I'll never forget the day I went
to my first teaching assignment in Stockholm. I just got hired as a freelance
Business English teacher and I took the train out to a suburb to the company I
would be teaching for, Telia AB. Just as I was walking up to the building where
I would have my first class, it hit me....
About 11 years earlier I was
working at a Japanese trading company in Stockholm doing administrative work. I
had a lot of contact with customers in Sweden and was the middle person in the
purchasing of telephone cables from Japan. Our biggest customer was Telia (at
that time it was called Televerket). One of the men I had a lot of contact with
told me once that he was taking English lessons that his company provided him
with.
I remember thinking that teaching
English at a company was something that I wanted to do. I wasn't very fulfilled
doing the work I was doing at the time, but didn't see how I could teach
English since I had no training. I quickly gave that idea up. A few years went
by, a relationship ended and I found myself back in California feeling lost and
confused. Finally, I decided it was time to go back to school. I did and earned
my MA in Teaching English as a Second Language.
After earning my degree I was
ready for another adventure. I found a job in Finland and taught at the
university of Turku for a couple of years. This was a huge challenge and a
wonderful learning experience. While at the university, the idea of teaching
Business English kept coming back to me so in 2002, I decided on a new
adventure, going off to Stockholm to see if I could get a job doing just that.
As I stood there that day ready
to begin my teaching career in Stockholm, I realized that this was the exact
company and the exact location where my customer had been receiving English
lessons many years before. It struck me how the plan had been unfolding the
whole time without me even being conscious of it.
I've had a few of these
experiences in my life and they have taught me the importance of being clear
about what we want. As I've become stronger in myself, I've realized also how
we can speed up the process of achieving our dreams by talking about what we
want, writing about what we want and even living as if we already have what we
want. This last one is key as it brings up the FEELINGS of having what you want
- which helps the energy wrapped around your goal find you much more easily.
Sound a little spooky? Yeah,
maybe. But I can tell you, that day as I realized the synchronicity of what had
happened, I knew that I was EXACTLY where I wanted to be doing EXACTLY what I
wanted to be doing. I also knew that with even more awareness of what I was
choosing to focus on, pretty much anything was and IS possible.
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