A year ago, I recognized that I was, and had been for a long time, gratefully accepting a paycheck while working a job I did not enjoy. From that light bulb moment, this website was born in concept even though it took me well over thirteen months to evolve the idea into reality. One great motivating factor was the termination of my two year plus employment on July 24, 2009.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like and thoroughly enjoy the people I worked with, loved the company’s mission and goals and feel grateful for the experience. However, since re-entering the workplace in 2004, I’ve mentally felt like the round peg being forced into a square hole and while I’m very good at what I’ve been doing (300% increase in salary in four years and promotion to management to boot!), I’ve not derived a lot of personal satisfaction from my work. Add to that the 70 plus hour work weeks on average, and I’ve spent a lot of downtime vegetating in front of the television or with a book in hand and little to no time actually figuring out a few crucial questions that have been floating around my brain for well over a decade.
These questions can be summed up as:
- Who am I really?
- What do I want from life?
- What is/are my passion(s)?
- How can I make a living while living passionately, finding personal fulfillment and figuring out what I like to do and what I want from life?
I know, I know… everyone has these questions, right? And everyone is out there punching the 9 to 5 plus clock in order to make the money needed. Passions are for the really rich or really poor and the bulk of us, the in-between, just hope we have enough time and energy on the weekends to cater to our likes and wants. Right?
Not exactly. First, I can’t believe it has to be that way. I know many people who live a life following their passions and pursuing their individual goals. Second, I think it is easier to know what we don’t want than to figure out what it is we do want. When once to describe my perfect job, I was only able to express all the things I did not want – my perfect job was an amalgam of dislikes, irritants and clients I wished to avoid and based entirely on negativity. Not once did I – nor could I – provide a positive description of the kind of job that would be perfect for me for two reasons: 1) I have no idea what I want and 2) I did know that the options available to me at that time were boundaries confining me to a job or jobs that I had no passion for doing.
Since I now have copious amounts of time on my hands, I decided to use this website as a personal journal to discover the things I do like. My goal is nothing short of figuring out who I am as a person and what passions, goals and positive traits make up that person. And hopefully, I’ll figure out a way to live passionately and completely and end up personally fulfilled and with a paycheck to boot.
It could happen, right?
Here’s what I do know. My name is Jeri Gloege. I am obsessed with my daughter’s freckles, making the perfect cup of coffee, and finding the perfect shade of green, and taking a picture of it. I have a love/hate relationship with my hair. I live with my ex-husband, my ten year old daughter, one orange tabby who hates cats and one black lab who is obsessed with licking his little, orange, fuzzy counterpart. The rest I’ll figure out as I go along.
