Description
How to discover your purpose and reveals how to make money following your hearts desire
- Would you like a more fulfilling work life?
- Do you want a job that’s creative, exciting and rewarding?
- That allows you to be who you truly are?
- You need to discover the work you were born to do.
Leading work expert Nick Williams has identified the twelve principles of the work you were born to do. He shows how we can activate these principles to amazing effect and utilise our inner power at whatever stage we have reached in our working lives.
The Work We Were Born To Do shows how to discover your purpose and reveals how to make money following your hearts desire. It will help undo any conditioning that has held you back, exploring ways to build work from the inside out, using heart, spirit, essence and inspiration.
The story behind The Work We Were Born To Do and why I wrote it
This is a journey in three parts. It begins with Nick discussing the ideas that the Universe wants you to Since a child, I dreamed of discovering what I was born to do, and in 1986, I discovered it – to inspire, to write, teach, educate and uplift. I also always had a dream to write a book, and at eight years old when people asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I responded with, “Pens!” So I got lots of pens but I actually didn’t really start writing for another thirty years, at the age of 38. By this time I had left my corporate career eight years previously, was running my own business giving talks and workshops and was Co-Director of Alternatives at Saint James’s Church in Piccadilly.
My talks and workshops were on finding work you love and had been inspired with the words The Work We Were Born To Do in 1997, so I gave talks and workshops of that title. In 1998, the thought entered my mind, “Maybe this could be the subject of the book I’ve always said that I will write one day.” The ideas I am sharing live seem to resonate with a lot of people, writing a book would allow me to reach more people and serve on an even bigger stage.
So I started structuring my ideas in book form, created an outline, wrote a few chapters – and thought I was fooling myself! My resistance kicked in big time, but something inside me kept saying, “Keep going,” so I did. I identified six publishers who I thought might be interested in publishing the book, and put a proposal together, photocopied it six times and sent it out, half expecting to receive either no response or six letters back saying, “What a load of rubbish, please don’t trouble us again!”
To my incredible surprise, two of them invited me to meetings with them, and then one, Element Books, actually offered and sent me a publishing contract. This both inspired me and sent me into even bigger resistance! Could I actually write the whole thing? Would anyone be interested in me and what I had to say? What if I couldn’t deliver? Excitement and terror filled my heart. I chose to let the excitement win over, (I recently told the whole story , and you can see it here). I signed the contract, the book came out in September 1999, and it went on to become a best-seller and stayed in print for nearly ten years. It became my signature work articulating a new vision for work and its place in our lives.
So my three major inspirations for writing The Work We Were Born To Do were:
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- To share my own journey of believing that work has to be source of pain, sacrifice and struggle to experiencing my work as being more joyful, inspiring, meaningful and fulfilling and finding what I was on earth to do
- My own growth and evolution – to confront my own fears and resistance and satisfy my own curiosity to see if I was capable of writing a book at all, and hopefully one with ideas that would resonate with people
- To serve and inspire others on a bigger scale – by then I had been pioneering in my own life for over a decade and wanted to share what I had learned. In some ways the book was a gift from my heart to the hearts of others, a very long postcard that said, “This is where I have been and this what I have learned and I hope it might inspired and educate you too.”
- I still feel deeply honoured and privileged that The Work We Were Born To Do has caused ten of thousands of people to find what they were born to do, change their careers, start inspired businesses and step into their self-leadership and then inspire others by their example.
Not surprisingly, The Work We Were Born To Do also has caused major transformation in my own life, opening doors, creating a global network of friends and opened the doors of inspiration to me creating a whole body of work.
It was certainly one of the books that most changed my life. Here I am telling the story of the resistance I had to signing the contract to write it.
