As a Life Coach, I love helping women in mid-life find and live their purpose.

😞 Probably because I know how painful it is to live without one.

A true purpose, that is.

🤩 That thing that lights you up…gives you direction…and makes your life feel meaningful and fulfilling.

How do you know you’re living your true purpose? I had to learn that one the hard way.

A true purpose gives you energy and passion; a false purpose, or lack of purpose, takes your energy and sucks you dry.

🔥 That’s because your true purpose reflects your true self, so living it and doing the activities involved in bringing it to life makes you feel alive!

Even when you’re doing something that requires a lot of effort, there’s an underlying sense of ease in it because your effort is aligned with your natural gifts…your values…and the way your soul wants to make a difference in the world.

🏊‍♀️ Living without a purpose, or spending years on the wrong path, feels hard. Like you’re always swimming against the current instead of floating along with it.

It’s the opposite of ease. It’s exhausting, soul-sucking, and ultimately self-destroying if you let it go on long enough.

❓ So how do you find your true purpose if you’ve lost your way?

As with most destinations, I think there’s a few ways to get there, but I hope my story will give you a place to start.

You see…5 years ago, I was in a bad place.

I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, dealing with crippling panic and anxiety, and had no idea if I’d ever come out of it. It was the darkest, most terrifying time of my life.

Today I can see that there were a few things that contributed to my rendezvous with rock bottom, but a big one was that I had spent my entire adult life either living without a clear purpose, or trying to shoehorn myself into one.

🤷‍♀️ I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

Today, thankfully, I’m in a completely different place.

Months of working with 4 different healers (2 doctors, a therapist, and a coach), along with many of my own practices, eventually helped me recover.

1️⃣ But there’s one thing on my journey that led me from just being “healed” to actually thriving and it started with a single question my counselor asked me:

👉 “What do you like to do?”

Simple, right? No big deal.

Except I didn’t have an answer. I was completely blank.

I was so disconnected from the voice of my soul – the voice of my true self – that I couldn’t come up with a single thing I liked to do!

Can you relate?

😮 I mean, holy crap! Answering the question, “what do you like to do”, should be one of the easiest things in the world. But I had nothing.

Fortunately for me, my counselor thought of something. She reminded me that in a previous session I mentioned that I enjoy taking baths because I find them relaxing.

I know! Baths, right?!

But it was seriously the only thing we could come up with for something I liked to do.

So that was my assignment.

🛀 I was supposed to take a bath whenever the notion hit me, instead of doing that thing we all do where we tell ourselves we can’t do the thing we want, because of all the things we have to do.

You know how it goes…

…the dishwasher needs emptying, the dog needs to be walked, that one last email needs to be sent.

And here’s the amazing thing:

Once I started saying yes to baths, other things started popping up that sounded good to my soul.

I started taking walks…I let myself swing on the swings at the park even though I’m an adult and I was sure I looked ridiculous…I took naps…wrote in my journal…read silly books…and did some light exercise when it sounded good.

☀️ Any hit I got for something that would light me up, even a little bit!

And once I started saying yes to those things, I started getting bigger and better answers about what I should do.

Eventually, those breadcrumbs led me to a book by Dr. Martha Beck. And that led me to her Life Coach Certification program…which led to my business…which led me here, writing to you today.

None of this happened over night – it’s been 4 years since I first picked up that book – and I’m still in the beginning stages of my business.

😍 But I have finally found something I love. Something that lights my soul on fire and makes me feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m meant to do in this world.

👉 I know my purpose: to help other women bring their bold dream to life.

If you read my post last week, you know I learned the hard way how easy it is to settle for less and how truly dangerous that is to your soul. So I’m taking the lessons I learned to make sure other women don’t fall into the same trap.

⭐️ My purpose is to help them get the clarity…courage…confidence…and structure they need to take their dream from something that lives in their heart to a reality that lives in the world.

Now here’s the key point:

I couldn’t have gotten here without saying yes to those small things first.

🔥 In my experience, your soul won’t give you the big answers you’re looking for until it trusts that you’re going to say yes.

So you have to start saying yes to the small flashes of joy. Those things that hit you and make you think, “oh, that sounds good!”

Most of us shut them down and think it’s no big deal. We minimize their importance.

👂 But your subconscious is listening. Your soul is listening.

Saying yes to the small things, is a yes to yourself! It’s a yes to your voice and your worthiness and your desires.

Each yes takes you a little bit closer to the center of your soul where your purpose lives.

🎄And when you keep saying yes to the small things, and then the big things, eventually you’ll land on that *one thing* that makes your whole body light up like the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center.

It’s the greatest feeling in the world and I believe everyone deserves to have it.

❤️ We all want to feel like we’re doing something meaningful…like we’re living our lives on purpose…and like we’re making a difference by using the best of who we are – our unique gifts, talents, and skills – to serve others.

If you’re still searching for that, I hope this map I’ve laid out works as well for you as it did for me. But if it doesn’t, don’t get discouraged. There are many roads to that destination and keep faith that, as the Sufi poet, Rumi, said…

👉 …“what you’re seeking is also seeking you”.

If you’d like my personal help in finding and living your purpose, I’d love to chat with you! Set up a free Meet & Greet call with me here ===> https://soulfireshift.com/coaching and let’s see if we’re a fit!

👩‍❤️‍👩 And if you want to be surrounded by other courageous, mission-driven women bringing their bold dream to life, then stay tuned for my new group, Bolder Women.

In this group, we’ll support each other by digging into the two sides of making a dream a reality:

1️⃣ The qualities that push a dream forward – like creativity, alignment, courage, and tenacity.

And…

2️⃣ The qualities that hold dreams back – like fear, self-doubt, over-thinking, and feelings of inadequacy.

If you dig the kind of introspection…conversation…and ah-ha! moments sparked by authors and speakers like Brene Brown, Martha Beck, Liz Gilbert, and Glennon Doyle, this group will be right in your wheelhouse!

⭐️ Follow my website and/or my Facebook posts @soulfireshift for more details and a launch date!