Stand for Something
This week I was hearing this message loud and clear from some of my mentors in different forms, so I decided to share my “country music” version with you today. In learning what our passion or “purpose” is that so many of us long to find, we unfortunately tend to over think it and continue to find ourselves frustrated about what that “thing” is, and when we don’t find it we’re frustrated until the next time we go on our “life purpose” hunt.
Think about it a little differently this time. Think about it from the inside out for a moment. Think about it, we are usually looking for so many of our answers outside of ourselves, but more often than not the answers are within us. I’m not trying to be cheesy here, I recently learned this lesson after fighting it for so long, and I want you to learn it quicker than I did. Just hang with me for a second.
Okay okay, I know, you don’t know what your answers are that’s why you’re looking outside yourself to get ideas. Unfortunately, the answers that we can get from the outside are “HOW” things. How to do this, how to do that, education or knowledge that we don’t have. But our “WHY” before we even begin to look at the “HOW” needs to come from within us. No one can give us our “WHY”.
Let me give an example. Instead of asking yourself what you’re passionate about, ask yourself what matters to you and/or what your values are. Passion is such a loaded word and can be such overkill sometimes. It’s associated with highly emotionally or sexually charged situations, circumstances and events and sometimes we just don’t have that fire inside of us on a daily basis so we think we’re missing something we need to go look for. That’s really not the goal. Guess what, you don’t have to find that “passion” you can start with what matters to you and build from there.
You innately know what matters or is important to you whether that’s the environment, animals, freedom, education, appreciation, health, simplicity, organization, belonging, compassion, forgiveness, etc. You get the picture. I’ll give a personal example, unfortunately or fortunately (depending on how you look at it) for me freedom matters to me more than fitness and it shows. (ok, yes I’m sensitive about my weight right now, but I’m working on that) but in all seriousness, I can get completely lost in creating personal and financial freedom for myself and my passion to help you do the same, but when it comes to some other areas they are slacking. That’s the way it goes, we’re not superhuman, which is why it is so important to have so many people in the world with various passions/aka values so we can learn from each other, grow and evolve together throughout our journeys.
Okay, next argument I hear. “Well, so and so already is passionate about that topic, they do it better than I do”, and BLAH BLAH BLAH. Well, I believed that for a long time too, but then when people repeatedly told me there wasn’t a Laurie Knight version of it yet, that resonated with me. So much of my message is about being authentic, that immediately I knew I needed to walk my talk and put my authentic version of my “why” out there even though it overlapped with what some other people are doing. It’s amazing once I took on that perspective, I no longer viewed people as competition, but more as partners with similar passions. Wow… talk about a-ha moment.
Okay, so watch the video and begin to jot down the things that you value. Jot down the things that you stand for and document circumstances where you would consistently respond the same way. You’ll begin to find some answers and slowly but surely you’ll start to connect with that knowing part of yourself.
In this day of information overload, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we don’t have our own answers and that everyone knows how to do it better than we do. In certain cases that may be true. This isn’t about being oblivious and lying to yourself that you know everything there is to know, it’s about being authentic and tapping into that part of you that does know you too have something to contribute to the world.
So, what do you stand for? Would love to see your own list or comments!
