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Brave Work is the book I would have wanted to read when I was 17 and fell into a depression because I couldn’t find the wherewithal to adapt to yet another new school. It’s the book I would have wanted beside my bed at 25 when I decided to leave a tyrannical boss, at 28 when I decided to start my own business, at 30 when I left my marriage, and at 38 when my business collapsed. In fact, Brave Work is the book I would want as a lifelong companion, always within reach to remind me where I am on my journey, and to give me the courage to go forth and do what I am meant to do.
Brave Work weaves together two perspectives. One is based on the real experiences of ordinary working people who are going through changes at work, and the other is based on our mythic experience of life as a heroic journey. The first perspective is supplied by Anna Simon, a career counselor who has listened deeply to the stories of thousands of people over the course of her long career. The mythological perspective is my contribution, informed by a deep appreciation for the hero’s journey as it is expressed in myths and folktales from around the world, and in the writings of wise and exemplary people like Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Rollo May, and Victor Frankl.
Anna and I came together in the mid 1990s, when the stability of the work world had been thrown into upheaval. Driven by technology and globalization, organizations had started downsizing and scrapping jobs by the thousands. The media reported wave after wave of layoffs—affecting dozens of occupations, including nurses, teachers, printers, secretaries and managers. It wasn’t just jobs that were vanishing, but entire fields. People found themselves stranded in mid-career with nowhere to go—plunged into a predicament that was expressed long ago by the poet Dante, who began his famous Inferno with the lines:
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
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