Grow With Soul: Episode 146 - How To Have A Fulfilled Life
Clickbait episode title alert! This is not going to be an episode that’s going to tell you an exact formula for feeling fulfilled in the next 3-5 working days - but I think you know me well enough by now to know that wasn’t really going to happen. Rather, today I want to talk about what I’ve learned about fulfilment so far, giving you some jumping off points on your own journey.
What I talk about in this episode:
An introduction to The Cabin
What fulfilment looks like
Relaxing into fulfilment
Practicing fulfilment
The 9 main themes of fulfilment
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Read the episode transcript:
Clickbait episode title alert! This is not going to be an episode that’s going to tell you an exact formula for feeling fulfilled in the next 3-5 working days - but I think you know me well enough by now to know that wasn’t really going to happen. Rather, today I want to talk about what I’ve learned about fulfilment so far, giving you some jumping off points on your own journey.
Before we get into it I just wanted to quickly let you know that The Cabin pre-sale is open today, meaning you get £50 off the total price (and a surprise bonus you can find out about on the website). The Cabin is a supported programme of essays and audio, workbooks, Q&As and 121 text support sessions, giving you a cocoon and accountability to actually take the life you’ve been dreaming of, the one you’ve got all planned out, and make it a reality. There is also a nice form on the website where you can ask me how The Cabin might help you specifically and I can send you a personal answer. All the details are at simpleandseason.com/thecabin, and I’m excited to see you there.
First of all, what do I mean when I say fulfilment?
How am I defining it? For me, fulfilment is living truthfully. It is doing things because they are what you truly want rather than you feel you have to do them. It is having your commitments and work and hobbies and family and self and all the other parts of your life in the quantities you want them to be. It is an ease with and acceptance of who you really are. It is making decisions and choices from an intentional place, living life on purpose rather than drifting through. It is not waiting or longing for the perfect conditions but creating the life you want to live in the here and now.
Which is easy for me to say, but what does all that actually look like? It’s going through your work projects and crossing out any that you are doing for clout, or because someone said you should, or it feels like the kind of thing you have to do; for me, this was finally taking 121 calls off of my website - they were something that I felt I should have as an option rather than being the truest way for me to work.
It’s adjusting your business model to allow for more space, if that’s what you want, or going all in on client work, or getting a job you can leave behind at the end of the day if that gives you the balance you want. It’s putting time in your calendar or an item on your to do list to do that hobby or activity on a regular basis.
It is deciding to believe that there is not something wrong with you in a social situation where you feel uncomfortable, just accepting that that’s not where you thrive. Seeing the travels or conferences or extreme sports that others are doing and instead of feeling bad that you’re not doing those things, or feeling boring that you don’t really want to, it’s allowing them to wash over you as you continue to do what really lights you up.
It is going to that family thing because you’ve consciously chosen that it is how you want to spend your afternoon not because it’s assumed you’ll go; and it’s approaching it with clarity about how you want to be there. It’s doing the group programme that makes you feel sparkly rather than going through the motions with the “logical” next step. It’s being in the midst of a heartbreak, or a big work disappointment, or a stressful life event and making sure you go out every day and walk the hills and look at the leaves and be yourself for just a few minutes.
In my experience, fulfilled is something we want to go out and get. It’s something we want to go out and find, capture, buy, receive. We want to have the right house or the right teapot. We want to have a hobby or passion that will be the nucleus of our fulfilment. We want to have the people in our lives orient their behaviour towards fulfilling our happiness. We want to read and research our way to a state of fulfilment. We want it to happen to us. But the truth is, fulfilment isn’t out there, it’s in here. It’s not something we can find externally, because it exists in our truest self. Rather than going out and getting it, we need to unfurl it from within.
Perhaps this sounds boring. Maybe you want to go on a great mission towards fulfilment or maybe you want it to be some shiny thing that appears on the horizon; just anything other than what is inside your humdrum self. This is supposed to be an unrecognisable makeover, a glamorous improvement, not making do with what you have! Ok, but it’s also supposed to happen. You can wait and struggle and keep scanning the horizon… or you can be fulfilled.
Because in this way it’s easy. Well perhaps not easy - it’s inevitable. How much less stressful is it when the life you want is not something you have to grab hold of on the wind before it blows away, but something that is quietly inside you that you have to unearth? It’s not something you can miss when you look the wrong way, but something that is constantly with you. In this way it is easy because you can rest assured that it will exist for you, but of course there is effort. There is the effort of unearthing that seed of truth underneath all the conditioning and expectations, the effort of creating the mechanisms by which that truth can be expressed, and the effort of letting go of your grip and allowing it all to happen.
But what about this life you’ve got planned? What about the dream you're chasing, the ideal life that is getting you through the days? I’m not saying give up on your dreams. I’m saying the way to actually experience fulfilment is to break those dreams into their elemental parts and find the truest expression of them in your life right now. This means letting go of expectation of what your dream life is supposed to look like, and relaxing into how it feels in your current life.
A very surface level example of this is that in my dream life I have a little cottage in the middle of a vast flower garden; in my current life I have four pots which I spent time planning out and picked out the things I loved most at the garden centre and that I tend - I have brought that element of the dream life into my reality and I’m getting what I wanted it to give me. I am not waiting to have flowers - literally and metaphorically. Once you tap into what you want the parts of your dream life to give you, how you want to feel differently in that dream life, you can start to see how you can integrate those things in your here and now. Yes they may not be as picture perfect as you might have wanted, but they are actually happening - happiness is happiness whether you’re experiencing it in your dream house or sitting on your front step.
Fulfilment happens by practice. It happens in every day choices and every day thoughts. It may sound silly but a big part of being fulfilled is remembering to be fulfilled. When the circumstances of life run amock and you’re escaping into daydreams, it’s dragging your actions and thoughts back to that seed and remembering that you want to be living as your truest self; and then readjusting and carrying on with more consciousness over your decisions and more commitment to making the time to do the things that make you feel the way your dream life feels.
It is having simple, even implicit, rituals (there is a blog post on this that I’ll link in the show notes) that ground you into this remembering or that allow you to access those oozy, joyful feelings. For example, when I put on a song before I start work it’s’ a reminder that I do things my way and not the default way, and when I go for a walk every afternoon, even a short one, it’s a way to access my truest self no matter what is happening in my world. It is being present to where your life is actually happening (again, a blog post on this is also in the show notes!) and being here living it.
Fulfilment is achieved by being in action, little and often. It’s not something that’s going to happen to you. It’s not somewhere you’ll arrive at in 25 years by sitting on the train you’re on for long enough. Start to think of fulfilment as a doing word. Something you remember to do every day for five minutes, and then when that becomes habit you aim for half an hour and it goes on and on, colouring your life one piece at a time until you're living in technicolour.
At least this has been my experience. I think it was 2019 when I chose Fulfilment as my word of the year, hoping that that would be enough for it to happen, that I could take up drawing and buy a house and then fulfilment would land as a blanket around my shoulders. But it kept not happening, it kept feeling that there were more doors I had to go through to get there and I lived an unsettled life of itching for more. I spent years trying to think my way to fulfilment. I thought I had to find the thing to add to my life, until I slowly realised that the walks I took every day were giving me what I wanted if I’d allow myself to lean back and receive it. I realised that the serenity I was longing for came after a day of writing and I could have it now rather than struggling to find the perfect serenity-inducing passive income stream. The more I opened to what was true, what was happening, the more I started to be existing in my dream life - not my dream life on paper, but my dream life in my heart.
It is all of this, three years of trying and forcing and then releasing, and then forcing again and then remembering to release, that has brought me to this conception of fulfilment. It is also all of this that I’ve put into The Cabin. Because so much of it is practice, and remembering to practice, I know that having a container to do that in, a cocoon to hold it within and ensure it happens, is something very useful. You don’t need to be told what to do or what to think, it is, after all, the expression of your truest self we’re talking about. You just need a place to go, to commit, to be held, to build the habits and emerge confident and easeful. Of course you can build practice and remembering and presence without The Cabin, it just might be nicer to do it within it.
When I was coming up with what became The Cabin, I had a piece of card and in the middle I wrote “a fulfilled life” and around the outside I wrote down everything I could think of that contributed to fulfilment. These congealed into nine main themes, and these will be our monthly themes in The Cabin that we will explore and work on how to apply them easefully to our lives. So I thought I’d share each one here too.
First, Desire.
There is no starting without knowing and embracing what we desire. And yes, this is what we desire to have, but also what to we desire to know and who we desire to be. It is centering these desires (those feelings we want) and committing to building a life around them, and then beginning to, of course, take action and carry them into our days.
Two, Possiblity.
What so often holds us back is an extremely narrow conception of what is possible. So much more is possible than what we think, and if we just consider an alternative, develop a curiosity and live in a more open mind, so much more can be real than we’d ever imagined.
Three, Choosing.
One of the biggest actions you can take toward fulfilment is truly choosing what you do. Not just going along with it, not doing the sensible option, not even doing the first thing that comes into your head; it’s deciding what the truest choice is, and committing to that. This becomes a natural way of being, but at first it’s a practice of self-empowerment.
Four, Devotion.
I wrote a blog post about devotion a few weeks ago that goes into more detail of how I’m conceiving of it. But ultimately, devotion asks “what would you do if your life was someone you love?”. How can you honour and elevate your own life every day as if it was something you cherished?
Five, Space.
Although the practices and rituals I’m talking about will slot into your life, whether because they already exist or you’re replacing like for like, it can feel overwhelming and like the walls are closing in when you’re trying to shift from one life to another. Creating space through radical prioritisation and then maintaining that space is crucial to allowing the fulfilling feelings flow.
Six, Loosen.
Nothing thrives under a tight grip. That makes sense, when you say it like that - we would not grip and a baby bird or squeeze a plant into a too small pot. But we do it with our fulfilment; we grip onto our ideas of what we think we want, grip onto our behaviours and actions. Loosening up, leaning back, being present, experiencing our lives is how we can let fulfilment thrive.
Seven, Try.
Things aren’t going to happen to you, you have to do something. You have to make effort. But effort can be easeful, and trying can be a fulfilling experience in itself. This is about taking that striving energy and harnessing it in a way that is light and positive.
Eight, Sourcing.
By sourcing I mean “getting what you want and need”. This means locating joy and contentment inside yourself, as well as where you can get it in the world outside of you. It’s practicing being able to access those fulfilled feelings at will and existing as self-sourced bubble where you always know how to get what you need.
Finally, Flow.
That elusive flow state that everyone seems to always want. I’m not defining Flow, it is for you to define for yourself - perhaps you don’t need to define it, just know how it feels. But this is about existing aligned with your truth, feeling both in control and along for the ride, trusting yourself implicitly and living a life worth living.
Each month of The Cabin we will explore these themes - there will be elements of how to’s where appropriate, ways of thinking around the theme, a workbook for you to explore your personal relationship to it and suggested activities and rituals to begin to embed them as part of your fulfilled life.
But now, I’m going to leave you with the simplest answer to that question, how to have a fulfilled life, that I can muster: be here doing the things that feel most like your dream life. Don’t wait.