My Turning Point

By Lynn Scheurell

Everyone has a turning point. And mine came as a result of virtually everything associated with a job that I had in 1997. Now it almost seems like a dream… but then, I was searching for something to fill me up. I had just taken a job with a consulting firm in Chicago two months earlier and my supervisor was taking me under his wing. And then I got recruited to move to a start-up .com in Salt Lake City, Utah. I wasn’t even unpacked yet, and yet somehow found myself packing up and moving again. I’d never been to Utah, so I had no idea where I was going. I’d rented an apartment sight unseen over the internet. I didn’t know anyone there to help me unload my truck, but I firmly looked past the details and drove for three days myself to get there (hauling my car behind me).

On the way, I called my new colleagues to ask for help and, not surprisingly, no one was available. After all, they didn’t know me yet and it wasn’t their issue. I drove straight to my new apartment, saw some young guys moving in themselves and paid them to help me. With one day to get myself oriented, feeling completely alone, cut off from support systems nearly 2000 miles away, reeling from a second huge life change in as many months , not knowing anything about the city, my job or how things were going to turn out, I walked into the chaos of start-up internet company.

Over the next fifteen months or so, I lived on shifting sand. In retrospect, I don’t know how I did it. Not only was I adjusting to a new life, had my car broken into (my purse, company laptop, and cash all taken), and feeling the shock of swimming in a social culture of which I wasn’t ever going to be a part, the leader of the company was a visionary trying to make a buck so our jobs changed on a daily basis. We went wherever his head did… I did everything from customer service to sales presentations to administrative support and more. I didn’t know my place, because it was changing and because I’m a generalist – I see the bigger picture. I know what needs to get done, and, as a life-long entrepreneur, I know what it takes to make things happen. As a professional catalyst now, that comes in very handy. Back then, it made me someone to rely on when they needed and a maverick when they didn’t as someone who didn’t fit in any box within a company that had changing, dotted-line bordered boxes.

At any rate, as people jockeyed for security, internal competition became the name of the game. And since that’s not a game that I knew the rules for (either then or now), I lost. I was the first of an eventually long line of lay-offs. Mine happened on December 15, 1998. I now consider it the greatest day of my life.

For the next three months, I laid on my couch in depression. I didn’t know what to do. By then, I was renting a house from a married (now former) colleague to whom I had a dysfunctional attraction. I had no financial reserves or support. I felt betrayed and couldn’t bear to think about getting a new job (since that would just set me up for more pain). I knew then that I was outside the ‘old’ way of doing things. But I didn’t know what my new way would be… all I knew is that this was my moment. This is when I HAD to do something different because I didn’t want to return to this place ever again, where my life situation had been dictated by someone else. Where my life force energy had gone into building someone else’s dream and had been ultimately devalued. And where I lost myself.

That’s when I did the only thing that felt right – I followed the energy. Over and over, I’d been seeing references to Feng Shui – a newspaper ad, a billboard, a story on tv. I approached the teacher of a practitioner training course, told her that I was supposed to take her class but couldn’t pay for it, and she let me work the course tuition off in her store. It was the gift that started giving me back my life. And that’s where I re-connected to the one thing that now guides and supports me living every day since – my conscious connection to Source energy.

Now, more than a decade later, I see that what felt like my most disastrous day after a string of disastrous days in that moment, overflowing with fear of not knowing what was next, replete with feeling that I had hit bottom in my career, and had used up all my resources and wouldn’t make it… THAT was my great gift from the Universe. It was my turning point to get on the right track with living and being and expressing my true purpose. And I’m happy to report that my life has been just that since my turning point.

Here’s my one piece of advice for anyone feeling the fear of a particular situation. Feel it and then use it to find your turning point. Your life will never be the same.

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Lynn Scheurell, Creative Catalyst, works with soul-driven entrepreneurs to gain clarity and strengthen their inner systems for dramatic business results. She teaches simple strategies to increase perception, align the ‘doing’ with the ‘being’ of true life purpose and how to express that through entrepreneurial business. Download a free report to learn “The Seven Deadly Mistakes That Keep Soul-Driven Business Owners from Making Money” at www.mycreativecatalyst.com.

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