Putting Passion to Work : Bring Vitality to Career by Finding the ‘Child’ in You, Author Says

You’re stuck. You’re making a living, but work seems a boring dead end. You want change, but you’re not sure what you want to do or whether you’d be good at anything else. And, after all, you’ve got responsibilities.

But before you shuffle back to that job, listen to Shefra Williams-Sam:

“There is an undiscovered and untapped Klondike of meaning and purpose and direction in the passion of a life’s work, ready to produce for you an unfathomable return on your time, energy, desire and effort,” she says.

And the way to find this passion, she says, is to forget for a while that you are an adult.

“You have to find the incredible child in you, the authentic part of you that’s always been there--creativity, imagination, risk, tenacity--things that were there before someone said, ‘That’s not OK,’ or ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ ” Williams-Sam says.

Williams-Sam, 40, of Anaheim, details her prescription for career fulfillment in her book, “Flying With Two Wings: Finding and Living Your Passion--for People Who Believe They Deserve to Love Their Work and Make Money at It.”

Williams-Sam, who runs the Center for Business and Professional Development in Costa Mesa, will be one of the speakers at the Southern California Conference on Women to be held Tuesday through Thursday at the Anaheim Marriott. The conference will focus on personal and career development strategies for women. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, psychologist/author Toni Grant and actress Linda Evans are among those scheduled to speak.

Traditional job aptitude testing and career counseling don’t go far enough for many people, Williams-Sam says.

“With some test data that says you are or you should be this, nobody’s going to rush into the unknown . . . They need to feel that passion to give them the impetus to act.”

Some of her clients make a complete change in careers.

Williams-Sam describes a woman who, until age 50, had been a housewife.

“She had totally blanked out being a ‘writer,’ but she was very imaginative when she was little. She was raised on a farm and would just daydream and ponder in her head.

“She would write and create stories in her head, never putting anything down on paper, but now she’s taking her imagination and bringing it to life.”

Others can be on the right track in their careers but need to find the impetus to think more creatively about their potential.

Williams-Sam writes in her book of a purchasing supervisor for a hospital-care products company who was using only bits of her childhood passions: buying and selling. As a child, she also took great pleasure organizing her friends in play activities she devised.

She now is marketing director of a company making recreational toys. She still deals with buying and selling but now with a product that reflects her childhood job.

“The more you are able to express and create, the greater your feeling of passion,” Williams-Sam says.

The first step in Williams-Sam’s counseling is to jog the client’s memory of childhood.

Most people say, at first, they can remember very little, and much of that is negative.

To get to the positive experiences that she says fuel adult passions, Williams-Sam uses various prompting techniques.

For instance, she asks a client to describe something easy to remember, such as the front yard of the childhood home. Initial, unemotional memories quickly trigger memories of feelings and experiences in the front yard.

Once primed, clients are asked to write a 15-page autobiography of childhood up to age 12, focusing on games, places, roles, fantasies and other pleasurable experiences.

“They’re shocked,” she says. “They have forgotten these things. They have forgotten their creativity and imagination. They actually remember, they actually go back and feel the feelings and say, ‘Wow, that’s neat.’ I coach that feeling along.”

Williams-Sam then analyzes the content of the autobiography, looking for recurring themes or patterns.

Those are then grouped into qualities the client possessed as a child, such as creativity, persuasiveness, organization and the abilities to perform and analyze.

“We now have the emotional basis for who you are,” she says. “We can use that then to come up with a plan to get you into an environment that maximizes your qualities.”

Williams-Sam says she combines standard job aptitude tests with the results of her “passion” quest to suggest career alternatives to clients.

Williams-Sam says she developed her approach to counseling others from her own experience of lacking a clear sense of purpose in her early adulthood.

She was raised in a highly religious, conservative family in Oklahoma City.

Williams-Sam left Oklahoma to attend Biola University with the idea of being a missionary, but she left Biola after three years and spent a year selling clothes at May Co. in Los Angeles.

“I remembered that I used to sneak into my family’s garage and put on an old fox fur that my mother never wore,” she says. “I found that I enjoyed being visible, selling clothes. I still didn’t realize that this might have something to do with my work.”

She enrolled at USC, and a summer job selling religious books in Tacoma, Wash., proved to be a pivotal experience.

“I was a black girl selling books, and it didn’t matter. People embraced the values I represented, they embraced me. I felt good about myself. I could perform. But I still hadn’t made the connection that this could be my work, that I could make a living inspiring people to do things.”

She graduated from USC and went to work for the city of Long Beach in the department responsible for oil and tidelands.

“I was following my father’s script,” she says. “He worked for the federal government as a sprinkler system inspector. But tidelands just didn’t compute as what I wanted.”

Williams-Sam was at the same frustrated juncture at which she now finds her clients when, in 1979, she attended a motivational lecture for city employees.

“I heard that you could make a living at what turned you on, and suddenly it all came together for me,” she says. “I realized I could connect my emotional feelings with skill in the marketplace.”