Chaos at work is inevitable. Perhaps you interact with difficult colleagues, are overloaded with projects and impossible timelines, and encounter frequent leadership transitions and restructurings. While workplace unrest is exasperating, it also presents you with a valuable opportunity to learn a lot about yourself – and it’s not by virtue of pain and suffering!

Mindfulness is the process of allowing intuitions from our higher wisdom to flow into our awareness. Our higher wisdom is the part of us that is endlessly intelligent and infinitely compassionate towards ourselves and others. Our higher wisdom resides “at the mountain top”: It has a panoramic view of our life and always knows where we need to go next. It’s the part of us that we want to lean into and trust because it is our true master.

Questions are powerful. You may not always be aware of the questions circling your consciousness, but if you pay close attention you’ll begin to notice how they constantly poke and nudge you. A big part of claiming your personal power has to do with becoming mindful of your questions. In other words, own your questions.

If your professional and educational journey to date has felt boring or unfulfilling, you might believe that you simply don’t have a passion. Perhaps you’ve embraced the mantras that work is about duty over pleasure, ‘no pain no gain’, and to just suck it up until you reach the weekend… or retirement.

When you suppress your gifts or lean into gifts you wish you had, you may find yourself in ugly places. You might experience job burnout or apathy. You may feel underrecognized or undervalued at work. You may experience anxiety or depression from a persistent feeling of emptiness. You might get “serially fired”, be chronically unemployed or wander aimlessly from one job to the next. Or, you might practice professional contortionism – painfully bending yourself out of shape to suit the requirements of an ill-fitting job.

If passion is a flame that burns hot and bright, why do most of us struggle to connect with it, name it, and live it? While passion is a critical part of our careers, we cannot chase after it for the same reason we cannot chase after happiness or love. For most of us, passion is impossible to pin down because it is big, elusive and intimidating.