Successful Blog

4 Steps to Discovering How to Live on Purpose

by

A Guest Post by Veronica Drake

cooltext443809558_authenticity

I am Veronica Drake…. mother, ex-wife, wife, victim, friend, arch enemy and survivor. I will show you how I came to realize there are really only four steps to finding your purpose. It only took me 18 plus years to figure it out. Most likely it will take you all of three minutes to decide if it means anything to you.

One cold November morning in 1996 I screamed at God and tried to give Him back His faulty product. I even had the balls to challenged Him to a standoff: “If you have any use for me, show up now or I’m outta here.”

I was sick and tired of living the life I was given. I was blaming the Creator. I had no idea if there even was a God. I figured what did I have to lose. As I was careening my car toward the abutment I came face to face with the details of the life I had created: friends I’d made, loves I’d lost, bridges I’d burned, battles I’d created, and mistakes I’d lived to regret. I realized all this in a split second. And, yes, like in the movies, something happened. It was as if something literally was taking my foot off the gas and applying it to the break. I truly had no control over what was happening. I remember feeling very warm and safe. Something very familiar had me.

t wasn’t long after that experience I got all Holy Rollerish. It didn’t take me long to realize that Holy Roller stuff wasn’t me. But, it did make me question WHO I WAS and WHY I WAS SPARED that day?

I decided to dive in and explore what was really going on with me. What I know about me is I have charisma, I’m very out-of-the-box, I am quick witted and people are drawn to me. Ummm, what was it the Creator wanted me to do with all of that; what Purpose could I possibly fill. There it was right in front of my face the entire time. I would be who I was naturally created to be. Still struggling to identify Purpose, I simply continued to live my life, a life I could be proud of, a life that served others no matter what title I wore.

Ironically, just as I settled into living, it became crystal clear to me. I am a teacher of Purpose. I was given the gift of connecting people to Purpose. Wow, that was powerful. Lil’ ole me using the gifts I was given to be naturally who I am.

It was an 18-year journey for me but luckily for you I condensed it all down to 4 easy steps!

My Four Steps for Finding a Purposeful Existence:

  1. Clarity. Be clear about who you are. Take an honest inventory of what you are bringing to life. List your successes and your natural abilities. Take the time to write it out and revisit it daily. Begin knowing that we are all inherently good and we were all created with natural gifts. If you are struggling to get started, remember our Creator put default settings in us and all we have to do is simply return to what we know; the Golden Rule, do unto others.
  2. Passion. Passion IS energy. It shows up mentally, physically, and spirituality. Embracing the passion and learning to focus it is really the core of finding Purpose. Passion pushes us to look for ways to continually improve what we do and how we do it. Be passionate about who you naturally are. Marrying passion with Purpose is the ultimate fulfillment in life.
  3. Acceptance. A big part of living on Purpose is acceptance. To live a simplified Purposeful life all you need to do is surrender to what is. When you have expectations you will always find yourself in chaos. Bring acceptance into your life and you will find how easy life really is. Acceptance isn’t about living with what is forever it merely means you allow it to be until it no longer is.
  4. Deciding. Nothing happens until YOU DECIDE. The law of inertia states that “A body in motion tends to remain in motion, a body at rest tends to remain at rest.” Will you stay stagnate or will you move? I have DECIDED to be a Spiritual Life Coach who empowers people to live life on Purpose. You?

Living life on purpose is living up to the reason that we’re here, making the most of our gifts.

Have you discovered how to live life on purpose yet?

——
Veronica Drake js an International Spiritual Life Coach who inspires clients to explore their spiritual self. Her site is Spiritual Coach Veronica Drake and she writes for people heeding the call of their inner guidance systems and who look to reconnect to their heart on her blog. Her Twitter name is RonnieDrake.

Thank you, Ronnie, for sharing the story of your passion, your purpose, and your life!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

7 Ways to an Attractive, Authentic Relationship … With Yourself

by

cooltext443809437_relationships

About this time each year, new folks discover the energy, the community, and the benefits of being online.
About this time each year, folks who’ve been here often get back that “new blogger feeling.”
And some folks even start looking back at where they’ve been to figure out where they might be going.

I do all of that.

And today finds me thinking of what makes successful and lasting online relationships.
The longer I look it, the more I realize it relies on how well we relate to ourselves.

So rather than talk about how to be visible to people you want to meet, how to attract people who care about what you’re doing, why not take a minute spending time on what it takes for you to get to know you?

Top 7 Ways to an Authentic Relationship … With Yourself

If you read down this list, it’s fairly obvious that the same seven apply to relationships with other people as do to the relationship you might want to build with you. The advantage of taking the time to reflect on these seven and yourself is that knowing who you bring to those other relationships is foundational to forging something valuable and lasting at every turn.

Do you treat yourself as well as you expect yourself to treat other people?
Do you give yourself the respect that you deserve?
Do you keep your promises to yourself and value your input?
All of these will build a better relationship with yourself and with other people.

  1. Show up whole and human. Do you see yourself as a person or a worker? Do you hold yourself up to some superhuman standards? Isn’t it unfair (and maybe a little snobby) to set one standard for yourself and another for everyone around you? Show up for everyone. Give yourself the time — and the you — you would give your best friend.
  2. Talk in your authentic voice. A good part of authenticity is knowing when we’re hiding behind our history. Another good part is seeing and admitting when we’re feeling one thing and saying that we feel something quite different. Choose the authentic kind words that express who you are now and what you are feeling. Know when to share them and when to keep them near you. But trust your “self” and your voice to know the authentic life you’re living.
  3. Tell your own truth.We all grew up with “tape recordings in our heads” that contradict what we know is true about ourselves. Why do we talk as if those are the reality? Stop long enough to gather the skills you’ve built. Reflect for the time it takes to appreciate why you might want to be friends with you. Learn what it is you are uniquely good at doing and don’t be afraid to tell the truth about who you are. The world didn’t hold a meeting to decide only one kind of person can be here.
  4. Have room for folks to tell theirs too. Hear the truth when it hides inside what other folks are saying. Ask until you know, believe, and feel that you’re communicating. Make it easy for them to share what might be weighing on their heads and their hearts with you. What you’ll find by listening to their truth with all of your being is that knowing the their truth deeply enough to understand it won’t hurt you. It opens us up to accept our own humanity.
  5. Don’t try to tie ideas up in a bow. Life doesn’t come in boxes that organize well with single labels. It’s rare that one occasion will summon up only one word or emotion. Enjoy the depth and live the kaliedoscope changes. Each breath of color and dimension adds new meaning that will get shut off and cut off if you try to categorize or define every minute. We aren’t meant to define our lives so completely. We’re meant to live them.
  6. Half the show is in the comments. Now and then take a moment to stop, reflect, and collect your own opinion on who you are without outside influence. Sit with yourself in your personal invisible comment box and have a conversation about who you are and where you’re going. If you don’t like the goals and the destinations, change them. If you don’t like the design of your life, get a new one.
  7. Be helpful, not hypeful. . . . Make everything about them not you. Default to what generates energy. Help yourself by helping other people. It’s not natural for a human to be a hermit. When the dark weather settles around you, reach out to help someone who is facing a far worse climate. Don’t think about how people treat you – those who get it wrong, don’t “get” it. Be your own model of how it should work and enjoy being it.

And when you make that relationship with yourself, you’ll find you’re the kind that attracts other people. They’ll see that you value what you bring and that what you offer is real.

So go ahead, what could be wrong with being someone you like, respect, and want to be with?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

See also:
Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

How to Turn a #Fail Position into a #Win

by

Whisperer

cooltext443809602_strategy

Anyone who’s spent time with me knows that the combination of hotels, airplanes, and my llergies is likely to be disastrous for my voice. Don’t get me wrong some folks are grateful that they finely get a chance to get a word in edgewise, but even they wish I was being quiet by choice. It’s been a problem for as long as I can remember. Back in the 1990s, the executive team where I worked used to put together a betting pool around our biggest conference to pick the exact day and time my voice would abandon me and I would become a whisperer for a few hours.

At SOBCon this year, it happened at the most inappropriate time.

My important talk of the event was scheduled for the afternoon that I lost my voice.

Doing Right Things, Wishing, and Asking the Wrong Questions

It made me worried and cranky to think that I might be letting down a roomful of people I so admire. It made me disappointed in myself that I wasn’t going to be able to deliver the value I’d worked on to deliver. And I’ll admit it took the wind out of sails to think that I couldn’t bring it back. (I’ve since mastered the art of regaining my voice – ha! – so I’ll not be there again.)

I did right things …
I took my allergy meds as directed.
I stopped talking — well whispering — as much as I was able.
I drank tea with lemon and honey.
I mainlined honey after that.
… ineffective right things.

For about three hours, I thought of what I might do to deliver in that last session.
I kept thinking of our friend, Glenda Watson Hyatt, who once wrote to me, “I know why I blog, Liz. Why does blogging do for you?” She knows what it’s like to have so much to give locked in her head. I was wishing her with me, wishing her technology to turn my thoughts into communication, but that wasn’t to be had.

In my head, I kept asking questions …
What can I do to make this situation better?
Who can I ask to help?
How can I get my voice back?
… the wrong questions.

… but the answers all came back as less than what I wanted to deliver. less in this case was even less than missing my best. It was a fail not a win. The people in the room deserved a win.

Then it struck me that how I was looking at the problem was what was keeping it a problem.

How to Turn a #Fail Position into a #Win

I’ve often had amazing people around me who give me great advice — my mom, my dad, yeah my brothers, VanFossen, Starbucker, Roth, and many others, including a guy named Fred. I started thinking about things they’d told me at times like the one I was in.

  • You’re always cooking up brilliant strategies for other people. Be brilliant for yourself! – Lorelle VanFossen
  • Do you remember that Sesame Street skit “which of these things is not like the others”? — Carol Roth
  • Decide what you want to do and you’ll have all of the help you need. — Terry “Starbucker” St. Marie
  • I love your brain! — That guy named Fred.
  • Call me back, I hung up on you by mistake

That’s when I literally turned a full circle, tilted my head, and looked again.

After hours on the wrong questions, the right question came.

How could I turn having no voice into a strength?

My brain started conspiring.
My eyes lit with mischief.
My feet started dancing with enthusiasm.

I went into the main room,
asked someone to hand me a flip chart and a marker,
and returned to the side room to write 27 pages.

Those 27 pages became a keynote titled “Not Speaking is the New Black by the Event Whisperer and Friends”

And ironically, as I wrote my thoughts filled with meaning, my voice came back … probably because I realized I didn’t need it to share what was in my head.

Terry asked 28 people from the room to participate by reading one page aloud to the room for all of us. If you follow the link above you’ll see what it said, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that

No matter what you think is working against you.
No matter what you think is your weakness or your lack.
It’s the way you’re looking at it that’s holding you down.

Step back, do a complete turnaround, tilt your head, and look again.

You can turn that #fail position into a #win.

I bet you’ve done that at least once. I’d love to hear your story.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Related:
Not Speaking IS the New Black

Beach Notes: Inspiration

by

by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Volunteer surf lifesavers setting up at Coolangatta Beach

lifesaverscoolangatta2011

Inspiration. Every weekend, right around Australia, teams of volunteer men and women surf lifesavers turn out to spend their days at the beach, watching the surfers and often risking their own safety to rescue the unsuspecting or foolhardy. Locally, because this is a major tourist area, the city council provides paid lifeguards on weekdays. Starting just over 100 years ago, in 1907 with a group on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, the organization now known as Surf Lifesaving Australia is the largest volunteer movement of its kind in the world.
Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Reinventing Is Futile – Connect to the Brilliance in You

by

cooltext443809558_authenticity

Reinventing ourselves.

What are we thinking when we say that? Is the plan to pull apart our DNA and restring it? Shall we just set aside those skills and talents we came with? Genetics doesn’t work like that. Our DNA is coded with four letters A, C, T, and G. The order in which they’re set not only differentiates us from other species, but also from each other, except our identical twin.

We can’t just toss aside the A, C, T, and G to reach in a box of letter beads to recode a new set of letters we like better. We can’t really even rearrange our current code with any sense of surety.

554987_alphabet_beads

Add to that the wealth of experience that has brought us from the moment we gave our first cry and opened our eyes to this moment in time. That experience has moved, molded, and made us into unique beings. We can’t relive our experiences either.

Our genetics and our experience are the foundation of who we are. They have burned the pathways in our brains that move and manage information. They have set the personal comfort zones that we find in the human experience. If we try to deny those foundations, to become something other, we end up a bad facsimile. We can’t replace bits of our being the way an inventor might change out a set of wheels for skis.

Reinvention is futile.
I can’t reinvent myself into you.
You can’t reinvent yourself into me.

But you can reconnect to the best that you are.
And I can reconnect to the best that I am.

0300724-nix-rottenegg-nebula-star2

People and stars are made of the same stuff. And as every star is shines with its own brilliance, so do we. When we reconnect to that we know deep in our genes and our experience, we become a richly alive, unique human being.

Even the smallest star shines with it’s own brilliant light. And we are like the stars. No one brings what you are. No one can replace you. No one can shine as you.

What’s irresistible is the brilliance you are.
Reinventing yourself is futile. Connecting to your brilliance is powerfully fruitful.
The world will be just that much brighter when you do.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing