're in the wrong job or do you feel your capabilities and skills are underutilised or mismatched in the workplace? Is your heart no longer - or was it ever - in the work you do? Whether you're speeding too fast (next pit-stop a coronary) or just going through the motions waiting for your pension, unless it engages your energy and is enjoyable, work can be bad for your physical, mental and emotional health.

According to careers consultant Ms Andre Harpur, author of Work: Inspiration and Transformation - An innovative approach to your work, your life and yourself (Blackhall Publishing, £9.99): "Each of us has something to rip-roar about."

Unless our work taps into that passion at some level, we may not be in the right job or we might not currently be expressing vital aspects of ourselves that could be expressed even within our present job to the enrichment of the workplace and ourselves.

This should matter to employers at a time when staff retention was never more important, given worker shortages and the cost of training. "A lot of people who leave a company feel under-fulfilled because much of their potential isn't being tapped in the workplace. What we're trying to do is to identify this person's skills and then to look at the company and to look at suggestions which this employee could make in order to use these different types of skills," she says.

As for people not in a job best suited to their talents, she says: "The actual truth is that we actually know deep down what is going to give us the greatest buzz and what is the work we really want to do. I'm absolutely convinced of it. I've never met a person that didn't know."

"What I try to get people to do is to break the link between work and money. It sounds the most impractical and unrealistic thing you can do, but when you break that link between work and money, you can really get into the passion. And the odd thing about it is that the more passionate people are about their work, the more money they make."

In the increasingly hectic work environment, it can be tricky to attend to one's "inner radar".

"Very often somebody feels that the pace of their lives is just too fast. They need to do something to slow it down. They're getting these vague little messages like `Do you need to do all this running around? . . .' I'd always say to people, listen to those little messages."

Giving up on the dream is difficult: "It's giving in to lack of movement. It's giving in to death instead of life. I think you can die in your life without dying physically."

Most people hate to step back and take stock. "We'd much rather go on with a very mediocre kind of life than step back and take stock of it."

She believes business is changing hugely. "I'm meeting financial people who are coming into me and saying I want my work to have meaning. I want to be able to look back on my deathbed and look back and say this life had meaning. It did something and it contributed something."

"It's actually, believe it or not, what people are looking at. What they're looking for is the alignment of the physical, the emotional, the mental, the financial and the spiritual."

Andre Harpur can be contacted by telephoning 01 283 6466.

jmarms@irish-times.ie