Janet Attwood: The First Aha
I was happy teaching meditation, truthfully. The work was fun. I enjoyed being around spiritual people, and talking about spirituality was something I could do all day. But I was also worn out from climbing over a fence every morning and sleeping on a floor, so when the people recruiting me mentioned millions of dollars, that landed. I said I was in. I never once stopped to consider whether the actual job suited me. I just figured, fine, let's do it.
The place turned out to be one big room full of cables, with a phone, and that room was where everyone placed engineers into jobs. They handed me a stack of job orders. I sat there. And I sat. And I sat, for a full month, and that phone turned into something I dreaded, because I could not get a single person to agree to anything. It felt awful, especially with everyone around me pulling in piles of money.
There was a bell near the front of the office. Every time a recruiter closed a placement for an engineer, they would dash up front and ring this loud, ridiculous bell. For a whole month it rang and rang for everybody except me. These were my friends, which made it worse. You can picture the feeling. They are too kind to say anything, and you walk in each day knowing you are the one who hasn't rung it. I felt like a complete failure, and I hated it. This is terrible, I kept thinking. I can't take this.
Underneath all of that, I held onto an idea that I was meant for something bigger. My mother used to tell me that. Jannie, she would say, you are here for some greatness. I kept turning that over in my head. I'm here for greatness, sure, but what greatness? Where is it?
Every evening after work I would head to the local meditation center and sit. One night I glanced up at the wall and saw a poster: Yes to Success Seminars, a success seminar happening in San Francisco. I stared at it and thought, that's the thing. I have to go. I need to try something completely different.
So I phoned work and called in sick. I told them I was so sorry, I was terribly ill, and then I drove to the seminar. I took a seat in the front row. A woman began to speak and I was hooked almost at once, because she looked beautiful in every sense. She was glowing. She was lit up about the thing she was describing. Part of what she talked about was living in your integrity and doing the work you love. Listening to her, one thought kept repeating in me: I want to do what she's doing. That was the first aha.