AUTHOR: Passion, Fulfillment Key to Success, Not Money Hamilton Journal-News Jennifer White has an energetic voice and a boisterous laugh that echoes as she discusses what her life was like before she started to live. She was success in a suit. She was working her way up the corporate ladder. She had a nice car and made money. Her beeper was constantly singing and her cell phone constantly ringing. She worked for a Fortune 500 company for 60 hours a week and devoted the rest of her time to a business she had part ownership of. But one day her life changed as her husband told her point blank that he did not like who she was becoming. "I thought I was successful until my husband helped me realize that what was missing was fulfillment," White said. She quit her prestigious job and focused all of her energy on her business, something she had always been too busy to do before. I never noticed that we were losing money because I was too busy, she said. After her business failed she went into consulting. White used her consulting time to redesign her entire life. She focused her energy and found what she was good at and did it with "brilliance" and "passion," she said. The steps she took to turn her work-obsessed ways into more productivity and less actual work are chronicled in her new book, "Work Less, Make More." The book is a self-help tutorial for people, who similar to White,spend all of their time trying to be successful without living their lives. The book follows her most recent career change from marketing consultant to success coach and the building of the JWC Group, a success coaching firm. The JWC Group helps people reach their full potential and become more successful. In her book she challenges people to change the way they live their lives and how they define success. "Work Less Make More" is about choosing how to live your life, everything is a choice, sometimes they are hard choices," she said. People do not have to quit their jobs or pick new careers to redesign their lives like I did, she said. "In my life I had to, to wake up," she said, "I was very extreme." But her extreme ways have paid off. White now has the time to garden, to paint and to nurture her marriage as well as her friendships. She only works during the week and rarely does she work past 6:30 pm. Business traveling is limited to two times a month. She does not own a beeper or a cellular phone. "This does not mean my life is perfect. My life is not perfect, but now my life evolves around my life, not work," White said. She ultimately would like her clients to switch their focus from logging hours and accumulating money to living their lives. One of her success stories is a working mom in Boston who went from working 10-hour days, seven days a week, to working five days a week while doubling her income. This working mother has found time to spend with her daughter while recently being named a partner in a real estate firm. All of this occurred, White said, in twelve months time. Success for White means something entirely different today than it did a few years ago. Success is "when you wake up the part of you that is inspired about the day, living the life you most want to lead. Time and money do not define success." The future for White is simple for now. She wants to finish another book and to continue to help people find out what success means to them, to help them "Work Less and Make More" and to find their lives like she has found hers. Copyright ©1998 Hamilton Journal-News. |