The advice to do what you love comes at you from everywhere and breaks against simple arithmetic. A woman has rent, a loan and children, and she cannot walk out of a job she dislikes into nothing. Peruquois offers a different question for that position and answers it with her own history. This was described by Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
The question that works before you quit
“We cannot always start doing what we love right away,” says Peruquois. Sometimes a woman does not know what that work is. Sometimes she knows, and switching immediately is impossible, because it needs time to train or money to launch.
So her first question sounds different from the usual one: “can I do what is in my hands right now with love?”
It is a question about the present, and answering it requires neither savings nor permission. It changes how a woman stands inside her circumstances, and that is usually where everything else starts.
Her own position
Peruquois describes this period directly and without romance.
“I started living independently early, at 15. I had to go to school and work at a fast food place to survive. It was hard,” she recalls.
Then the task got harder. “Later, to live and also pay for singing lessons, I had to work as a waitress,” says Peruquois. Singing was the only goal the whole arrangement turned around.
“But I understood that I was on the way to the work of my dreams, to singing,” she says. Out of that understanding came her question about how to do the current job with love.
The choice she made
Her first decision was about the schedule.
“I chose the most prestigious restaurant in the city, one that only worked dinner service,” says Peruquois. That mattered: evening work freed the morning, and in the morning she studied voice with a teacher and on her own.
Women looking for a way to learn something new usually run into a shortage of time. Here the time came from comparing options inside the same occupation. One waitressing job would have taken the whole day, another left half of it free.
Her second decision was about money. A prestigious restaurant meant higher tips for the same hours, and that directly determined how many singing lessons she could afford.
People as a school
Her main shift was in how she related to the work itself.
“Then I decided for myself that this was my school of communicating with people, and people are always interesting if you ask them the right questions, if you highlight their best qualities. That is how I began to work with love,” says Peruquois.
The condition is hidden in the middle of that sentence. People become interesting through two actions: asking them the right questions and highlighting what is best in them. Without those actions a dining room stays a stream of faces, and all that is left at the end of a shift is fatigue.
This works in any profession with people in it. Accounting, teaching, a clinic, a store, a support desk. Attention to the person in front of you turns a repeating day into a live one, and the tiredness at the end of it is of a different quality.
What it gave her
Peruquois names two results and starts with the one that is not money.
“It was an excellent school of life, it helped me understand people really well, it gave me the ability to be open, loving and attentive to them,” she says.
Understanding people served her later on stage and in her work with women in full rooms. A skill picked up in a restaurant turned out to be a professional instrument in work that was only on the horizon at the time.
The second result was financial. In return she earned the highest tips of any server there, and given how expensive and prestigious the restaurant was, that was serious money.
The order matters. Her relationship to the work changed first, and the money and the skill grew out of that.
Where the line runs
This story turns easily into a demand to love any job, and that is not the conclusion Peruquois draws.
“Do you want to find your superpower? For that you have to move out of survival and into love in every one of these areas,” she says. Survival is a state she calls worth leaving, and work is only one of its districts.
The restaurant was an intermediate step for her, with a clear term and a clear purpose. It financed her singing lessons and gave her the morning to practice, and in that sense it served singing from day one.
The difference between a step and a trap runs along one line. A step leads where the woman is going. A trap takes years and brings nothing closer, and the honest answer to that question is usually known right away.
What it adds up to
A woman who has asked herself about love for her current work finds more freedom inside that job than she expected. The schedule can be reconsidered, the place can be traded for a better one at the same skill level, and the way she meets the people in front of her can change in a single day.
Peruquois walked this road from a school-age shift taken for survival to work of her own, and the step toward it was that same unloved job, done with love.
If you want to hear your own work and build a road to it out of what you already have, take the Peruquois course How to Hear and Follow the Voice of Your Calling, available on her website under Courses.
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