Whenever readers or coaching clients ask me about how they ought to live, I recall these lines from David Seabury’s The Art of Selfishness:

“No one but yourself knows what you ought to do. You discover it when you no longer fear condemnation ….

The artist, Whistler, once remarked that a great painting was made by knowing what not to put upon a canvas. Successful living depends upon knowing what not to do.”

if you’re asking, “What should I do with my life?” — the only person who can give you a true answer is you. You are the expert on you. Your purpose is a map written on your own heart and soul. No one else’s.

My goal for this post is to help you turn down the noise, and listen for the guidance that comes from your deepest self. (It’s speaking to us all the time, actually – it’s just that we’re usually too busy or anxious to listen.)

In my experience, the Self tends to speak more through feelings and sensations than words. It speaks to us in quiet moments. Let me tell you about the time it spoke to me on Thanksgiving, as my family walked back to our house in the darkness.

We were almost to the back door when our 4 year old exclaimed, “I see the moon!” Naturally, our 2 year old chimed in, “I want to see!” So my father, her grandfather, picked her up and showed her the waxing white moon.

And it’s hard to explain, but that moment just sliced straight through me. Do you know what that’s like, when suddenly you can see so much beauty, and you have tears in your eyes and your body almost can’t contain how much you’re feeling?

When you know that it’s all fleeting and we’re all mortal, but god, it means so much just to be alive, and with these people you love?

That’s what it was like for me seeing my tall dad, holding my little toddler and pointing at the moon.

Admittedly, this is not at all a traditional way to write about finding your purpose. It’s probably the weirdest post you’ll read on the matter. But I find that I don’t care about sounding savvy.

I care about helping you have moments you’ll remember your whole life. I care about you feeling clear, present, and fully alive. I care about you living your purpose. Of course, I don’t know what your purpose is. But I can help you to see it for yourself.

I can be the finger pointing at the moon; I can help you know where to look. In that spirit …

Practical Challenge #1: Do nothing for at least 15 minutes today. (Yes, your busy mind will run wild. It’s fine!) 

What should I do with my life right now?

Simplest answer? Whatever brings you joy!

I know, I know – that probably sounds at once too easy and too difficult. What about all of your responsibilities? What about what you’re “supposed to” do?

Well, if you’re reading this post, you’re probably a conscientious person. You’re probably really good at being diligent … even diligent to your detriment!

Assuming that’s the case, you don’t need any more guidance on how to be responsible. Rather, you need guidance on how to let yourself be free. Guidance on how to expand your capacity to feel joy more consistently.

That’s why I took a long-awaited trip to Scotland with close friends for my 40th birthday gift to myself – because going there brings me joy and helps me come home to myself.

My favorite life coach, Dr. Martha Beck, talks about how the felt experience of joy is key to a life on purpose. In this interview with The Genius List, she says:

“…You track [your purpose] through the feeling of joy in your body …. Joy is the natural state of our psyches when we are free from the pressure of socialization and traumatic experience. If you get rid of those two things, social pressure and any pain that you’ve been carrying from the past, you are immediately in a state of joy.”

How fantastic is that? All we need to do is subtract two things – pressure and pain – and joy is right there!

I’ll give you a practical exercise to help you have more joy in your life in a minute. But first, let me offer a few resources if the quote above sparked new awareness for you.

For more support in subtracting social pressure, read these posts:

Limiting Beliefs Examples & the Surprising Way to Set Yourself Free

Emotional Abuse Test: When You Know Something Isn’t Right

For more support in subtracting pain from the past, read these posts:

How to Forgive Yourself for Past Mistakes: A Step by Step Guide

Embracing Imperfection Gets Easier with This Ancient Practice

And since subtracting pain from the past can be tricky, let me tell you one quick story to illustrate a really important, and accessible, tool for healing: using kindness to reconnect to the true Self.

What actually helps during a trauma trigger

On my first day of a new physical therapy routine, one of the exercises triggered me. You see, I had a traumatic birth experience in 2019. I’ve done a lot of healing work since then, but every once in a while I get triggered.

If you have personal experience with PTSD, then you know that your physical reactions happen faster than your conscious mind can process them. One second, I was fine. The next second, my body was shaking and crying, all before my mind caught up to what was happening.

When that full-on fear response happened, I kept trying to hang on to the present moment reality. I tried saying out loud, “This is now, that was then, it’s over, I am safe.” It did help a little bit, as did letting my body shake. But it wasn’t enough.

What actually calmed me down was when I heard myself say, “You are safe, you are okay.”

Somehow the shift from I to You made the difference. At first I didn’t understand why simply changing a pronoun made me feel so much better. Was it just semantics? No, it was the shift into integrity.

When I was saying “I am safe” while my body was freaking out, it felt off to me; it wasn’t actually the voice of my deep Self speaking. It was my scared self trying to pretend to be my Wise Self! But when I said, “You are safe” (to myself), I did two things:

1. I left more room for the part of me that was freaking out and feeling unsafe. Overriding that part didn’t work! What worked was to acknowledge it and offer compassionate care.
2. I connected to that core part of me that knew the deeper reality. I connected to the Self (or the Soul, or Spirit) … the part of me that is always safe.

Once I did that, I was able to quiet the fear response quickly.

For me, the point of this life isn’t to never get triggered or feel terrible. The point is for us to learn how to be with ourselves and each other as we experience it all. (What should I do with my life? Feel it all, experience it all!)

It’s the relationship that makes the difference. It’s the connection that matters in the end. The connection we have with ourselves, with others, with the whisper beneath the noise.

Here’s the problem. Most of us are never taught how to truly connect! Instead, we are taught to disconnect from ourselves to survive. We are taught to push through and override our truth.

So, let me give you an exercise that I share with every one of my coaching clients: smart, capable people who are high-functioning but secretly suffering.

We do this exercise early on, to help them reconnect with their true selves. It’s a step toward shifting the inner emotional patterns they learned from trauma, and freeing up their natural confidence.

It’s also a practical answer the question, “What should I do with my life?”

How to find life purpose

Practical Challenge #2: Play “You’re Getting Warmer, You’re Getting Colder”

(Excerpted from my first book, You Don’t Owe Anyone.)

As recovering perfectionists and people-pleasers, we tend to live in our heads. We have an innate mistrust of our physical responses. But what if our best decisions aren’t made by endless rationalizations and explanations? What if our next right step is as close as our breath, our skin, our body?

On the physical level, we know what’s right for us in any given moment. Our bodies are a fantastic source of information, yet so often we tune them out and ignore them. We spend a lot of time and energy pushing down our truths, and that drains us.

How can we regain strength and practice trusting our bodies? This exercise is a simple yet powerful way to do just that.

Harvard-trained sociologist, coach, and author Martha Beck says that life is like a childhood game of “You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder.”

The great thing about this game is that you don’t actually need to know what you’re looking for in order to win. You just need to pay attention to the feedback you’re getting from the other person, who tells you whether you’re closer to or farther away from the object. You win by shifting direction until you get warmer and warmer and you’re right on top of the object.

So how do we play this game in our real lives? It’s straightforward, though not necessarily easy. We get in tune with our physical responses to different choices and activities in our lives, and we learn to trust those physical responses more than our mind-based explanations.

As a coach, I help clients do this using a version of Martha Beck’s methodology, which she calls the Body Compass. (Martha Beck writes about this concept at length in her books Finding Your Own North Star, Steering by Starlight, and Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, all of which are excellent.)

Often it’s easier to start with the negative (that is, the colder) than the positive (the warmer). Typically, when I ask people what they want, they begin by telling me all the things they don’t want. So begin by thinking of a situation that you know was 100 percent wrong for you.

For example, here’s a situation that feels very wrong for me, personally: “I’m sitting in a high-­school math class, next to this so-called friend who tries to control me.” If I picture myself there, my physical body responds. My throat gets tight, my shoulders cave in, and my stomach sinks. I call it the “Trapped in Prison” feeling. That’s my “colder.”

Conversely, if I picture myself doing ballet, or figure skating to my favorite song, or traveling with my closest friends, or cuddling with my husband, I feel light, expansive, and happy. A smile comes to my face. I call it the “Free as a Bird” feeling. That’s my “warmer.”

Your invitation is to start noticing your physical responses to the activities, environments, and people in your life. Do not go by what you think about them. Go with how your physical body responds.

Know that you may need to break down your more complex experiences because certain elements may be warmer, while others are colder. For example, you may love spending time with your coworkers but not love the work you’re doing together, or vice versa. There are nuances to this process.

For the next week, be an observer of your own experience. Be a scientist. What is it like to be you? When you go to your office, how do you feel? When you get dressed for the party, how do you feel? Are you getting warmer or colder?

Also notice how as you receive the clear signals from your body, your mind will jump in and tell you all the reasons why you “shouldn’t” feel that way. This is a great time to revisit the exercises on questioning your thoughts, judgments, and limiting beliefs.

Two quick reminders as you integrate this process:

First, this exercise isn’t about wanting things intellectually. It’s about noticing what your body leans toward and away from. (Oh, and if you don’t feel a draw towards anything, you’re probably either really tired or really depressed. Get either rest or therapy or both, ASAP.)

Second, please don’t let perfectionism stop you from actually doing this practice. You might notice all-or-nothing thinking kicking in: Well, if I can’t quit my boring job / leave my miserable marriage / get out of this awful situation right now, then there’s no point in doing ANYTHING different.

Not so! Even just 10 minutes of time spent in daily joy, rather than suffering, can make a HUGE difference in your experience of life.

I need guidance in my life

Lest I risk minimizing very real struggles here, let me add one more thing: When you’re going through a very difficult time, just trying to survive, it is harder to find the bright thread of joy. Frankly, it’s harder to know where to even look!

If that’s you right now, I get it – back in 2021, I had a toddler with a broken foot, and I was 8 months pregnant with my second child.

In the midst of all of this, my first book, You Don’t Owe Anyone, was published; riding the wave of the launch, I spent several days recording the audiobook.

Afterward, I crashed. I was in what Anne Lamott calls “bad mind,” terrified of my own thoughts, down and depressed. (And then I was feeling guilty about this experience, both because I have a great life and also because I’m a coach, darn it, and shouldn’t I be happy all the time?!)

I felt sad and weary and lost, and I judged myself for all of it. I thought to myself, I need guidance in my life.

Then one night this week I dreamed that I saw Oprah at a grocery store. I was in the produce section, looking at lettuce, and all of the sudden, there she was. Oprah! Crazier still, I went right up and talked to her. I told her how I’d been feeling lost. I asked her for help.

She looked me in the eye and told me two things. I felt the truth of these statements in my whole body.

First, she said, “Honey, you have a light inside of you. You just need to find the God within you.”

And when she felt my fear that I was somehow veering off course, somehow missing the mark of life, she said, gently but with confidence:

“Oh, you? You’re going to live YOUR life perfectly.”

I love that the Oprah in my dream emphasized the YOUR. As in, this is YOUR journey, you don’t need to look to others, or an imaginary ideal, for comparison. Just walk YOUR walk.

I woke up from this dream feeling physically strengthened, as though I’d had an IV dose of some wonderful, necessary nutrient. I share this story in case you need an infusion of hope, like I did.

Dear reader, you have a light inside of you. You just need to find the God within you. And rest assured: You’re going to live YOUR life perfectly.

So, here’s your new to-do list:

1. Remember that you have a light inside of you.
2. Find the God within you.

We could even combine these two things into one thing – let’s call it Practical Challenge #3: Be the light that you are.

Most of us have been misinformed about what it means to be a good person. We have been taught that being a good person means depleting ourselves daily, giving and giving until we have nothing left. We’re taught that it’s selfish to guard our light, so we don’t … and eventually, our light goes out.

This is confusing, because now we’re left in the dark, even though we’ve tried our best to be good and do what we’re “supposed” to do! So why do we feel lost? Why does everything seem unclear? Why don’t we know how to live on purpose?

Often, it’s because we never learned how to protect that inner light. We never learned how to let our spirit shine. It isn’t our fault that we never learned this, but it is our responsibility to do it now.

Contrary to popular belief, the hard part isn’t reigniting your light and clarifying your purpose. Usually we get that done in about 30 minutes.

The hard part is subtracting. It’s letting go of the beliefs, commitments, chores, expectations, and obligations that are not on purpose for you, in order to best protect that light.

Fortunately for you, I created a process to help you do just that. Enter your email address below to receive the Sacred Circle Exercise!