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Living your purpose is the key to your fulfillment. When you embrace your life purpose, you commit your effort to what you’re best able to do. And this has infinite positive outcomes.
Living your life purpose blossoms a sense of wellness throughout your entire life. You experience true harmony because you’re not emotionally invested in any particular outcome and so you’re better able to make lemonade when life gives you lemons.
Each and every one of us wrestles with a nagging sense of unfulfillment until we understand that it’s in our power to create our happiness and to live our passion.
For example, if I believe my actions and interactions make no impact, then I’ll have a negative perception of my life inside and outside of my workplace. Or, if I perceive myself as a victim in all circumstances ― and feel as though the world sets me up to knock me down ― I will shy away from circumstances that might prove my belief otherwise. Instead, I’ll likely create situations that prove I’m at the world’s mercy. This perspective will leave me blaming others, feeling resentful and stuck.
On the other hand, if I believe that my actions have the potential to make a positive impact, then I’ll feel more positive about my life, more excited by my choices, and – ultimately – more fulfilled and satisfied. Moreover, if I see a situation that is dangerous, negative, or hurtful, I’ll feel it’s possible for me to take action towards a positive outcome. This creates a virtuous cycle. Over time, I’ll see the net effect of my positive actions and will likely find it easier to face challenging circumstances in a positive way. This makes a profound difference in my life and the lives of others.
So, what does this cycle of positive action have to do with Life Purpose? Well, in order to move toward your life purpose, you need to feel as though what you’re doing makes a difference. Otherwise, there is no reason to bother.
Whatever it is that you feel passionately about, you can do it! In fact, you were meant to do it.
Think about yourself in the terms used by Alan Watts: “You are the perfect expression of the universe exactly where you are in this moment.” Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.”
Since my work is all about helping people achieve a feeling of success and fulfillment in their lives, I’ve made a list of fundamental questions that will help you identify your life purpose! This list will give you a good sense of where to focus your energy as you take your first bold steps towards the life of your dreams.
Passion:
2. Do it often. Doing what you love makes you feel more fulfilled.
3. Remove things from your life that are mediocre, beige, flat or merely being tolerated. You only have so much time attention and energy don’t waste it on what does not matter.
Courage:
2. Know why it is important to you.
3. Because, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” F. Roosevelt
Kindness:
2. Learn to be good to yourself and do it as much as possible.
3. Go out of your way everyday to do something especially nice for a total stranger.
Gratitude:
2. Thank people for what they bring to your life.
3. Learn to find gratitude even for the things and people that are difficult.
Contemplation:
2. Keep a journal.
3. Learn to listen fully to what someone is saying. Really take it in before responding.
Forgiveness:
2. Forgive yourself.
3. Make it a practice to forgive others as quickly as possible.
Play:
2. Laugh as much as possible.
3. Remember that your life is what you dream it to be.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!
We all need a break sometimes. When we’re kids, breaks are given freely during playtime and nap-time. The importance of play to psychological development has received a lot attention as we watch our kids feel the pressure to achieve more and more at a younger and younger age. This pressure, though, extends to us parents, too. By understanding the importance of ritual and play to our identity, we can better recognize when we need a break and what it should look like.
The most normal and competent child encounters what seems like insurmountable problems in living. But by playing them out, in the way he chooses, he may become able to cope with them in a step‑by‑step process. He often does so in symbolic ways that are hard for even him to understand, as he is reacting to inner processes whose origin may be buried deep in his unconscious. – Bruno Bettleheim
I think Bettleheim’s assessment is as applicable to us adults as it is to our children. As technology infiltrates our lives, it is increasingly difficult for all of us to be “on vacation” or “out of touch.” Our moments are crammed full of information and activities – from compulsively checking our smart phones to over-booking our days so we don’t have any time to decompress. The net effect is a slow but sure erosion of our lives into a never-ending to-do list. We may not even know when we need a break.
What I know is that play is a necessary component to a full and fulfilling life. In fact, ritual, play, and creativity are central to the evolution of consciousness and culture.
Ritual – whether it has it’s roots in religious, cultural, or personal expression – allows us to create a symbolic container for our experience and work towards a desired outcome. Rituals allows us to mark something that holds importance to us. It provides a means of working towards a solution or resolution to something that remains unresolved in our lives. Play, on the other hand, refers to the process rather than the outcome. At it’s best, play is a pleasurable expression of our essence and that leads us in unexpected directions.
While ritual is often associated with religion and religious practice, recent research suggests that ritual may be more rational and secular that it appears. According to an article in Scientific American, “even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses – from loved ones to lotteries – do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks – like singing in public – do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit people who claim not to believe that rituals work. Recently, a series of investigations by psychologists have revealed intriguing new results demonstrating that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.”
At it’s core, ritual permits us time and space to contemplate and honor meaningful connections in our life, while play takes us outside the parameters of our daily lives and into a sense of timeless creativity.
Dr. Stuart Brown from the National Institute of Play defines play as a voluntary and pleasurable act that “offers a sense of engagement, takes you out of time” and whose efforts are “more important than the outcome.”
The effects of play can be profound as it allows adults and children to express parts of themselves that don’t come out in everyday activities. Further, play creates novel alternatives to otherwise ordinary situations and trains us to have fun. Play also kick-starts our creativity and prompts us to use it in the manifestation of something external to us. This process reveals what is most important to us because we tend to innovate around what we believe is most relevant. Play and ritual are both integral to our understanding of the nature of who we are. When we need a break, turning to play and ritual are a good place to start.
Are you looking for a way to let go of heavy emotional baggage and breakthrough to the next level of your personal development?
The Group Healing Intensive is designed to help you accomplish, in one weekend, the amount of personal transformational work that would take years of traditional therapy to accomplish.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
One of the main problems we run into when we create something new is that we focus on what we don’t want to see happen, so much so that we forget to get clear about what we do want. This is true whether we’re starting a new business, a new relationship, or a new habit. Inevitably, when we pay more attention to what we don’t want we’re not able to see what we do want and how we can achieve or attain it. Intention is a big buzz word these days – from yoga classes to business journals. Let’s break down what intention is really all about.
Intention is:
In essence, intention is the energy we focus on a particular outcome. As you’ve probably experienced, how we use our energy can have a huge affect on what happens in our lives! Intention is also our conscious – and often times our unconscious – thoughts and feelings about an outcome. So, what we think and feel about what we want makes a big difference in our ability to bring it into our lives.
Even when we’ve made our intention clear, sometimes we don’t get what we’ve set out for. Other times, we intend for one thing to happen and something entirely unexpected occurs. When your intention does not match your outcome, pay attention. It’s these moments that give us clues that something we’re doing might be keeping us from the results we seek.
Often times, we have lots of unconscious thoughts that oppose our conscious ones. When this happens, we’re unaware of what we’re doing that creates undesired outcomes. Another thing may of us do is that we spend a lot of time ruminating on our negative intentions. When we do this, we can’t see when possibilities to get what we want present themselves. This is because we’re so focused on what we don’t want that we fail to see an opportunity to get what we do want.
The good news is that we can change how we use our energy. Getting to know ourselves better and building some new habits can go a long way towards creating the outcomes we desire. Here are three things that you can do today to help bring your intentions into being.
Recognize Your Unconscious Opposition for What It Is
This one can be tricky. It’s pretty clear that we’re not aware of what we’re not aware of (duh!). So, how do we turn this around? In this instance, personal development work is the answer. When we examine ourselves and look for our blind spots, we’re generally able to find them. Personal development work helps us see how our thoughts, beliefs, and actions might have created the “negative intentions” that have held us back. And when we’re aware of our blind spots, we’re able to change our thinking so that we can begin to see the things we did not see before.
Be Patient with Yourself While You’re Building New Habits
A funny thing happens when we start using positive intentions. We may spend a few moments of each day focused on something we want to happen. And then we spend the rest of our day in our default mode – which is the same mode that got us where we didn’t want to be in the first place. All too often, we get frustrated and assume that our effort to bring about our intention is just not working. What we fail to remember in these moments is that it takes time to set a new default. And, it takes more time than saying an affirmation three times a day. So, be patient with yourself. Anything that focuses our energy in a positive direction is helpful, but it may take time to see the big results.
Practice Creative Thinking
Our negativity limits our thinking. It stops us from seeing what we could have or could create. And, quite frankly, when we spend time focused on what we don’t want, we have little time left over to imagine what we do want. To counteract this, take time each day to come up with creative ways to bring more of what you want into your life. What solutions haven’t you thought of? What could you do today that would be different and exciting? The point here is to practice thinking about what you can do and what you’d have fun doing. Creative thinking is linked to positive thinking. And when you can do both, your dreams can grow big.
Do you want to be a catalyst of change and have a profound, positive impact in the world by strengthening your own work?
The Integrative Transformational Coaching program is an exceptional training with top-notch resources for people who want to make a difference working with others one-on-one.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
I can’t wait to get started with you if you are ready to take this next step forward in your work as a practitioner.
People ask me all the time what true happiness looks and feels like. My answer is always self-acceptance. The truth is that our happiness requires our acceptance – especially of parts of ourselves we like the least.
If you don’t have much context for self-acceptance, then you might not know what it’s all about. Let me put it into some concrete terms.
When you accept yourself, you’re okay with who you are. You’re also okay with you are not. You’re always on your side – no matter what happens in your life.
Self-acceptance definitely takes some practice. We all can get carried away with thoughts that are self-shaming, self-judging or self-criticizing. When you catch yourself thinking these kinds of thoughts, I suggest that you douse yourself with self-acceptance because it really is the best antidote to feeling cut down or simply not good enough.
You can get a sense of how self-accepting you are by asking yourself the following questions:
If you answered “no” to any of these questions, you’re not alone. Self-acceptance is a continual pursuit that’s just as much about your relationship to yourself as it is about your relationship to others.
If you want to work on building your ability to accept yourself, you can start with these exercises that come from my book Real Answers.
Ask Powerful Questions:
Speak Your Truth:
Talk to Someone Who Was There:
Acceptance of your personal experience radically changes the way you approach almost every aspect of your life and ultimately allows you to engage the world in a more positive, productive way.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!
There are times when we get a premonition or a gut feeling about a situation. Perhaps it’s a flash or an insight that shows us events to come. Or perhaps it’s a feeling that what we’re doing leads us astray from what we truly want.
Sometimes we listen and respond to our premonitions and sometimes we don’t. What I want to explore here is why don’t we listen to ourselves? Why do we choose to tune out our feelings, intuitions and observations? And, if we made the effort to tune in, how could we listen to ourselves more effectively?
What I’ve learned through my work is that people have unique ways of processing information, though there are commonalities that run through particular personality types. I try to help people learn how to best hear, listen, and then respond to their inner-guidance.
All too often, we don’t recognize our feelings or sensations as inner-guidance. We might feel ill-at-ease or hear an inner voice express concern. Yet, somehow we fail to realize that we’re receiving crucial information from within and not simply churning thoughts or ill-founded worries.
You might ask: “once we understand this internal information as guidance why on earth would we choose to not listen to it?”
We generally disregard our inner-wisdom for several reasons. Most often our inner-guidance cuts against what we want to be true or how we want things to go. Sometimes, though, our minds are so cluttered with the details of our everyday lives that we cannot fully hear what our bodies are trying to tell us. It’s easy to lose sight of our deeper truth in the busy-ness of modern life.
To hear our inner-guidance we need to clear out our clutter. We need to clear it out from our lives, our minds, and our hearts.
Once we’ve made some space, we’re better equipped to tune into and listen to ourselves. The truth is that the messages we receive from within are frequently direct and simple. They tell us: “Stop doing this or start doing that.” Our job is to focus and refocus on the simplicity of the guidance we’re getting and figure out how to align ourselves with that simplicity.
This skill is more of an art. Aligning and realigning with our inner-guidance takes an equal measure of finesse and surrender.
Are you looking for a way to help other people transform their lives and have a profound impact in the world or a pathway to strengthening your work with others?
The Master Transformational Coaching program is designed to give you individualized training and top-notch resources to help you become profoundly successful doing what you are meant to do.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
If you are ready to take this next step towards your life purpose, I can’t wait to meet you.
There are events in which we lose something we never thought we’d lose: our perspective, our health, a loved one. These life-altering events can leave us reeling. In these moments it can seem that the world is an unfair place and we are at its mercy. Or perhaps we fail to judge the fairness of our situation and simply grieve that it’s happening.
In these moments we often grasp at what’s familiar. We try to negotiate a way to have and to hold what we previously held so dear. We fight, we deny, and we pretend that things have not changed. Yet, we can not un-know what we know – things are no longer the same.
These are the least peaceful times in our lives. This is when what we want to be and what is are at odds.
In his very powerful essay, David Whyte describes anger as our response to seeing something we held dear destroyed. This can be an idea, a relationship, or a state of being. Our anger states: “I have loved this and I’m not ready to let it go. I’m not ready to accept its fate. I’m not willing to accept my fate.”
When we approach the gravesite of what we once held dear, we are fraught with anguish. We want justice. We want to hold someone accountable. While others might be involved, they will never hold enough responsibility for the situation to appease our need for retribution.
We can keep fighting or we can be humbled by our humanity, by our intrinsic vulnerability.
We can find within ourselves a bravery that allows us to accept the ebb and flow of life. This kind of bravery sources its sense of peace from the practice of acceptance and not protection.
Protection is a strong and peculiar habit. We believe that we protect ourselves by cloaking our vulnerability and disappointment with anger, sadness, or avoidance. We convince ourselves that donning an outer armor is the only way that we can survive the inevitable heartache that comes with loss. But a shield expects an onslaught. Our protective gestures create the environment for a continual fight.
Conversely, acceptance is the fabric of a durable, permeable peace. It permits us to open to life, to allow for its expansion and contraction. It enfranchises us to give a rightful place to our anger and need to hold only as long as serves us. Most important, acceptance allows us to be remade again and again in the fire of what we believe we cannot bear. And this is where we find our peace.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!
All too often, a good relationship downgrades into a ho-hum affair because we fail to keep up the spontaneity and interest that comes with a new love. Worse yet, even the most well-intentioned people get stumped at how to show they care for their loved one after the honeymoon ends. Little acts that once felt so rich with romance – sweet gestures like whispering “I love you,” sharing a nice dinner, or bringing home flowers – begin to lose their potency.
While these are nice gestures that signal our love for our partners, their impact wanes if they’re the only ways we show our lover how much we care for and desire them.
In a love relationship, the things that seem counter-intuitive to everyday intimacy are the very same things that fuel real romance. Desire requires distance, surprise, vulnerability, adventure, and play. Desire for your partner gets red-hot when you’re attentive to all the wonderful things that make your loved one different and unique.
On the other hand, things like continuity and familiarity are essential to intimacy and are so important in creating a sense of safety in relationships.
So to create and sustain a great relationship – one that’s full of passionate, erotic and compassionate connection – you need to flex your creativity and make your partner someone you’re really curious about. The best part is that when you get curious about your loved one, it’ll be easy and fun to come up with creative ways to lavish them with love.
Don’t know where to start? Try these on for size!
1. Get Your Poetic Flow On
2. Shout Out the Tiny, Beautiful Things That Make Your Partner Shine
3. For One Night, Get Indulgent
4. Get Busy Giving
Are you ready to dramatically shift your life in the direction you want and need it to go?
The Group Healing Intensive allows you, in a weekend, to do the amount of personal transformational work that would take years of traditional therapy to accomplish. But that is just the beginning of the benefits.
If you feel it’s time to stop waiting for “some day” and that you’re ready to step fully into a new and vibrant way of being, Group Healing Intensive is for you! To learn more, CLICK HERE.
Yesterday I led a workshop for my LifeWork Community Program on the topic of Harmony.
All of my studies and all of my experiences have led me to the understanding that a harmonious life is connected the expression of one’s personal truth. Put another way, you’re in harmony when you’re in your truth.
While “harmony” is a universal idea, each person has their own truth that they live and breathe. With 7 billion people now on the planet, I often wonder how can we take 7 billion unique ways of being and get them to fit together harmoniously?
As we see everyday, our ways of being seldom synch up peacefully. We fight, we war, we oppress others based on the color of their skin, their gender, or their beliefs.
Yet, in the face of this apparent disharmony, I still believe that harmony is ultimately attainable.
What I call harmony is not as lofty as a utopian principal. It’s much more down to earth. It’s something that we can strive for each day.
I like definitions of harmony that refer to it as an agreement or congruity. I see it as an accord between two or more things.
Yet, all too often we block ourselves from perceiving harmony. We cultivate – and give into – mindsets that analyze, deny or set up false dualities.
These mindsets are so common it’s no wonder that people often cry out for peace. When we approach our lives through criticality, we analyze our moments so that we can’t see the proverbial “forest through the trees.”
All of these mindsets contain a common element of “this not that.” This means that we set up dichotomies in which we pit situations against each other. One example of this line of thinking says: if I forgive this person, then they win. Another is: if you want something to work, then you need to figure out all the ways it might not work to prevent failure.
Each of these lines of thinking generates a lack of harmony in our world. And this is important. We’re bold to assume that the universe is or is not harmonious based on our own experience of it.
There are ways we can look at the world through a more harmonious lens. We can choose to accept people and situations with which we struggle. We can try to see and empathize with what’s happening on either side of a scenario. We can look at how things fit together rather than how they conflict.
If you want to build more harmony into your life, here are a few skills you can practice everyday.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!
Creativity is a big buzz word these days, particularly in the business world. I’ve come across a lot of articles that talk about the benefits of cultivating creativity in your personal and professional life. And for the most part, I tend to agree with them.
But what these articles tend to miss is that creativity is a collective process. They tend to perpetuate the myth that creativity is a mysterious, solo act. And this simply isn’t true.
Creativity has as much to do with how you respond to yourself as it does with how you respond to your environment. It requires that you say “yes” to yourself more. “Yes” to daydreaming a new solution to a vexing problem. “Yes” to the fact your “out-of-the-box” idea might actually be the right idea.
But creativity also requires that we say “yes” to others more, especially when it pertains to our passions and life purpose. It requires that we say “yes” more to inviting the input, feedback and support of those we trust most.
All too often, we safeguard against failure and risk as we contemplate acting on our “crazy” dream or goal. This limits our capacity for creativity and innovation and keeps us further from our dreams.
This is where creative thinking is essential. It connects us to a greater sense of possibility. It also connects us to our authentic self. When we tap into our creative self, we quickly realize that the “only one right way” myth really isn’t true. What is true is that there are always limitless options. Yet, we’re conditioned to ignore this limitlessness.
Here are several ways that you can boost your creative energy in your life.
Are you looking for a way to help other people transform their lives and have a profound impact in the world or a pathway to strengthening your work with others?
The Master Transformational Coaching program is designed to give you individualized training and top-notch resources to help you become profoundly successful doing what you are meant to do.
To learn more about this opportunity and how it might be right for you, CLICK HERE.
If you are ready to take this next step towards your life purpose, I can’t wait to meet you.
One thing I hear over-and-over again from people is that they’re afraid to fail.
They’re afraid of what others will think about them if they fumble towards their goals. They’re afraid to endure the pain of falling short or failing. And so, they make their fears their reality. They stop short on realizing their goals or don’t take action in the first place.
I certainly have feared failure. And my fear has, at times, paralyzed me.
If you’ve experience this, then you know how much it sucks.
Sometimes fear of failure is rooted in perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionists never feel good enough. When they realize they’ve made a mistake, it’s enough to take them down into a place of self-criticism and self-shame. Often times, this stops perfectionists from doing anything at all.
A perfectionist streak can hurt your health, career and relationships. This is because it exacerbates fears of failure so much so that you don’t reach for your goals at all. Compounding this is the internal judgment and negative dialog that’s part of the perfectionist’s tool box and are used as weapons against themselves for not achieving what they deeply want to achieve.
If you relate to this, there’s hope! You can change your perfectionist tendencies by embracing your limitations and failures. This isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes ongoing patience, but it can be learned.
Here are five things that you can do to become less of a perfectionist.
Want a step-by-step guide to find and live your life purpose? My Morning Mindset Life Purpose is an inspirational daily video series that delivers tips, insights and exercises straight to your inbox for three weeks. Morning Mindset will help you step-in your purpose and live your life to its fullest. Learn more here!