The Pursuit of Happiness School in Katoomba, New South Wales | Community organisation

The Pursuit of Happiness School

Locality: Katoomba, New South Wales

Phone: +61 402 959 946

Address: 7 Seventh Avenue 2780 Katoomba, NSW, Australia

Website: adifferentdrummer.com.au/pursuit-of-happiness

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17.01.2022 Work that is rich in gratifying experience, work as self-fulfillment in short, work as vocation, has become the privilege of the few, a distinctive mark of t...he elite, a way of life the rest may watch in awe, admire and contemplate at a distance but experience vicariously. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman captured just how atypical it is to meet people who are aligned to their work and enlivened by it. Unable to accept that work was something to be endured rather than relished, I spoke to hundreds of people about their engagement with their jobs & found that a rarified 1% of people managed to place themselves in roles where they could integrate their values, creativity, passion & a sense of contribution. I came to view this minority as ‘Different Drummers’ who followed their own beat and walked the path of the hero’s journey. This lead me to write a book outlining what is required to walk the narrow path of individuation. My ebook takes a holistic & mythical approach to career direction and It also speaks about how doing so impacts every other aspect of one’s life. While there are innumerable social challenges are being faced today, career misalignment may well be one of the most pressing considering just how much time and energy work consumes. Isn’t it time to develop a vision for more nobility in our careers, personally and collectively? Read some of the foreword here: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au/career-counselling You can also read an excerpt from one of the chapters on the above website.

14.01.2022 Are you one of the 80% who classify yourself as not feeling engaged by your work? It could be worse. In China & Singapore, the figure is 97%. It’s hard to find... your passion when you’re stuck in what is known as a bullshit job. When I worked as a bank teller my job was a mixture of tedium (endlessly counting cash) and anxiety over whether I would meet my daily sales quote by upselling credit cards and loans. Henry David Thoreau captured the essence of these jobs when he said: , , . . Equally disengaging is a burnout role. When I worked as a caseworker with the unemployed, economic rationalism saw my caseload grow over time. Instead of working intensively with someone to enact change, I was pushed to quickly go through the motions in order to tick off the next client. So why do we submit to spending most of our lives doing things we get little enjoyment from? Necessity. Whether we live simply or lavishly, most of us require a certain income. The seduction of affluence has steadily led people to abandon meaningful work. The initial production of automobiles required expert craftsmen who had developed their skills over many years working with bicycles and carriages. Their work was challenging and demanded a great level of technical proficiency. But then Henry Ford introduced automation to lower costs. Initially, workers resisted the numbing assembly line roles. Every time Henry Ford wanted to add 100 workers to his factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963. Wages had to be doubled to entice people to give up satisfying work to endure monotony. Fast forward a century. Jacob Fisker captured the legacy brought about by disconnecting people from their work when he said: . - , , , , ; ' , , , . , . , , , . . . The 1% that counts When we hear the term 1% we tend to think of the recent movement to rebalance the extreme wealth inequality that exists in most countries. While this is an important issue, it could be argued that rectifying the extreme job satisfaction gap is even more important, as wealth doesn’t have a huge correlation to our overall happiness. If around 20% of people feel passionate about their work, then the proportion of these people who would do it for free is far smaller. Professional MotoGP rider Chris Vermeulen once said that motorcycle racing was such a joy for him that if he won the lottery he would continue getting up each day to ride. How many people do you know who would do the same? Read the rest of the article to learn how transformative it is to find your passion and live an integrated life: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au/career-coun/career-retreat

13.01.2022 How familiar are you with your esoteric blueprint? It is the key to fulfillment and finding life direction. Your soul map is revealed largely from your numerolo...gy and astrology charts. Understanding it and then embracing it is the key to contentment and vitality. A political leader can be either a politician (pollster) or a statesman (leader with integrity). Donald Trump is a classic example of the former. His astrological sun sign is Gemini. Ruled by the fast-moving planet of Mercury, this archetype is flexible, versatile, curious and loves variety. The sign is associated with trade and Trump has proven to be one of America’s great dealmakers. It is fairly atypical for a business magnate to go into television. Once Trump tried his hand at that, he next developed a curiosity about politics. Gemini’s are never lost for words. Sociable, outgoing and talkative, they love being surrounded by interesting people. They are also very efficient when communicating with people. As for their enthusiasm, Trump’s campaign motto Make America Great Again went a long way to helping him defy the odds of becoming president. While every sign has its shadow aspect, Geminis are the most famed for their dual nature, as symbolised by twins. Gemini is associated with the exchange of ideas and communication, so it is no surprise that in its unhealthy expression it is well known for mind games. With Gemini being the master of manipulation, it is quite befitting that Trump popularised the term fake news. Being mercurial, it is fickle-minded and always ready to throw tantrums. Trump is constantly at war with social media outlets, recently threatening to announce an executive order pertaining to social media after being censored by them. Trump’s communication abilities were instrumental in him stunning the world by being elected president in 2016. Wanting to report the news, rather than being reported on, Trump frequently expresses his hostility toward journalists by calling them the most dishonest human beings on earth. The great irony, of course, is that his campaign win largely came about due to employing dark advertising. It has been increasingly accepted that social media can be used to get people to vote or to sway them to stay away from the polls. Labelled as weapons-grade persuasion, the medium can divide or unite us depending on the whims of whoever pays to take our digital threads and weave them into a pattern of their choosing. Trump’s Project Alamo campaign, spent a million dollars a day on Facebook ads ahead of the 2016 election. Documentary, The Great Hack, reveals how Trump enlisted Cambridge Analytica to scrape data from millions of Facebook users and used it to target impressionable voters. Read the rest of this article about Trump's blueprint as well as that of the more enlightened statesman, Abraham Lincoln: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au//ast/astrology-numerology

09.01.2022 The most interesting stories, just like the most interesting lives, start out quite forgettable. Consider the Lord of the Rings saga. Frodo Baggins is an incon...sequential person, living in an obscure part of the world, where very little happens. His fellow hobbits spend their lives gossiping, blaming & concealing themselves (not unlike many humans). Myth, as with life, presents us each with a call to adventure. We’re summoned, or invited to take on our power & our authentic self. Frodo’s call occurs when he is visited by an elder called Gandalf. Gandalf gives him the epic task of caring for a ring which can restore the balance of good and evil in the world. Bilbo had long been fascinated by stories of grand adventures but the thought of actually going on one was a different matter. So he initially rejected the offer. Ultimately, there is something irresistible about the call. And so Bilbo seizes his. The great tragedy of life is that most people permanently reject their call. Or as Benjamin Disraeli put it, Most people die with their music still locked up inside them. When we comb through our lives and the events that shape us we can discover moments when we arrived at a crossroads and took the path of least resistance. In ruminating over our individual journeys we can stumble upon recurring themes and find the great narrative of our lives. So many complex factors come together to make us the person we are todaychoices we make, family heritage, the era we live in, the particular culture we immerse ourselves in etc etc. Memoir writer Melissa Gilbert touched upon the complex web that wove her, saying: My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction. Learning how to write a memoir, or simply creating a collection of life story writing pieces can be tremendously illuminating and cathartic. For those interested in a writing course that can help you glean the story in your life while discovering the life in your story, find out more about Writes of Passage: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au//australian-writers-centre

05.01.2022 Normal might be a great setting for a dishwasher but it's a lousy default for a life. https://adifferentdrummer.com.au//133-how-to-start-a-small

04.01.2022 The midlife passage (ages 35-55) is the most treacherous of our lives according to life phases expert, Gail Sheehy. Midlife calm is not a phrase in the lexicon ...but midlife crisis certainly is. Dictionaries define it as: a loss of self-confidence and feeling of anxiety or disappointment that can occur in early middle age. Midlife cycles involve major mood shifts and physiological changes. Menopause for women and men. Most men notice a steep decline in sex drive while many woman experience a letting go of identities forged on appearances. Roles based on people pleasing and gaining societal approval wear thin. A crises of authenticity is just one of many that emerge. The middle years of middle age have been dubbed middlescence. It’s the adult equivalent of the mayhem we experience in adolescence. An example of this can be seen in the recent film, The Professor, starring Johnny Depp. He plays a responsible university professor named Richard who has a wife and family. Struggling with her slumping career and midlife malaise, Richard’s wife has an affair with his boss. Upon learning he has 6 months to live, Richard casts aside every social norm that feels stifling. In his opinion, maturity is really just another word for how much misery you'd swallow. And so he begins doing away with pretence to live boldly and freely. In one conversation his wife says, What happened to us? He replies, What happened to us? Life. If you’re navigating this stage of life and like Richard and the rest of us, don’t feel like you’ve got it all together, take heart. Some native Americans used the concept of the medicine wheel to explain the seasons of our lives. Based on moon cycles they regarded our first 27 years as working through childhood development. From 27-54 the developmental phase was adolescence. Gail Sheehy’s called it provisional adulthood. In the indigenous model, adulthood only commences at around age 55. Quite a contrast to the view of our culture that makes us feel we should have our life path and career direction sorted by the time we leave school at 18. Fast forward thirty years and we end up thoroughly disengaged with our lives. As journalist Bill Moyers recounted: A man said to me once after years of standing on the platform of the subway, ‘I die a little bit down there every day, but I know I am doing so for my family.’ The mythologist Joseph Campbell captured the other extreme, where a person had devoted themselves to a life of striving for what seemed critical only to discover it was at the expense of developing their psyches: There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall. Just as the moon has a waxing phase and a waning phase so do our lives. If we are to flourish during what Carl Jung called the afternoon of our life, we have to have a radical change of focus. Midlife demands that we shed what we’ve outgrown and insists we relegate our egos from being lead role to supporting cast. Should we embrace the changing cycle and grow more introspective rather than mindlessly striving, our second half of life can be both rewarding and one where we leave a legacy of substance. The poet David Whyte wrote a piece which expresses the letting go aspect of midlife where we sit with uncertainty and discomfort, akin to the caterpillar dissolving during chrysalis before rebirthing into something far greater. Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away. What is that thing in you that you will sow and cultivate in midlife so that your harvest years bring about your bloom? You can read more about what is a midlife crisis, signs of midlife crisis and the effect of mid life crises for men & women: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au/wellness-re/midlife-crisis

04.01.2022 The dancer and musician Gabrielle Roth shared some potent wisdom when she said , ... , , , : ? ? ? ? As industry slows, nature grows more vibrant. And as our industriousness wanes, so can our soul-sickness dissipate. This morning I connected with an online group where we each spoke about what has changed in our lives since Covid. Many people shared the same responses. ‘’ .’ ‘ , ’ .’ ‘ 20 .’ People spoke of how clear the air was, how connected they felt and how peaceful life had become. Collectively, we hoped that the gains we’ve made would stay once normality returned. Beauty making was another theme. We were asked what creative work was rising within us and how we could help create a better world. It reminded me of the glorious phrase Maggie Smith’s closed off with in Good Bones, a poem encouraging people not to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the issues we are facing: , ? . Having been bogged down doing things that don’t particularly speak to me, I’ve noticed a shift in the last couple of weeks as I’ve returned to doing life story writing. Events in my past which seemed arbitrary took on a great deal of meaning as I looked at them with awakened eyes. The combination of introspection and writing helps us to view life as a great adventure and privilege. It infuses soul back into our lives. And as the Philosopher, Heraclitus so sagely pointed out , , . A facilitator in this mornings group shared a most exquisite poem. It was written recently to capture the zeitgeist. You can read it in this blog post: https://adifferentdrummer.com.au/about-life-story