Build Your Opus
The Antidote to the Uncertainty of It All
Live Your Opus is a transformative perspective, process and approach that you can bring to your life, work or business. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter and upgrade to access invitations to live online sessions with Janine, conversations with special guests, private community discussion threads, and more. Thanks and see you inside!
Are you asking existential questions?
Have you ever wondered what โitโ all adds up toโyour experiences, expertise, and the many moments you choose work over something else in your life?
If so, youโre not alone. Grab a cup of tea or coffee, pull up a chair, and letโs talk.
Iโm seeing a trend among the high-achieving, change-making women Iโm speaking withโcorporate leaders, start-up/scale-up leaders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and creative professionals.ย They are asking powerful questions about the trade-offs theyโre making as they work.
Theyโre asking what โitโ all adds up to.ย
In a conversation just this week, a client surfaced numerous essential questions as she reflected on her tenure at a job: What am I getting from this other than a paycheck? When I walk away, what will I end up with? And, what impact am I really generating in the world as a result? Is this it? Or is there more?
Another client, motivated to unearth the reasons why he ultimately chose one career path over another despite years of academic study, landed hard on his legacy and the impact he feels called to have in his community versus his chosen field. This realization has helped him to crystallize a vision for his work over the next five years.
And yet another client has, over the last year, stepped into action to address the questions she was asking. Sheโs replaced her corporate income with a portfolio of purpose-driven consultancies and engagements; sheโs generating her own IP, publishing case studies, and driving great impact in the organizations she serves.
If owning your time is the ultimate measure of success, what does your time and effort at workโin a job or within your own businessโadd up to for you and the issues you care about?
Legacy, Purpose, and Identity
Ultimately, the existential questions Iโm referring to are about legacy:
What impact will my life and work have on others? On my community? On the world? What special contribution will I make with my time here on earth?
Equally, they are about purpose:ย
What issues do I care about? What challenges might I want to solve? What opportunities or contributions do I want to make?
Finally, they are also about identity:ย
Who am I? What are my unique experiences, skills, knowledge, perspectives or ways of being? How might I draw upon these to make a difference? What is โsuccessโ to me? What else do I need to feel like I am achieving?
Existential Questions & Workplace Trends
Youโve likely read about several workplace trends, including The Great Resignation, The Great Reshuffle, and Quiet Quitting, which have made headlines worldwide over the past several years.ย
Collectively, these are โa convergence of trends some decades in the making that culminate in a changed relationship between individuals and organisationsโ (McGowan & Shipley, 2023). NB: If you want a good summary of these trends, check out this article.
Far from being simply headlines, these still-active global trends, coupled with a steady increase in available jobs globally, set the broader context in which women choose to leave the workplace en masse, known as The Great BreakUp.ย
Looking across, whatโs clear is that peopleโs perspectives globally have shifted from โwhat we do for a living to how we want to liveโ (Moss, 2023). This is especially true for women, who continue to leave jobs, including leadership roles, at high rates.
Other research has dug into why women leave. The five leading workplace reasons are prospects for career progression, organisational culture, support from their line manager, amount of work, and the day-to-day work.ย
However, my research and conversations with women indicate that women's issues with work today run deeper than headlines suggestโsignificantly deeper.ย
In addition to how we want to live, high-achieving women are also thinking critically about:
who they are or who they want to become,ย
the impact they want to have, andย
what else they want to get out of it all (e.g. personal fulfilment, money, a stage, their own IP, reputation, notoriety, etc.).
If these existential questions are being asked by women en masse, then the gap between individuals and employers may be significantly wider than headlines or trends suggest.
And if thatโs the case, then neither the issues we face nor that gap will be fully addressed by focusing only on fixing the five leading workplace reasons women leave. (I am not saying these should not be addressed; they must be addressed, but doing so may not be enough to reverse trends.)
Perhaps the antidote to our deep issues with work requires a deeper solution: If what matters is this bigger picture of what โitโ all adds up to, then a solution is for us to craft our lives, careers and businesses in a much more deliberate wayโstarting today.
In many ways, this is a logical next step for humanity in the future of work. Rather than react to the various mega factors affecting everyoneโs working lives (e.g., longer lifespans, automation, and climate change), weโll increasingly need to drive and adapt our lives and careers deliberately.
But hereโs the kickerโnothing we do in preparation for work todayโschooling, university, certifications, internships, typical work-based professional development programsโhelps us raise our consciousness or think critically about who we are or who we want to be, how we want to live, the impact we want to have, and anything else we might want to get from the time and effort we put into our lives, careers or businesses. These topics require support and some helpful tools and frameworks to explore.
And, despite the broader workplace trends, itโs difficult, if not impossible, for most people to walk away from a well-paid job without lining up work equally as well-paid. Therefore, most will grapple with these massive existential questions while managing their lives, working full-time, or running their businesses, a challenging task for sure.ย
The Antidote: Build Your Opus
โThe best time to build your lifeโs work, your Opus, is now.โ - Janine Mathรณ
Over the last few years, as Iโve asked big questions of myself and others and reorganized the focus of my life and career, Iโve become intrigued by people who are building a body of work and/or a way of living over a longer period of time.
People I now refer to as those building their lifeโs work, or their Opus.
Iโm learning the art of building my life and the work I create around it from an intentional, deliberate place, and taking the long view, allowing space for serendipity and lifeโs natural ebb and flow.
This is a dramatically different way to approach life and career or business building than Iโve previously encountered, and itโs taking me practice over time.
Engaging in this way has meant thinking deeply about and answering some of those critical existential questions in order to determine the outcomes Iโm after and how I might want to attain them. And then figuring out and building the requisite skillsets, mindsets and habits to support me in working towards those outcomes.
Nobody is successful overnight, and itโs never too late to begin. Take the long view and build your Opus one step at a time.
How might your perspective on your life or career shift if you think as though youโre building your lifeโs work, your Opus?ย
Do you feel less stressed? Or more?ย
More focused? Or less?
Iโve spent the past six months piloting different ways to adapt what Iโve learned and expert research and tools Iโve leveraged along the way.ย ย
For me and the clients to whom Iโve also introduced this thinking, taking the long view thinking about building our Opus has been a game changer.ย
The pressure or stress decreases as we move from short to long-term thinking.
The questions we ask of ourselves change from near-term reactionary questions, or framing about โsmallโ situations at work or in life, to deeper questions about our intent and the place of these situations in the bigger picture.
Our commitmentโto ourselves and how we show upโchanges as we show up with more curiosity, less judgment, and more willingness to direct our thinking rather than mindlessly going along.
Our actions changeโas we become less afraid of being bold because we know where weโre going and the impact a single bold move can have on our speed of travel. We begin to seek experiences and cultivate relationships that move us towards our bigger goal or outcome and help us generate the impact we want sooner.
One client has started responding to things that come up at work from the point of view of her future self, who has achieved the outcomes she desires, and thatโs been a powerful shift in prioritising and decisionmaking.
Are youโor is someone you knowโasking what โitโ will all add up toโyour experiences, expertise, and the many moments you choose work over something else?
If so, think of your life and work as your Opus, the only one youโll ever create.
Slow down to speed up, sort your direction, sit with the existential questions, take the long view, and then see how youโand your actionsโbegin to change.
If youโd like some help and support working through existential questions like the ones Iโve mentioned here, send me a message, and letโs chat about how we might work together.
You may also be interested in joining Project Opus, an intimate group of high-achieving women who will meet for ten weeks in the new year to develop their Opus further.
These are women who have
stepped into the arena of entre-or solopreneurship or are creative professionals, or
who've set themselves the next-level challenge of staying in the traditional workforce to build their own (not so secret) agenda, bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to their careers, ensuring they generate impact & achieve their own success in a specific area.
All of them are building their careers around rich, real lives.
In 10 weeks, we will travel through four separate yet interrelated stages: Connect, Dream, Compose, and Embark. Each member will:
develop a clear vision, strategy, and plan for our life and our work or business,
explore & adopt critical skillsets, mindsets, energy, and habits to support,
cultivate our ability to communicate these to others and take them into the world with a newfound confidence and spark, and
prepare to navigate potential barriers and opportunities with ease.
This transformation process is anchored in your strengths and draws on elements of peer-reviewed, evidenced-based methods, including Appreciative Inquiry, Stanford Life Design, the work of William Bridges and Hermania Ibarra, the Blue Zones, Annie McKee, and others, and proprietary tools Iโve developed and used with success.
Members will enjoy a mix of 90-minute workshops and group coaching sessions held one evening per week over Zoom and one 1:1 coaching session. I'm enrolling for the program now and offering those who enroll by 4th December three additional 1:1 sessions and early-bird pricing. Please reach out if youโd like to learn more.
