“…when all the world’s asleep, the questions run so deep…”

Please tell me who I am~
Supertramp – The Logical Song (written by R. Davies, and R. Hodgson)

Most of you know that I have a business and marketing background, and that it has been my mission for the past 8 years to support entrepreneurs in being able to build a successful, profitable business around a purpose or passion that they want to take out into the world. What you probably don’t know about me, is that I “learned” to do that very well.

The key word is “learned.”

Let me ask you three questions:

Number 1) What have you learned to do really, really well?
Number 2) What are your natural-born traits and passions?
Number 3) Are they a match?

If your answer to question number 1 came easily, rolled right off your tongue, and sounded a little bit like a canned elevator speech, you might want to read rest of this message.

And, if your answer to question number 2 came more slowly, you really had to stop and think before you answered, you definitely want to read the rest of this message.

Now, if your answer to question number 3 is “No,” then do not read the rest of this message, and immediately do one or both of these two things: (1) stop doing what you are really, really good at, and start doing what you are naturally passionate about; (2) call me to immediately help you get clear on how to know who you were born to be and how to transform your life to one lived with passion, joy, purpose and freedom!

Here’s another secret about me: Up until 4 years ago, I was living a life that was not my own! It was a good life, family, friends, home, job, but I always felt that something was missing. I remember my mother saying to me (several times), “Why can’t you just be satisfied? Why do you think you need to always being doing more?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that question. And what I did know, is that it made me feel even more out of place than I already did. So, what was wrong with me? Why did I feel like a square peg trying to fit into a nice, comfortable round hole? Actually, one of my clients expressed it this way, “I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Everything seemed and appeared to be normal and usual, but I felt like I didn’t belong there, I felt like I was just floating above and looking down at the scene wondering how I got there and why I didn’t feel like I fit the role I had created for myself!”

So, why did I say “up until 4 years ago I was living a life that wasn’t my own?” What happened 4 years ago that changed for me? Well, the short answer is: I discovered who I was born to be. I also discovered that the skills and rules I had been living by, and had become so good at, were a result of conditioning. In other words, I had learned really, really well to be someone that parents, siblings, teachers, church, school, employers, friends, family perceived or thought I should be. I also learned that this is occurs more frequently than I would have expected! Research suggests that 84% of the population is not self-aware enough to profile accurately on personality profile assessments.

Why is that true? You see, we come into this world as perfect human beings, with natural-born abilities, skills, passions, and our own light, purpose and brilliance. But whatever society we are born in to has its own sets of beliefs, rules and visions of how we fit into their society. They begin to condition, or train, us to fit into their vision of who we should be. Conditioning begins very early in life, and continues to impact all of our life’s choices, decisions and how we perceive the world, in ways we rarely recognize. According to Dr. Sherry Buffington, author of the book, The Law of Abundance, “Most of us are so thoroughly conditioned as children that by the time we reach adulthood, all we are able to see is the conditioned mask we donned as children in order to be accepted and acceptable by our family, our school systems, our society, our religion, our co-workers, etc., etc., etc.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in the book, The Four Agreements – A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, calls this conditioning, “The domestication of humans.” Ruiz says…. “During our early life we began making agreements. Our parents rewarded us when we did what they wanted and they punished us when we didn’t. We also learned behaviors and habits in school, church, and from other adults and children on the playground. The tools of reward and punishment were often emotional and sometimes physical. The impact of other people’s opinions and reactions to us became a very strong force in the habits we created. In this process we created agreements in our mind of who we should be, what we shouldn’t be, who we were, and who we were not. Over time we learned to live our life based on the agreements in our own mind. We learned to live according to the agreements that came from the opinion of others. In this process of domestication it turns out that the choices we make and the life we live is more driven by the opinions we learned from others than one we would choose on our own.”

I remember, vividly, the relief, freedom and true joy I felt when I connected at the deepest level, to who I came here to be. And, like my clients all tell me after our 4th meeting together…. “There is no going back!”