cover image Take Your Soul to Work

Take Your Soul to Work

Tanis Helliwell. Adams Media Corporation, $12.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-1-58062-289-9

Carefully distinguishing between ""work"" and ""a job,"" Helliwell, a Canada-based speaker and management consultant, believes that a job offers the financial means to meet one's obligations while work is what one truly loves. Often, people have to take a job for an extended period of time in order to allow them to work at what they love--whether it is helping to raise children or be an artist. Finding the right balance between the two is essential for contentment, according to Helliwell. To achieve it, she urges readers to recognize and learn how to satisfy the needs of both the soul, which determines one's life purpose, and one's personality, which has the gifts to realize it. Through a combination of visualization exercises and journal writing, she shows readers how to probe their physical, ""etheric"" (a kind of superego), emotional, mental and spiritual states, and how to identify and evaluate their life goals. However, much of Helliwell's advice about articulating the soul's mission, confronting fears, ""cultivating people who feed your soul"" and practicing ""abundance mentality""--which draws on a mix of Eastern spiritualism and the work of Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman and Jack Kornfield--will be familiar to all but beginning readers in this area. Readers hoping for a step-by-step program, however, may be disappointed by what is essentially an overview of the subject of spirituality at work. (Mar.)