Dream Job

I'd like to think I'm very good at what I do in the IT field, as a Director/Manager/Architect of Software Development (I don't do that much developing anymore, but know my stuff).

The industry's been rough, though. While my current position is, for lack of a better word, stable, I've gone through a tumultuous history to get there as several other companies became insolvent. I'll spare the full history as I know one of my buddies is already rolling his eyes. It would help though, Mike, if you didn't constitute 50% of my readership and thus wield an enormous amount of clout in shaping the content of my entries.

Hmph.

Anywhoo, before the current gig came along I could see the approaching end of the previous one and started off in a different direction entirely: hypnotherapy. Hypnosis itself is something I've had an interest in since High School, and had even drafted up some of my own highly effective inductions prior to this serious entry in the field. I've had a natural tendency toward therapeutic counseling and psychological analysis for as long as I can remember too. It was a natural step for me to find a mentor in a good educational program and fork over the cash to start the certification process.

I was whipping through the courses, and was just coming up on the Master Hypnotist completion when the job finished falling through and I needed to start in on something else with a higher immediate return on the cash-flow. That's where the current place comes in.

Starting at the new job and all (this is November of 2003) I applied myself full-force to be able to establish myself and truly p0w|\| the arena - there's no reason to do the job poorly after all, especially when it's sustaining the family. But that level of effort hasn't pulled back at all - to the contrary, it's continued to increase. Only recently have I been able to rein it in from the 60-70 hour work week standard to a more respectable 55 on average. It's left me so drained though that I've never completed the master hypnotist cert, and thus have not moved on to the theory and application of therapeutic processes through the medium of hypnosis. I still have all the course material sitting here next to me, but lack the time and energy to complete it: especially now that almost every step in the course requires quite a lot of practice, which would mean coordinating with some test subjects. These aren't hard to find, but getting schedules to match up slows the process down.

Getting back to the intent of this entry, I would love to do this for a living. I've made some choices in the last 6 months so as to have financial requirements out of reach of the average hypnotherapist in the region, so it wouldn't be tenable unless I augmented the income by drafting software for use in the industry or the like (which I would naturally be doing for my own practice as well).

Or - and here's the really juicy part - unless I was writing as well. Doing part-time novel writing combined with part-time hypnotherapy in order to explore two of the niftiest things I've ever dabbled in, and still getting to say good-bye to the rat race. THAT's the most satisfying arrangement I can think of.

Step 1: Get a little more free time.
Step 2: Make some progress on A) writing and B) hypno-certs (mesmerizing breath-mints?)
Step 3: Produce like mad.
Step 4: Self sufficiency.

The procrastination for the perfect incarnation of Step 1 has killed me for the last year. It will continue to do so if I allow it, so I have to rethink it. I've got a 4 day weekend coming up, so I'll bang my noodler against that for a while and see what I come up with.

And that's the useless whining I have today. Maybe I should add:

Step 5: Go to Toshi station for pwr. converters