The Enemies Within

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Bonnie Bell

During career transition – when it feels as if the rug has been pulled out from under you and it seems as if you have been stripped of your identity – the dissonant choir of negative inner voices that have been lurking around in your head for a lifetime is suddenly unleashed and begins shout at you. You’ll never get a job! Who would want to hire you? What do you have to offer, anyway? It’s a terrible economy. No one’s hiring. You never should have majored in ________ (fill in the blank). You never should have taken that last job. You’re almost 30! 40! 50! 60! Nobody wants to hire you! You’re too fat. You’re too ugly. Why is nothing working out for me? Everyone else seems to be doing just fine. What do they know that I don’t know?

You may think I am making up these inner voices myself, but trust me, they are actual inner voices borrowed from the lists of negative voices produced by actual clients of mine over the years. And these are not the most extreme ones I’ve heard. They get much worse. I would say the collection of voices reiterated above is pretty typical. And these do not issue forth from crazy or neurotic or highly insecure people; these are the inner voices of ordinary “normal” people like you and me.

About the third or fourth coaching session, after we have established the groundwork for our work together, along comes the homework assignment I refer to as the Vision and the Voices. If you were in my office, you would see that I have a set of signs about 1 x 2 feet resting on an easel next to my chair on which the themes of our work are written and on which the homework is based. You would become very familiar with these questions and themes that guide us. One of them says in a bold font, Vision & Voices. This is how I explain this theme:

During career transition, when you should actually be tuning in to the Vision, or picture, of what you actually want for the next step in your career evolution, you are swept up in fear and anxiety which prevents you from doing this. Even if you have an idea or get a glimpse of what that is, it is impossible for you to stay there very long. This happens especially if you bein to imagine that something wonderful might happen: maybe you’ll get a great job, better than the one before, or start a business or move to the place you really want to be. The anxiety you are in, which is totally understandable during transition, will immediately cause you to jump away from the wonderfulness of that thought and into the negative voices shouting within telling you all the reasons that good thing can’t happen. If you pay attention, you’ll hear such things as, “You’re too old, you’re too stupid, you’re too fat, it’s a terrible economy, etc.”

You don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Think of some kind of work you really want, in order for this difficult transition to result in the best possible outcome. Look out, here come the voices. Try to hear them, and then write them down. Give voice to the feelings you have and maybe have not named. Translate the feeling into a voice. Then write down the voices. Get them out of your head and onto paper so you can see them in black and white. Don’t ask me why this happens. It just does. Next, read them out loud to yourself, one after the other. Most people are shocked to learn they are talking so cruelly to themselves . . . Now, do you think those voices aren’t affecting your progress from A to B? Trust me, they are.

What really needs to happen when you’re in transition is for you to pay lots of attention to the Vision. Indulge the Vision, indulge your imagination, really get into it. When I say “Vision”, all I mean is the picture you have in your head – and I know you have one – about what you really want. This is a picture based in the reality of who you are, of the gifts, talents, abilities, skills, education and experience you actually have. You know these things. You just don’t know you know them. You need to get out of the negative voices and into the vision that I know is there because it just works. Try it. You’ve actually been afraid to imagine good things happening because you might not get it and then you’ll feel bad. Isn’t that kind of superstitious or something?

I will say that sorting out all of this on your own without a coach is difficult at best. But with coaching, it is possible. Think about the analogy of athletic coaching. What athlete doesn’t have a vision or goal in mind toward which he/she is working? There is hard work involved in translating the vision into reality, no question, but without the vision, the voices take over. What athlete would go into a competition thinking, “I’ll never make it. I’m fat. I’m slow. I’m stupid. I’m a loser.”  What athlete would not examine, after losing, how he/she can do better the next time. Think how often the athlete doesn’t really know why he/she lost out; the coach can often see things the athlete cannot see.

The “picture” of what you want is – and I know you won’t believe me – something you can actually count on. It emerges from the reality of who you are. It is the “camera” that has been watching you every day of your life. It knows and records things you don’t even remember. Pay attention to it, flesh it out, indulge it, write it down, and more details will come to you. It’s like remembering and then talking about a dream. You start with a little shred of the dream, like “I was in a room all by myself,” and then when you start telling someone else about it, you remember more. Something like, “No wait a minute, someone else was there too. It was an old friend. She was someone I went to grammar school with.  She was a singer . . .” You get my drift.

The vision can be the place on a trajectory toward which you point yourself. We can get more specific as we go. We begin to disarm, dismantle, and talk back to the negative voices one by one. You will find they are not all equal, and once exposed to the light of day, they are mostly not true and mostly weak. They begin to take a back seat to the vision, which tends to become bigger, louder, and clearer, until it seems to fill the room, and we both know it. The eventual result is a transformation that sounds like: “This is who I am! This is what I want! This is what I care about. Let’s get the resume together, the cover letter, the criteria for the search.” The energy shifts take a back seat.

Once upon a time I had a vision like this: “I am in a beautiful office with plants and books and windows. The door is closed, and I am talking one to one, one at a time, with all kinds of different people. We are talking about life, about who they are, what they want, what they care about, what is important to them, and I am helping them find their way.” My inner self knew what would make me happy. I inched my way toward it, step by step, overcoming all of my own nasty inner voices, until I was free to find my way in the world. It was hard, and I got help. What I never could have known was that it would turn out so much better than I thought.

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News Update

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Bonnie Bell

It’s been a long time. . . I left you with the “Fail at Something Every Day” message for much longer than intended, but important obligations have intervened. In April, we participated in another project for Rebuilding Together Oakland. (For details about RTO see my May 2011 blog, Making a Good Life Happen — for Someone Else, and our May 4, 2012 news article). For two full days in April this year we became part of a 52-person team rehabbing a house for a senior homeowner in Oakland and adapting it to accommodate her emerging physical challenges. The results will make it possible for her to stay in her own home for many years to come. Her tears of gratitude were our collective reward.

In early May, Jim and I attended the National Financial Planning Association conference in Scottsdale, where we had been invited to speak on how we had integrated career coaching with financial planning and investment management. There is definitely progress in this regard. One planner – Mike Haubrich – in Wisconsin routinely includes “Career” as a line item in his financial plans; another, in Baltimore has an executive coach on staff, and others said they have developed referral relationships with career coaches, so they are able to make appropriate referrals when their clients or members of their clients’ families encounter career challenges or crises that threaten their well-being, financial or otherwise.

One very encouraging factoid is that our session was approved for Continuing Education Units for the certified financial planners in attendance. This is the first time that we know of that the topic of “career” has been integrated into the CFP curriculum.

Now, let’s get back to you and your career issues . . .

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Fail at Something Every Day

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Bonnie Bell



Last week on CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose (March 8, 2012) I happened to see an interview with Sara Blakely – mastermind of Spanx, the hip hosiery company that manufactures seamless, stretchy tights and hose designed to pull you in and shape you up – who, at 27, has made Forbes famous list of billionaires. She is suddenly all over the airwaves and in cyberspace. Google her, and you will find out whatever you need or want to know about her success, but you might not see what I happened to see on the CBS Morning Show.

This was better than the usual network interview just because it was Charlie Rose asking the questions from his deep well of curiosity. He said something like, “Sooo, what do you think it was in your background or upbringing that had you come up with an idea like this and then be able to take it to the limit by the time you were 27 years old?”

I expected some blah, blah, blah answer about business success (which you can find in some of her other interviews this week, e.g., “go with your gut, be kind to people, never give up,” etc.), but what she said next had me stop everything I was doing to get ready for work and stand directly in front of the TV. She said that at dinner every night when she and her brother were growing up, her father would ask each of them this question:

“What did you fail at today?”

Say what??? I had to hear the rest of what she had to say.

But before I tell you, let me say that Sara Blakely is blond, beautiful, spirited, has a great sense of humor, and is as down-to-earth as a co-worker. She seems genuinely surprised and delighted by the extreme nature of her monetary success, but I don’t think she – or anyone who knows her – would be that surprised by her personal or professional success. And didn’t we all – men and women alike – immediately love the name of that company? “Spanx” is just immediately a clever joke. It makes a name like Hanes – another wildly successful hosiery company – seem boring by comparison. It came to her out of the blue one day while she was stopped at a red light. By the time the light turned green and she crossed to the other side of the intersection, she had the company name. Let me go out on a limb here and speculate that she probably thought of and rejected 500 other names that failed to make the grade before that one stuck.

What has stuck with me is the “What did you fail at today?” question. Not only would her dad ask the question at dinner, but every morning when he said goodbye to her and her brother for the day, he would say, “Fail at something today!”

The effect of this counter-intuitive approach to child-rearing was to produce kids who weren’t afraid to fail. They were always trying new things, learning new things, had a sense of adventure, and enthusiasm for life. They realized at a young age that it was not possible to succeed at everything in life, but that they would discover things at which they would succeed. The point was not to seek success and fear failure, but to embrace life, embrace the new, discover joy, let go, find a path that works. So you aren’t perfect? Big surprise.

“To succeed or not succeed” is not the question. “To be or not to be” is the question.



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The Bow Stance

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Bonnie Bell



Archery is the national sport and pastime in Bhutan. Prior to a fortuitous business trip to Bhutan last fall, I was fascinated to discover in my research this curious centuries-old factoid about the tiny Himalayan country I was soon to visit: a long shot for sure.

The first image that came to mind – and the only personal association I had with the sport of archery – was a dim childhood memory. I am about five years old, and I am sitting on the grass under the big shade trees in the park near our house in Sacramento watching my parents and some of their friends shooting bows and arrows at a big bale of hay in the distance. That day, I learned from my father what a bulls-eye was, and I kept my eyes peeled for it, as he suggested, but it never came to be. Lots of arrows hit the bale of hay, all right, and some came close to the middle, but none hit the bulls-eye. It looked pretty easy to me, so I was puzzled.

It was a few decades later when on a visit home from Berkeley one weekend, I discovered the long, thin, tan-colored metal box in the guest room closet and opened it. My sister and I had been warned not to touch the “dangerous box,” so of course we did. But we never took out the bows or arrows, just looked at them, finding them frightening and mysterious, like a loaded gun.

When I opened the box this time, as an adult and parent, I burst out laughing, remembering the day in the park and how strange it all seemed now. In the rear-view mirror of our lives, it seemed such an aberration, that whole bow and arrow thing. It was incongruous.

As a joke, I grabbed one of the bows, picked up an arrow, and striking the bow stance in the kitchen doorway, aimed it at my mother where she stood making sandwiches for our lunch. When she looked up in pale-faced shock, she too burst out laughing, and we laughed ‘til we cried. Once recovered, we spent the rest of the afternoon talking about how inexplicable that whole archery episode was in the first place. She couldn’t really remember how long it lasted. It was kind of a fad among young marrieds at the time, an unusual social pastime with friends in the park on a warm sunny day.

As a career/life coach, I use the concept of the bulls-eye all the time to describe what we are up to in the coaching process. I want all of my clients to achieve the best possible outcome to their particular transition. In my last post, I talked about two clients who hit the bulls-eye last month. There have been countless others over the years and will be many more. One is interviewing right now – only for jobs in her desired target market – and I believe she is close to hitting the bulls-eye. The interviews she is getting now with her cover letters and resume suggest she is indeed getting closer.

Several other of my clients and I are engaged in identifying the target outcome of our work together – the job, the business they want to start, the goal they want to achieve at this particular time in their lives and careers – and we are specifying all of the criteria that need to be present in the multi-faceted target. Otherwise, how will they know it when they see it? And how can they hope to hit the bulls-eye if they don’t know what it is?

In archery, the bow stance, the aim, is everything. It requires thinking, grounding, positioning, preparation, and practice. In the marketplace today, too many people are in a rush to shoot off their arrows into cyberspace without any real preparation at all. They have a vague idea of an ill-defined target, not much deep thinking or positioning or strategy at all; and they often aim too high or too low, erroneously thinking this is increasing the likelihood they will hit something, anything. They tend to wing it on the tools they are using, too – the cover letters, resume, and spoken narrative about who they are, what they want, why they see there is a match between the job possibility and their gifts, talents, skills, education and experience. And have they even thought about their own requirements for the match?

On our first day in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, my husband Jim and I met with the officials of the Bhutan Trust Fund for the Conservation of the Environment, our hosts and reason for going half way around the world to a place we had never even thought of before, let alone visit. After that first meeting on the first day, we looked out the window of the fifth-floor office (no elevators in Bhutan), and to our amazement we were looking down at an archery arena right across the street! And sure enough, there were two archers at practice. We had thought we would have to seek out the possibility of observing this unusual national pastime.

Archer, the Bow Stance

Archer in Thimphu, Bhutan

The first thing we noticed was that we could barely see the target, much smaller than a bale of hay – more like a small grave marker out there in the distance – and the bulls-eye, which we were told was painted on the oval stone, was entirely invisible to us. The target, 140 meters away, seemed impossible to hit, let alone the bulls-eye!

We quickly observed that the Bow Stance – the aim – is everything. The arms of the archers were strong, muscular, toned, and their stance was perfectly grounded, still. When the bow was finally released, it came as a shock, because there wasn’t a sign it was coming any time soon. It was simply released – perfectly aimed at the target. Almost every arrow hit the target, and many came very close to the bulls-eye. If there was one, we were unable to see it with the naked eye.

There is an art to archery. And there is an art to just about everything in life, including finding the right partner, the right place to live, the right work, and the right job. All of those things require thinking, clarity, strategy, practice, a grounded sense of what the target is, and a solid bow stance, and a skilled aim, before releasing our arrows into space – cyber or other.



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Lunch & Learn Event 2/17

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Bonnie Bell

To my Blog Fans:

If you are in the Bay Area and interested in meeting me in person, we will be hosting a Lunch & Learn in our office, “What About Coaching for High Performance?”, on Friday, February 17, from 12:00 to 1:30.  If you have questions or would like to attend, please contact us as follows:  jroundtree@bellinvest.com.  Reservations are required.

Lunch & Learn Event: What about Coaching for High Performance?

Lunch & Learn Event: What about Coaching for High Performance?

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Hitting the Bulls-eye!

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Bonnie Bell

Just last week, one of my clients, Pamela – a writer/editor in her mid-twenties, hit the bulls-eye – the very job toward which she had been aiming for the last three years, without realizing it. What she was experiencing was a lot of career pain, the symptoms of which included the dreads (dreading going to work every day); the drabs (boredom, verging on depression); and the dregs (obsessive-compulsive negative thinking and talking about the job).

If you have any or all of these symptoms relating to your job or career, take two Advil (my personal favorite) and call your career coach! It might be time for the Big Dig! A coach just might be able to help you dig yourself out of the hole you are in and into the light and air that awaits you just above ground. As long as you’re down there struggling, you can’t see anything else.

You may not believe me now, but it doesn’t take all that much time to get a handle on what lies beyond the limited world you can see from that dark place. For Pamela, it took about six coaching sessions over a period of two months to move from “I am stuck forever in this job because the economy is so bad and I’ll never get another job in my field”, to “I know who I am, I know what I want, and I am determined to keep looking until I find it.”

This transformed, powerful (as opposed to weak) attitude is predicated on finally knowing what you want and what you are looking for – the bulls-eye. You can’t find the needle in the haystack unless you know what it looks like. It requires that you sit with the not-knowing for a while until you develop a solid list of criteria for your next step. This list often emerges right out of the pain you are in. The pain is a sign of what you want but don’t have. The pain often points to its opposite, which actually points you in the direction of what you want next.

Example 1: You have no autonomy. This points to the fact that you want more autonomy. Check. Example 2: You have no say in how things are run. This points to the fact that you want more authority. Check. Example 3: You don’t respect your boss or your company. This points to the fact that you want to work for a company and boss you can respect. Check.

I just took a moment to look at Pamela’s list of criteria for the next step and counted 15. Here are a few examples of the general and the specific types of things that show up on a typical, well-thought-through list: 1) the position includes leadership, written and verbal communication, and some form of teaching or presenting; 2) the organization is either a non-profit with a cause that I resonate with, or a company with a mission and purpose I can respect; 3) there is the possibility of flexible scheduling and working from home. There were 12 more criteria on her list.

Usually people have a pretty clear sense of their criteria for the next step when they stop to think about it. Examples of these are: appropriate job title, size of company or organization (smallish, mid-sized, global, etc.), general vicinity and commute time, salary requirement, et al. These criteria constitute the general target for your fabulous cover letter and resume. Don’t apply for jobs you don’t want, only for jobs you want and that meet your general target requirements. If your resume is actually a fit for the job description, and you know you are a good candidate, it is likely you will be called for an interview. If you don’t get that call, move on. It’s not the bulls-eye, or you would have gotten the chance for an interview. The point of the cover letter and resume is to get the interview, so you can get your body there and assess the situation. You will have criteria you are looking for, just as the interviewer(s) will have. If there is a match, you will know it. If there isn’t, move on. Don’t take everything so personally! Each opportunity will give you a clearer sense of what you really want. Our mutual intent is for you to hit the bulls-eye, just as Pamela did. Her new job – the one she is thrilled about – has all 15 of her criteria, plus many great things she didn’t even think to mention. The bulls-eye job is usually better than you imagined it would be.

And lest you think it was just Pamela who hit the bulls-eye last week because she is 25 (and you are 50), another client, Daniel, a 48-year-old marketing creative on the East Coast, hit his bulls-eye as well. He’ll be assuming a VP role in a company that is expanding internationally – yes, one of his most important criteria.

One of the things Pamela said when she got the job offer was that she felt almost guilty because she knows people who have been job-hunting for two years. My response was,

Do they know who they are? Do they know what they want? Do they have their criteria written down? Do they have a great resume that clearly matches the job descriptions to which they respond?, and

Do they have a career coach?



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Happy New Year!

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Bonnie Bell

I love saying that and hearing it, but I always forget about it until the first time I say it or the first time I hear it in the new year. Inevitably, a good mood shows up in January, along with some good news. It’s as if everyone has simultaneously forgotten all the bad news that accumulated in the previous 365 days. This year, the good news is about the economy getting better, the unemployment rate going down, and Gabrielle Gifford getting better. On top of that, we’re having unseasonably warm, sunny weather here in the Bay Area and in diverse locations around the country that are normally inclement by now.

I, for one, am relishing the feeling I get once the December celebrations are done, the decorations are down, and I open one of my new-smelling calendars for the first time. I feel as if the blackboard in my head has not only been erased, but wiped clean. I have a sense of anticipation that the new year will bring something different, something better, something new. I embrace the deliberate demarcation of time that the whole world seems to agree upon at once.

Prior to January 1, I savor my search for the calendars I will enjoy throughout the new year: one for my desktop at the office, another to carry around, another for the wall next to my desk, another for the kitchen at home. I insist on having aesthetically-pleasing wall calendars with images that inspire me with incredible photos of birds and other wildlife, familiar scenes of some of my favorite places in the world, or images of great art and architecture. Last year I had one of palaces, for some reason.

For the wall in my office, that I look at many times a day, I always want one to go along with our Asian décor and something that inspires me— glorious stanzas of poetry or adages of the sages and ages. I usually enjoy them so much throughout the year that I can’t bear to throw them away at the end. I always think I will frame them or do some other creative thing with them, but I don’t. And I don’t let go of them either.

The brand new 2012 calendar I have on the wall next to me right now is called Nirvana’s Dream. (Since when did calendars start having titles?) It was created by a man named Gwynn Goodner, of Studio Voltaire, “a consortium of artists and photographers dedicated to creating beautiful and accessible work. “ It’s published by an outfit called Brush Dance (www.brushdance.com). Goodner is a lover of Asian art and philosophy who hopes to inspire viewers to a more positive way of living. Right on. The exquisite images have a look that transcends time: pressed leaves, a lotus blossom, a hand-painted Oriental fan, a white, long necked crane. Along with the peaceful images for a given month is a wisdom saying. One that especially caught my eye today is from Lao Tsu: Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment. Interesting. . . Ancient wisdom somehow puts the press of current and future obligations into perspective.

I am not one to come up with Resolutions. The typical New Year’s Resolution tends to center on something people really don’t want to do – like lose weight or exercise more. Yeh, yeh, but that’s such a lazy catch-all. What about taking your new year’s thinking to new heights? What about your life? How’s it going? What’s working? What’s not? Are you satisfied with the quality of the content of your life? Your work? Your relationships? Do you have a sense of meaning? Purpose? Intention? Commitment? Are you cultivating your gifts and talents? Do you have a sense of being fully alive?

Instead of establishing some more short-lived, guilt-laden resolutions that the evil twin within won’t allow you to keep beyond the 15th, how about doing some gentle, self-loving reflection on the year just past, and focus for awhile on the big picture. You will find meaning and purpose in doing whatever you can to make your life as good as possible. And you don’t have to be perfect at it, just focused on it.

Happy New Year! Really. . . as it progresses, let me know how it’s going. I’d love to hear how you might live this year a little differently— and better.



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How to Follow Your Passion (When You Don’t Know What It Is.)

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Bonnie Bell

Most people have heard by now about how important it is for them to find their passion, work with passion, and live with passion.

The problem is that many people honestly don’t know what their passions are, much less how to find them or turn them into paid work. Others just don’t relate to the concept or word – it’s too intense, over-the-top, or somehow inconsistent with the rest of who they are.

Visions of Van Gogh cutting off his ear for love or killing himself for his art come to mind…

Several years ago, I worked as a coach with a young woman we’ll call Tam. Tam was bright, attractive, well-educated, and soft-spoken. She was very disappointed and dissatisfied with her career in accounting. She had pleased her parents with this choice, but had made herself miserable. She definitely wanted a different career path, but she had no idea what it would be.

She was not a passionate kind of person, she said. She had no passions, in fact, so how could she possibly find her way to a career she would be passionate about?

When I asked her to tell me what the word “passionate” meant to her, she quickly responded that if you were passionate about a cause, a talent, or a person, you would be willing to die for them. She was quite sure there was nothing inside or outside herself that she felt that way about; therefore, in her mind, she was defective. She had no passions.

I suggested that we consciously put on hold the whole question of passion and career change while we took some time to follow the breadcrumbs – the more subtle clues that might point the way to a different and more satisfying direction.

To do this, we had to come up with language with which she was comfortable. Instead of exploring Loves, Hates, Deep Desires and Primary Values – all impassioned words and descriptions – we considered Likes, Dislikes, Attractions and Enjoyment. This worked; she could relate.

She became more comfortable and engaged in the process. She started perking up.

Next we worked on the Inventory of Personal and Professional Assets. These include your gifts, talents, education, training, experience, skills, accomplishments and personality traits. They invariably add up to something more valuable than the sum of the parts.

Once people can actually observe and acknowledge their accomplishments in print, they begin to get a grounded sense of who they are and what they want to spend their time doing. Then they can develop a grounded sense of the value they might bring to the marketplace. Clarity begins to emerge, and clarity is power!

What began to make a lot of sense to Tam as we side-stepped the concept of passion and took a serious look at what the breadcrumbs were telling us, was – hold on to your hats! – becoming a physical therapist. What?

It’s not just that the idea of a career in the medical field was subtle; it’s that it wasn’t even part of the conversation at all. It sort of jumped out one day in the midst of our inquiry as an “Oh, and by the way, I just remembered something that might be important. The thing I love to do more than anything is read about health, exercise, and nutrition. I know quite a bit about it. My friends call me Dr. Tam and are always asking for my advice. I am all about health and fitness.”

Suddenly everything came to a halt, and nothing was left but a pulsing silence. We stared at each other. We were thinking the same thing at the same time: woops, did we just stumble into a passion? We both burst out laughing. There was the answer, and the answer was pure delight.

Would she cut off an ear for it? Would she die for it? Probably not. But did she apply herself to it fully? Yes. Did she bring her gifts, talents, intelligence, education and accomplishments, interest and skills to it? Yes. Does she enjoy what she is doing every day? Yes. Is she making a good living and having a good life? Yes.

Are you paying as much attention to the value of your own personal and professional assets as you are to your financial assets? They might be worth something.



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Some Thoughts About Passion

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Bonnie Bell

It’s been a very long time since my last post, but, hey, I’ve been to the Himalayas – more specifically Bhutan – and back: more about that at some other time. Meanwhile, if your interest is piqued, read the article in the current issue of our newsletter, The Opening Bell, called “The Perfect Invitation” at www.bellinvest.com.

But back to my October 7 blog post, “The Dancer, Part 2”, and her “exquisite burden”. Many of you may still be scratching your head about it. Even among people who follow their passions, this degree of determination, dedication, and sense of “calling” is pretty rare. Ever heard of Herzog?

While there are many people who know what their passions are, and follow them to one degree or another, what is much more common, I’m afraid, is the number of people who struggle with the whole concept of passion itself. I have done coaching with many of these people over the years. In fact, they have come to see me for that very reason. They don’t think they have any passions, and they feel terrible about it. They feel defective, as if they are missing a gene or missing out on this intangible source of full life. They think if only they knew what/where this missing link was, they would know what to do with the rest of their lives. They are sad, even depressed. Sometimes, they are mad.

But guess what? We inevitably discover their passions. They just haven’t known how to look.

All of this has me wanting to resurrect an article I wrote for the Piedmont Post a couple of years ago called, “How to Follow Your Passion When You Don’t Know What It Is”. I hope it will open up a fresh conversation about the whole topic of passion. It seems to be on people’s minds and lips.

Meanwhile, before you even read what I have to say on the subject, what do you have to say? Do you have a comment? A story? A frustration? An “exquisite burden”? A dream? I will post your responses and will respond. Until then …



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The Dancer – Part 2

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Bonnie Bell

Exquisite Burden

Danielle, former tiny dancer, current contract engineer (her day job), accidentally stumbled into her bliss as a result of her inexplicable fascination with the nature of consciousness, quantum physics, the search for intelligent life in the universe and related themes.

Then one day, she doesn’t remember why or when, she became consumed by an idea – a very Big Idea, a Vision, really – of the documentary film she would make about all this. Before she knew it, and without conventional training, she was becoming a documentary filmmaker. The Vision had its way with her; it took her.

One of the unorthodox things Danielle and I did together happened a couple of years ago… When we inadvertently discovered during a coaching session that I happened to know personally one of the Nobel Prize-winning physicists she wanted to interview, we embarked on a project of our own to make this meeting happen. After several phone calls and emails the three of us met at his office on the U.C. Berkeley campus.

I wish you or some one other person could have been there to witness this meeting. The sheer contrast between these two brilliant, rare souls is a poem in itself. She, the adorable tiny dancer who looks like she’s about 16; he, the world renowned physicist–white haired, slightly stooped, well into his 80’s–face to face, lost in space, or at least in an incredible conversation about it and about consciousness, the search for intelligent life in the universe, quantum physics, et al. I listened with a few tears glistening in my eyes as I thought about the incredible journeys of these two brilliant, rare souls, and the completely unlikely nature of this pairing.

Afterwards, she and I found a place on campus to get a cup of coffee and sit on a bench in the sunshine for awhile laughing our heads off about what had just taken place. I’m sure we must have high-fived. It seemed as if some magic was at work in the universe to bring us all together in this incredible dream.

But the question of whether or not Danielle will follow this dream was left way back there in the dust somewhere. There’s a sense of calling, meaning, knowing, but the journey is anything but a skip down the lane, which is what some people think it would be like if they found their bliss. She might wish she could lay this burden down at times. She is tired. It’s always a struggle. She needs funding. She needs our periodic conversations to stay the course.

Finding one’s bliss can be more like a burden than a skip down the lane, but this is a beautiful burden – no, an exquisite burden.



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