Last week was increasingly hectic as the weekend approached. My younger son had a Tae Kwon Do belt test to prepare for and then a soccer game. My older son’s team had the first game of their soccer tournament, as well as a team meeting and a picnic prior to the tournament to welcome international players the soccer club is hosting. I am grateful my schedule allows me the flexibility to focus on their activities, but it means I wind up doing only urgent things in my business for a few days and setting aside the rest. This blog fell into “the rest.” It took a while for me to calm my mind and think about what I gathered on the self-employment journey this week. I came up with one idea, but I think it might be a doozy.

I believe strongly in the idea that each person has a calling or purpose. I believe this is defined for each of us by our unique nature. Expressing our natural gifts, talents, and passions and sharing our unique viewpoint is what we are each called to do.

That’s not the new idea. I’ve believed it for a long time, and really wrapped my mind and heart around it when I was reading Barbara Sher’s books. I have realized my purpose is to help other people rediscover, or in some cases uncover for the first time, their natural gifts, talents, and passions and figure out how to express them through their life work.

I believe in authenticity and genuineness as the way to claim real personal power. I believe that living in alignment with the true self, living from the core, connects each of us to the power of spirit that brings joy, contentment, deep caring, and abundance. To me, that is experiencing God.

I had been thinking a lot about people who are struggling against other people’s expectations, family beliefs, cultural norms, and other limiting thoughts. We all spend so much time fighting the ghosts of our past. We replay arguments from long ago, even when the people arguing against us in the past are very different people today. We keep that distant image alive and assign the role to an unsuspecting person who has no connection to the original argument from years ago.

I got clear about this when I received an e-mail harshly criticizing people I know only peripherally. The writer of the e-mail seemed to think I was closely involved with them or somehow in charge of them. I explained my limited involvement, which only provoked more harsh comments. The person wanted to pick a fight with them and was trying to do it through me. Since I wasn’t involved, I could see the folly of it. But since I was annoyed and provoked by the comments, I could also feel my ghosts of past arguments rearing their heads and wanting to jump in. Letting go required focused effort.

Then my son told me he was more nervous than usual about the tournament because it draws a lot of attention. College scouts and professional scouts will be watching and he wanted to look good for them. I know that nerves are the quickest path to poor performance, and I reminded him. We’ve talked about it for years. I wanted to reconnect him with the part of himself that brings out his best performance. I wanted to remind him that he plays best when he plays for the joy of the game, from his heart, and not when he stays in his head and is always looking over his own shoulder.

I told him of the idea that had been developing over the week as I thought about how we all get trapped in other people’s expectations and in limiting beliefs, and how it gets in the way of us acting from our core, the true source of personal power and excellence. I asked him:

Do you want to live your live expressing what was poured into you when you were created, or struggling against everything that’s been piled on you since you got here?

Just saying the words out loud to him humbled me. I felt suddenly awed, a little nervous and breathless, and I had to focus on my breathing to become calm. The words touched something universal, something very powerful, that grabbed me by my core and made me look at myself.

I live most of the time struggling against what’s been piled on me, and hoping for permission to express what was poured into me. This is not a “now I get it” sort of transformation. I will continue as I have been, only slowly moving away from the ghost fights and towards being who I was born to be. But I now have a clearer view of the choice I have to make several times each day.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey
Ideal Life Work & Self-Employment Advocate