Grow With Soul: Episode 130 - 12 Pep Talks About Finding Fulfilment
Over the last three years, in increasing intensity, I have been thinking, writing and living about fulfilment. How does happiness happen? What stops us living true lives, enjoying our lives? And all that thinking and writing and living has converged into Mapping, my new programme which has opened today. Mapping is the the most distilled version of everything I know and have experienced about finding fulfilment, and today I wanted to give you some of that inside information. I will be taking you through the fulfilment process and sharing my favourite parts from each section of Mapping, making today’s episode a series of twelve little pep talks.
What I talk about in this episode:
Introducing Mapping
Unravelling our beliefs
Stepping out of the march of linear time progression
Redefining what is important
Becoming your own source of permission
Knowing your energy
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Read The Podcast Transcript:
Over the last three years, in increasing intensity, I have been thinking, writing and living about fulfilment. How does happiness happen? What stops us living true lives, enjoying our lives? And all that thinking and writing and living has converged into Mapping, my new programme which has opened today. Mapping is the the most distilled version of everything I know and have experienced about finding fulfilment, and today I wanted to give you some of that inside information. I will be taking you through the fulfilment process and sharing my favourite parts from each section of Mapping, making today’s episode a series of twelve little pep talks.
But first, some context.
In 2019 I wanted to be a woman who owned a beautiful character home and pulled up vegetables from the garden in her linen apron, a woman who was partnered, who had started painting and wasn’t she good at it, a woman who was smart and successful in business, earning an impressive income without seeming to break a sweat, a woman who was so balanced. Being that woman was what would make me happy, and those were all the things that would make me fulfilled.
In 2022 I am a woman who loves to hike alone in the mountains, a woman who loves her friends, a woman who loves to write and so does that for her work as much as possible. I am a woman who reads because I like my thoughts better when I’m reading, a woman who makes herself a chamomile latte every night, a woman who won’t settle for someone. This is the woman who knows where her fulfilment lives, and so she lives there too.
The move from there to here was of a to-and-fro, a piece of flotsam on the tide moving in and out, never quite settling on the shore. It was not something I experienced as a capital-P Process and yet, looking back, there was a momentum beneath the waves pushing the to-and-fro ever forwards. I can see how there were stages and lessons and things that came together in a process toward a truer form of fulfilment. There was reimagining the way the world worked, redefining my life within that, reclaiming my power from all the places I’d left it and reigniting living a fulfilled life beyond survival.
Reimagine, Redefine, Reclaim and Reignite are the four sections of Mapping, and within in each one are three core pillars. It is these pillars that I’m going to share with you today.
The first pillar of Reimagine is Belief - unravelling the beliefs around what would constitute fulfilment and what it would take to get it.
I don’t think getting to 100% positive belief - good vibes only - is anything like a realistic goal. Life isn’t supposed to be only the good beliefs, and in trying to get there we are essentially trying to get out of life. No, what we want to aim for here is first awareness, and then a new perception.
The awareness we seek is of the difference between a belief and the truth; seeing the heartwood and the parasite as two separate things. It means noticing, as if as an observer, your thoughts and feelings, seeing what comes up again and again. Do you notice that every time you go to pick up that craft project you have a small sinking feeling that belies a belief that you’ll never be any good? Do you notice that when you set financial goals you think something is unreasonable or unrealistic? Get into a habit of questioning those thoughts and feelings, something that you will have to remember at first but will become natural. This doesn’t need to be a great interrogation, just as the impartial observer asking “is this true? Is this heartwood?”.
Then comes perception. This is not about forcing yourself to try to believe so hard, it’s about considering the possibility. Considering the chance, the tiny, tiny possibility, that something other than your belief might be true. That maybe you will be good at that craft, or that even if you’re not it doesn’t matter as long as you enjoy it, or that “good at” is so relative. That maybe what a “realistic financial goal” is isn’t a static thing, that if it’s possible for someone that’s not you it could be possible for you too. That there is no harm in experimenting with trying, that it is reasonable to aim for what you want. This isn’t “changing your mindset”, this is light and playful, trying on differently tinted glasses and acting the part for a little while. What if what we assume is true isn’t true - what would we do?
The second pillar is Decompartmentalisation - snappy I know, but this is an expansion of work in life, bringing body and mind and all the parts back together. Here’s why this is important:
When we disconnect the elements of our lives in our brains, we aren’t able to see how they affect each other. So when we experience a problem, our go-to explanation is that we are somehow a failure, rather than one part of our lives might be affecting another. For example, sometimes I can’t concentrate and I think “god I’m so rubbish I’ve got no focus what the hell is wrong with me”, and then I remember I’ve had nothing to eat yet and that actually I’m just a bit hungry. In the year I was selling a house and finding somewhere to live in the wake of a big break up, I would be annoyed at myself for not having much motivation to work and no new ideas - as if the mind and body under extreme stress was the same one supposed to come up with a bestselling idea.
When we reconnect the parts of ourselves the answers are simple and the solutions are easy. Instead of an existential crisis about whether your inability to focus means you’re not cut out for this, you can realise you’re hungry and eat something. When almost every problem has an answer, or a reason, other than “you’re rubbish”, it becomes easier to exist within your own mind. You can treat yourself with more tenderness, more kindness when you don’t think your fundamental awfulness is the root cause of everything going wrong. There are telegraph wires between all the parts that make up your life, and you are at the exchange desk interpreting all the connections and where they need to go.
The final pillar in Reimagine is Circular Mindset - all about, as Sasha said last week, realising there are no revelations only reiterations, and stepping out from the march of linear progression:
Time in nature is inherently circular - three great spheres, the sun, the Earth and moon, going endlessly around and around each other, never going somewhere new but always returning to where they have been before. Trust us, the humans, to take this unending circle and straighten it out into a line to march along.
Linear progression is the way things are in human society. Birth to death, preschool to graduation, entry-level to management, first job to retirement, renting to homeownership, single to married to parenthood, beginner to expert; our lives are organised along a straight line where our progress, value and success is measured by how far and how fast we can travel along it. It is in terms of this line that we decide how good we are: whether we are falling behind, where we should be; if we are going backwards, making progress, or stuck. So much of what bothers us about our life, and especially our work, is not being where we think we should be, or want to be, on this imaginary made up line.
Nature does not finish a summer and think it needs to build on the progress it’s made, see month-on-month improvement; it circles back. And within that circle, life happens. With each circling back you have more knowledge, so although you still have wobbles they are of a different intensity, and a deeper lesson is revealed that you could not have accessed before.
Moving into Redefine, the first pillar is Visioning, figuring out what you really want, not what you want to want; what actually makes you happy, not what you want to make you happy.
It is part the vision of a soothsayer, of a future moment that is coming. It is part the vision of a visionary, who perceives and plans with imagination and wisdom. It is part the vision of dreamers, conjured in half-awake imagination. It is part the vision of an explorer, seeing the vistas and routes opening up ahead. It is all these roles and definitions rolled into one experience.
A vision is a clear, sensory and emotional experience of a day in your life at some point in the future. It is not just a picture - the visionaries and the soothsayers do not just see an image, they feel an experience. They live it in their bodies which is how they know it is true. It is not a list of things you will have but the experience of how you will be. It is also deep clarity. In the vision there is no second guessing or bet hedging. With the high point vision of the explorer you see what is possible and confidently choose the path you wish to travel - always with the knowledge you can course correct once you start.
How we feel about our lives is how we experience our lives and is therefore what our lives are like - You can tick off your “dream life” bucket list but if you don’t feel the way you want to then the bucket list is going to make no difference. The feelings help us navigate, but mostly they help us be present to how much we can already start experiencing the life we want.
Next is Prioritisation - extreme radical prioritisation, cutting things out, bringing a few back in, whittling down commitments and responsibilities, redefining what is important and holding those things in the palm of your hand.
It is strange to use “priorities” as a plural when the root of the word, the Greek priori, means “one”. I find this an interesting, somewhat stark place to begin. Here we all are with our lists of priorities, when really such a thing should not be able to exist - if we are going with the definition then that list should be a single line, “a thing that is more important than others”.
Don’t worry, I am not going to make you choose just one thing that is important to you to focus on; part of the wild joy of being human is that we are multi-faceted, multi-passionate beings. Having more than one thing is kind of the point. But I think this brief brush with etymology highlights how cavalier we have become with the word “priority” - it is supposed to mark some things out from others, distinguish the very few things that are important, rather than be a way to arrange the order in which you do all the things.
What tends to happen is a dilution. When everything is, to one extent or another, a priority, then nothing really is. We dilute what is important so much that it is indistinguishable from all of the rest of life, identical molecules swirling around in the water. And what happens when you over-dilute a glass of squash? There is no flavour, no colour - only a hint of what it might have been that actually tastes worse than just plain water. This is what we’re doing by not being conscious and radical with our prioritisation: we are removing the flavour and the colour from life and getting washed away by all the water we keep pouring. We need a higher concentration of clear priorities.
Finally we come to True Self - shedding the layers of all the versions of a selves you’ve wanted to be and all the things you could never be and moving towards touching distance with the truest version.
There is a lot of talk of “higher self” in the self-development world, and I haven’t always really known what it means. Any posed question of “what is your higher self trying to tell you?” was met with a blank, because if I couldn’t conceptualise this higher self then how on earth was I supposed to know what they were saying? But I was on board with the theory. I liked the idea that there is a version of me that is confidently and comfortably embodying the greatest potential for truth.
I think the break down for me, between reality and my highest self, was one of semantics. I can see, especially when laced with spiritualism, how the image of going up, getting higher, feels like the direction to move in, how it can be inspiring to do so. However, when I look up all I see is air. I am a person of the earth and cannot conceptualise that the way to move is upward when truth feels like it’s below me, rooted deeply in the ground. Rather than a heightening, I seek a deepening; rather than a highest self, it is a deepest self - a truest self. When I position it as “what is the truest version of me?”… well, things begin to clunk unlocked.
Still, even with a question like that, it can be easy to skip to a state of trying to picture the highest or truest self. To see what they’re doing every day, to see what they have, what they look like. And that, still, doesn’t really tell us anything - it’s just not what we’re trying to get to. Our truest self, for me, is how we “be” in the world. It’s not what we do or what we look like, it’s how we exist as the truest, most aligned version of ourselves. And none of that is external - it happens from the inside out.
After redefining, we Reclaim. And here we start with Permission, becoming your own source of permission and being the one who gets to decide:
When I started out coaching, I thought my job was to teach people what they didn’t know, to help them on a journey from not knowing what they were doing to doing things with confidence. In reality, I became a professional permission giver. People didn’t come to me because they didn’t actually know what to do, or whether their ideas were any good. They knew all that, even if they didn’t know they knew it. They were not asking me whether the idea was good, whether they should do it, whether they were capable of doing so. They were asking me for permission. Permission to believe what they already knew, and act upon it.
By outsourcing the permission we are also outsourcing the judgement and decision making. If someone else gives you permission to go ahead with that idea you’re nursing then they are making the judgement that the idea is good and the decision to do it. You can just glide through on the slipstream of that, feeling safe in the knowledge that someone else has ok-ed it so it’s not really on you. You’re just following through on what someone else has said. My friend sent me a text asking me to tell her it was ok to not go to a party, and by seeking my permission she got to not feel guilty about it because she had a note that said she didn’t have to; seeking permission means you get to not make the scary decision, feel the scary feelings of taking a risk.
That makes people feel better. And then, very quickly, another decision would need to be made and they’d feel they needed permission to make that one too. You become dependent on external permission and ultimately that means you aren’t actually doing it. Any of it. You’re not running your business, running your life - you’re just working in it, hoping your boss doesn’t tell you off.
This is a combination of bluffing and proving. At the roots here, we are not just learning to give ourselves permission, we are learning to trust ourselves, our power. In order to do that it needs to be proved that we can be trusted, but in order to do that we need to bluff our way into doing things that create the proof.
Next is the big one, Time and Space. This pillar is all about how to reclaim your time and space from wherever it’s being spent so you can spend it on your newly defined priorities.
Time is always the problem. All the dreams and ideas are held back by time and the constant lack of it. No matter how many planners you buy or podcasts you listen to or techniques you try, time falls from your hands, unspooling into blackness. There are never enough hours in the day, that’s what they say. And yet we still act as if there were. We make long to-do lists in the knowledge they are uncompletable, we continue to set standards for our productivity that we have never attained, we still act as if time might, for some reason, suddenly become different today.
Much of this is our conditioned perception of “normal” productivity. We feel we should always have the output gauge pushed to maximum, because that’s how it’s done and that’s what everyone else is doing and we should just be able to manage. But as we continue to very much not manage, it is our responsibility to consider the possibility that there might be a different approach here - and to create our own. If it’s not working, fix it.
Oftentimes, when we think we want more time we actually need more space. The desire for more time comes from the perception that we are falling behind, that things won’t be done “in time”, that we don’t have room for ourselves in our schedules. How often have you looked at your calendar and realised you don’t have a free weekend now for 6 weeks, or that every day this week already has its hours accounted for and there’s nowhere to fit in that walk? It feels like the walls are closing in, but it’s not because you’ve got no time - those 168 hours that week will still be happening. It’s because you’ve got no space.
For me, space is what makes time manageable. It gives me options, gives me overflow, gives me room for everything I want to include in my life. There is never a sense of falling behind or running out of time because there are always gaps and spaces to flow into. Everything has a place, from calls to appointments to creative projects to walks, and it also means if I need to book a doctor’s appointment or a friend asks if I’m free for a coffee they can fit right in without sending shockwaves through my plans. And I have space because I’ve boiled down everything I could do into the thick sauce of what actually works and what I actually like doing.
Finally, we reclaim our power from where we’re holding it back inside - the excuses that masquerade as logical reasons to not do what you want, and making your way forward in spite of them.
These excuses dressed up as reasons are tricky customers because they are so sensible and so convincing. This isn’t some hysterical notion about how the world isn’t going to crash around you, this is grown up, calm logic. And that’s powerful, because you believe it. And that means you don’t even think to investigate it a little further because the reason feels like a plan.
We all do it, read something and think “yeah I get the concept but it’s just not possible for me to follow through on it”. And we do that because it’s easier to have a reason we can’t or won’t make that change rather than do the hard work. The acknowledgement of “yeah I get it” legitimises the “but”.
Just because there is a boulder in your path does not mean that you turn back or stay to chip away at the boulder until it’s gone - you find a route around it. Your excuses and reasons are boulders, and while you acknowledge their presence in the landscape of you, you don’t let them stop you going where you want to - you map around and through them.
After all this, all that is left is to Reignite. The first way to live within your fulfilled life is to get to know your energy and how to best create and maintain it.
Much of thriving is, to me, the preservation and management of energy. Certainly I think we all know when we’re not thriving because we feel lethargic and unmotivated, and rolling ourselves from the sofa to put the kettle on feels like an almost insurmountable quest. Energy levels are a personal thing tied inextricably to our bodies and lives - chronic and transient illness, working conditions, parenthood and caring, overall wellbeing. And yet there seems to also be this universal standard of energy that we feel we should be hitting, and feel frustrated and inferior for not.
The one thing about energy that we all know yet refuse to believe is that it is not static. Of course we know there is not one energy level we can hope to maintain across our day/month/life and yet we really really want there to be, so much so that even when we consciously know the opposite is true, we still strive for that consistent high energy and hate ourselves for not having it. I know you have heard people say the words “ebb and flow” to you a hundred times and I’m not going to demean you by going into what it means - you know what it means, you understand the truth of it, you just don’t want it to be the case.
This is not about having energy to “use”, it is about having energy to “hold”. We cannot expect to maintain super high energy levels at all times, but we can help ourselves to hold a level of workable energy for longer
Next is experiencing what I call The Ooze, and finding ways to revel in it more and more often - this is the joyful stuff of life.
It feels like an ooze because it is not a fleeting moment, not jumping up and down joy, not a lightning bolt nor a sweaty dancefloor; it is thick, golden, slow, enveloping. It is a slow smile and warm insides, small indulgence, contentment, peace. It is this is it - when you know, without needing to think about it, that this is exactly the feeling you’re doing all of this for. When you are at one with yourself and nothing really matters any more and you are just… happy.
It is not as straightforward as doing more of the things you love, because that is too conscious. You have to decide with your brain what the things you love are, and your brain doesn’t know. Two years ago I’d have laughed right in your face if you’d told me I’d find my Ooze out walking up mountains. I didn’t even like doing that two years ago, let alone expect it to be where I’d locate my truest self and peace. We bring a lot of “shoulds” when it comes to joy - we should love knitting and yoga and baking bread from scratch or sketching in nature and herbal teas and gardening. This is a list of all the things I thought were what would make me happy, even though half of them I never even did and the other half felt ok but not, like, life-enhancing. The idea was better than the reality. This is what we need, to get away from the idea of joy and lean into the reality of it. Lose our preconceptions and the Instagram pictures we want to take and explore this with our senses rather than our minds.
And lastly, right at the end of Mapping we talk about keeping going, keeping committed, and continuing to choose your own world.
Sometimes things aren’t hard if you don’t treat them like they’re hard. When you treat things with tenderness and curiosity and play and lightness then sometimes they’re not hard at all. So I suppose it’s striking a balance, not expecting mastery and perfection straight out of the gate, but also not piling on the pressure and dread. It’s saying “ok, this is harder than I thought and I’m a bit uncomfortable, but what if I acted like it wasn’t hard at all? How would I navigate this if I believed in myself? What would I do if it was guaranteed I’d have what I want at the end?”.
There are a few things I would recommend as you begin off down this trail. One is to not put off anything good. In our conditioned world of linear time and suffering towards a reward we tend to put off the joyful things until we’ve “earned” them, or until we have time because they’re “not important”. The entire point of you doing all this work was to have more of the good, not to work out how to get it and then not claim it until you’re perfectly living life. The more joy you experience in your life, the more likely you are to stick with the work because you’re getting positive reinforcement, and because these snippets of joy become addictive.
And that’s Mapping! I hope you have enjoyed this whistle stop tour through the process and can take something from this episode to change how you think or act in your day to day. If this has peaked your interest in Mapping then there is much more where this came from. Within the course each pillar has an essay of Field Notes you can read or listen to, a Map worksheet for you to work out how the pillar affects you, and an Excursion where you can practically apply the learnings in real life to make a real difference. There are no planned live elements and no group, so there is no falling behind and no comparison - just navigating your way to true fulfilment. Mapping is available from today until February 18th, and then will not reopen again until later in the year.