I was intrigued about what I could become, I was much more uncertain of what that role might be.
“Your talent is bigger than a profession. Your talent was given for a purpose. Use your talent for the purpose for which you’ve been put on the planet.”
—Dr. Steve Perry
When you are in pursuit of your purpose, or if you are deciding whether you should follow your dreams, the pathway forward may seem questionable. Many questions will run through your head. Is it the right decision? What could go wrong? What will happen if everything goes right? I asked myself all of these questions, and sometimes I still do. These are the times when you should really dig deep, find your self-confidence, and take the advice of motivational speaker Lisa Nichols. I had the opportunity to attend the Disney Dreamer Academy as a member of the press and sit in on a session with Lisa. This was my third time hearing Lisa live at a Disney Dreamer Academy, but on Friday, March 9, 2018, she changed my life.
I am not sure if it was her pure genius, my thirst for knowledge and growth, or the timing of my life. I was ready to take a risk and believe in my own magic. Lisa’s amazing story begins when she was a single mom on public assistance with twelve dollars in her bank account and a baby wrapped in a towel (instead of a diaper). She had hit rock bottom. She struggled trying to care for herself and her son.
Then she had a shift and today, more than twenty years later, she is a millionaire entrepreneur, a best-selling author, a humanitarian, and a motivational speaker. It felt like she was speaking directly to me when she said, “Bet on You!” It was at that moment that she aroused a sleeping giant within me. As she stood there, bold, radical, powerful, and passionate, I could not help but hang on every word as tears streamed down my face. I finally felt that I deserved to give myself permission to Bet on Me!
You can have the same epiphany. You have to bet on yourself before anyone else does. Believe in the fact that all of the essential elements you need are already inside of you. Believe that you can and will succeed in accomplishing even more than you have ever dreamt about. This journey of living out your dreams is like relying on an internal GPS tracker. Trust that, even if you have to recalibrate, your navigational system will always safely guide you to your destination.
As you venture toward that passion, remember that, even if you take a wrong turn, you have what is needed inside you to get to your personal place of fulfillment. The most important action you will take is to engage yourself in this process.
As difficult as your journey may become, you cannot worry about what others think about your actions. Only you can decide if your decisions are right or wrong. Reserve that power for yourself. And trust yourself! Give yourself permission to change direction. If it is not what you originally planned, so what? Life is all about change, and taking a new route is your choice to make.
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take.”
—Wayne Gretzky
When you begin to reevaluate and discover yourself on the pathway to purpose, expect a definite learning curve. This process is not always comfortable or uncomplicated. But there is a simple way to become more at ease with your possible missteps and new learnings. Open yourself up to the vulnerabilities of not knowing where you might land. This is especially true if you have been at an expert level for many years in a totally different area. If you learned how to excel once, you have the potential to learn again. Imagine how you will thrive and achieve that much more once you tap into who you were created to be!
I bet you want to reach out to ask me, “Is there one specific thing that I should do to become who I was created to be? If so, how do I find it?”
To be honest, there is no one, cookie-cutter answer to figuring out exactly what you will do or who you will be next. Remember that hatching is about removing restrictions. In this process, you can and should explore new opportunities as they come to you.
For example, I remember the first time my friend Vickisa invited me to a Bikram Yoga class. Initially, I did not know if I should be insulted or inspired. When someone is insecure, she (meaning me) might easily misinterpret an innocent remark. I took the high road and initially thought doing yoga seemed easy, but the heat factor gave me serious pause. I thought, You mean to tell me that we are in one room for 90 minutes, in 105-degree heat, at 40 percent humidity, and doing the same 26 postures in every class? The class did not sound like something I would voluntarily sign up for. “Oh, okay girl,” I said to Vickisa in my sarcastic voice.
A few days later, I walked into that same Bikram Yoga studio with a plastic water bottle, a rented mat, and no idea what I had gotten myself into. But surprises never cease! I used my thirty-nine-dollar trial pass several times over the next few weeks and, once my trial ended, I found myself subscribing to a monthly plan. I ended up attending classes four to five days a week. I still practice Bikram Yoga so many years later. I have made significant progress in my practice, even though I still cannot do some of the harder poses. I keep on trying. Who would have thought that I would become a yogi and that my journey would teach me so much about myself and the benefits that yoga added to my life? In this instance, I certainly hatched!
The most important lesson of hatching is to embrace the process. Break out mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for each new level of growth, development, and maturity that you reach. Then go ahead and do it all over again.
Let’s revisit the image of the unhatched baby bird. In the baby bird’s beginning stage, it is equipped for formation inside of the egg. However, once the baby bird reaches full term, it hatches from that same egg into a season where it learns to function outside its shell. The bird continues to evolve, one level at a time. Its purpose includes learning how to fly; at another level, it will become impregnated; and in yet another level, it will reproduce. If it stays within the shell’s confines, it will probably become inert.
The same is true for you as one of God’s greatest creations. There are inherent stages of development and markers of growth that you progressively met as you matured. For example, as a newborn infant, crying was the only form of communication that you had to share your needs with your parents. But there was a point at which you evolved and learned how to communicate with single words, then sentences. You forged ahead from kindergarten through higher education, so there is no reason to stop progressing to the next level now!
Every season will bring you new stages of development, new personal assignments to fulfill, and new seeds to nurture. Unless you continuously hatch into your next season, you will risk going bad in the last environment you have outgrown. Why is there such a risk attached to staying the same? And what does it really mean to go bad?
With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I can clearly answer that question with some of the feelings that started going bad in me.
•The longer I remained inside my shell, the more frustrated I became.
•The more I realized that I should be doing something different with my life, the more I realized I was conforming to the expectations of others.
•I found myself becoming insecure where I had once been confident.
•I started seeing behaviors in myself that showed me I was becoming the type of person I had always despised.
•The longer I stayed comfortable within my shell, the more uncomfortable I became. I was “going bad.”
It is easy to miss the potential of your now by staying still in the comfort of the present with your pains of the past or your fears about the future. If you were to stop and honestly assess yourself and your life today, are there any instances that do not feel right emotionally, mentally, spiritually or physically? Can you name what they are? Do you know where these feelings stem from? It could be just one strong, incessant issue or a multitude of contentions that you’ve hidden away in your shell.
Faith is the one essential element that you need to hatch. The answer is to find faith in yourself. Right now! Today! You do not have to be religious to have faith. The definition of spirituality, which is a “strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion,” need not apply when hatching. I am simply suggesting that you put your complete trust or confidence in something!