The False Choice: A) What brings you alive, or B) what keeps you alive.
Years ago, something big happened to me.
I suspected the fragility of one certain thought, and in doing so, my world opened up.
I had arrived at what I thought was the grand destination point — President/CCO of a large company — only to find myself, two years later, filled with dread as I went to work everyday.
It wasn’t the fault of the agency. It was a fine agency.
It was me.
I wasn’t doing what I had come here to do. I wasn’t doing what brought me alive. I was out of integrity with my true self.
And so, armed with origins-unknown courage or surrender, still not sure which, I left that job. I left the world really, and went back to grad school for two years — both literally and in the meta sense.
It was the most powerful choice of my life.
But as I was emerging from that schooling, and looking with fresh eyes at the world and work again, I kept hitting a wall.
The wall was the “certain thought” I referred to up on sentence four.
The thought was this: “You have to make a choice — A) What brings you alive, or B) what keeps you alive — you can’t have both. You have your work that keeps you and your family fed, and you have your “doing good” stuff on the side that lights you up. It’s not possible to bring them both together.”
It was a wall because my schooling had centered me on what brought me alive and yet this polarity gave me no possibility without pain.
But my schooling had also taught me to be suspicious of polarities, and I now saw the glaring fragility of that thought. I saw that it wasn’t written on some cosmic Rosetta Stone — it was only written in my head — fiction — and yet it had been scripting my reality for years.
So I let that thought fall into a million little pieces and chose into a world where it wasn’t real. That opened a series of opportunities that totally disproved the fragile thought — too many to bring forward here — but perhaps epitomized by one day, absurdly soon after, sitting next to then President-elect Obama and showing him a script I had written as an anthem for his Inaugural Call to Service campaign and then watching him deliver it to camera.
Since then, my real discovery of what brings me alive is scaling the joy gotten from my personal epiphany by working with leaders to guide them through their own limiting beliefs and thoughts about what is possible for them in terms of a life and vocation of purpose and aliveness. From 15 years of sherpa-ing this journey, I have learned there are some pretty dependable bridges that one needs to cross:
- From ego to true self
- From preference to true purpose
- From force to allowing
- From the finiteness of “me alone” creation to the infiniteness of “We together” co-creation
We founded Soul Purpose so that a group of like-hearted individuals, feeling the call, from all walks of life and business could come together and walk those bridges together and arrive on the other side in a new reality, with a new vision, plan, and actions to build a life that will bring them fully alive. Our first event in LA did that more fully than we imagined with almost 100 leaders from around the world, and knew we had created something powerful when it happened in NY with the same size and potency.
If something, anything, that you read here chimes deep inside you either aliveness or a little discomfort at the idea of dashing that “certain thought” to bits — my experience is, that feeling is a direct invitation from your Universe saying — “Well done. You have found your personal way forward.”
If it’s something you’d like to talk about, please reach out to me at kirk@kirksouder.co — it’d bring me joy to chat.
And thanks for listening.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have been brought alive”
— Howard Thurman
