What exactly is fulfillment? What makes your heart sing? What puts a smile on your face when you are driving in rush hour traffic? When do you feel most alive? What about self-care? Do you exercise regularly? Do you eat right? Do you consider yourself a happy person? What’s happening to you right now while you are pondering these questions? Where are you? Who are you with?
How long has it been since you asked yourself any of these questions? For most of us, we coast along, doing what we need to do to pay our bills, take care of our families, sock money away for our retirement, if we’re lucky enough to have money left over to do that. But, fulfillment is more about being than doing. The Dali Lama once said (I’m paraphrasing) “We are not human doings, we are human beings.” Feel the difference between being and doing. The difference between rev- ving up and quieting down.
Even when we think we’re going in the direction of fulfillment, we have a hard time getting there. This is because fulfillment is not the end result. It’s not the goal. Goals are tools to point us towards action. Fulfillment is about courage. It’s about change. It’s about imagination and intuition. It’s about asking yourself, “What do I really want out of life?”
In Co-Active Coaching, we say, “fulfillment is a radical act”. That’s because to get to fulfillment, we have to make choices that are often difficult and painful. After all, we are going after our dreams. Dreams we have had inside of us for a long, long time. I am not a student of Jungian theory but my interpretation of at least some of it is as follows. Carl Jung, considered to be the “father” of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, believed the roles we play as we adapt to external pressures relegate us to a life of shadow material that left unconscious stunts our personal growth causing us a lifetime of self-disappointment. I coach people on Transitional Empowerment, which has to do with our relationship with change and transition. This is a very specific area in our lives that I approach differently than coaching people on fulfillment even though the two are inextricably linked. The common bond they both share is the ability to change. Change is essential to any form of personal growth work, in my opinion. Resistance to change creates distance and distrust and, for me, when I am designing our alliance together, I make it very clear that if this work we are committed to doing together is compromised by distrust, it is in both of our best interests for the client to seek help elsewhere. Seeking happiness and fulfillment requires authentic and honest communication and the willingness to look at what is keeping us from our life purpose.
Our work together is sacred. We will explore your core values, beliefs and views, challenging you to imagine the possibilities of what the present and future holds for you in the land of fulfillment. We will call on your “conscious or higher self” to guide us on this exciting and rewarding journey.
You will feel the shift and the freedom and from that feeling our work will move into planning and action. By honoring your values and re-clarifying your beliefs and views, you will discover the vast difference between the messages the left-brain sends vs the right-brain. As you gain more clarity around this difference you will understand that fulfillment is based on what you are feeling rather than rationalizing your thoughts. A good metaphor would be: “think from your heart, instead of your head. Fulfillment is about who you are becoming as a result of evolving into the life you truly want. There is scientific evidence that happy and fulfilled people live longer, are more compassionate, are better parents, partners and friends, and are more loving and forgiving.
Fulfillment is a radical act. But, so worth it.
“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
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