Every morning when you wake up there is a part of you that absolutely dreads going to work. Work has become this enormous burden that you carry around with you, dragging you down, holding you back. Yet, you get up and go because you are responsible, there are bills to pay, you need food and housing to survive and working is part of that cycle. Although it is a battle, you find your way to work and every day runs into the next with each day becoming more depressing than the last. There must be more to your life than just this job.

At work, you constantly look for ways out of your situation. You try for different promotions thinking that if only you could get out of that particular job you are in that then things would be better. Unfortunately, you rarely get the opportunity to find this out because you are passed over and other people get the job you try for. Your attitude is showing through and preventing you from climbing higher on the corporate ladder. Now you really are stuck.

The next step is to look outside of work and you start seeking other ways to find a way to make a living without it crushing the life out of you. There must be another way and you are desperate to find it. There are all kinds of advice books and some of them have interesting information but there is one huge problem. You already have a “good” job. If you leave it there will be a huge loss and not in terms of the burden that it has become but in terms of the benefits that it offers. The job is secure, everyone knows you already and it pays benefits. While you certainly could use more money, this job pays “well” and that isn’t something to give up lightly.

So even though the information available offers some enlightenment and may stir you a little bit, the known evil, (current job) remains the lesser of two evils. Staying in a position that you have come to hate and even abhor is still the sensible thing to do. After all, it pays the bills.

The main factor is that despite reading all this information on other career paths, the main thing that strikes you is that you still don’t know what to do. You have never had a plan. Some people appear to have been born knowing what they would do with their life. You just fell into everything and went where the wind carried you. You know there is a better way, obviously having that passion did something for those other people but so far, you haven’t managed to find that elusive factor that stirs your soul deeply enough to leave the known world to explore into the unknown realms. At least not without some sort of security in the works and your existing job is that security.

People fear a lot of things in their lives. Change is one of them and another is success. Success is harder than failure. Indeed, failure comes quite easily. Staying in the job you hate is a form of failure but it is acceptable because you still are being responsible. The bills continue to get paid; you have a roof over your head and food in the house. While it isn’t reaching for the stars, you won’t get burned either.

Success would change your life and in ways that you aren’t even clear on but it definitely would break the routine. Routine is safe and always has been. What would you do with success if you had it? Success is more than just making a lot of money, it has responsibilities all of its own. If success were equivalent with money, all the big lottery winners would be successful, but time and again, it has been proven that these winners often lose everything they have and end up living on Social Security and Food Stamps. You can read about some of them at www.Bankrate.com.

So success isn’t a sudden deluge of money although money is often a part of what we recognize as success. It actually is more than that. Success has to be worked for and planned on. It is important that you actually see yourself in the state that you will be in the future if you do find success. By putting yourself in that state of mind, you will help yourself in more than one way. Seeing yourself already successful will help you to start planning for that success and accommodating your lifestyle to it.

Plan in stages and write down goals, no matter how absurd they may seem to you at the time. As long as you let your imagination be stifled by your current reality, it will be nearly impossible for you to change that reality. As you start to create a mindset that welcomes success, your attitude and behavior will start reflecting what you want to bring into your life.

The important thing is to take action to make it happen but your action doesn’t have to be the leap of faith off of a tall building. Instead, take baby steps and somewhere along the way, you will find the path you have been seeking. Then you can move up to strides. Like all things, it takes time to achieve but it will happen sooner than you think. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Start chewing.