For Love or $$$

Venturing out on your own can be risky. So many of our fears are founded on the logistics of time and money… “How will I pay the bills?” “Do i even have enough time to make this happen?” “What if I fail?” Do you ever feel like the numbers always add up perfectly against you? Pause, take a breath and take a step back for a second. When you think about it, the modern life of an “employee” forces us to play a numbers game: income must align with bills, consumption costs such as food, entertainment, socializing must remain under budget, and so on. Violate these rules and panic quickly sets in: “What will i do?!” “How can I cut costs or increase income?” What you’re really asking is, “How can i sacrifice my behaviors, lifestyle, and in some cases, my livelihood to avoid seeming devastation?!”. All too easily, our livelihood feels reduced to these logistical decisions, often feeling like they require little more than a reptilian brain stem. Pause and ask yourself, “How many of these factors are even related to my purpose in life?” To my values and the essence of who I am to myself and my loved ones?”. Yes, it’s important to pay the rent for the apartment that houses you but everyone has to do this so do these things even define you or your purpose, in the end? I’m not asking you to give up your housing just because it doesn’t define you, I’m just hoping to reduce the emotional charge of what should influence your decision making. In other words, your decisions should focus on your highest purpose and what aligns with it. Risk is inherent to everything so pay yourself and nourish the purpose of your higher self, first. How does your purpose nourish you and influence your decisions about what constitutes your ‘livelihood’?

The above are all natural reactions to our modern day game of survival and I used to grapple with them every day for years! They used to pile onto each other because I didn’t like my job, which influenced how much I could earn, which influenced my bad habits of coping with the job I hated, which influenced how much sleep I lost, and on and on and ON… I felt like I had been manipulated into a numbers game that didn’t add up or at best, was a zero-sum game. Have you ever felt this way? I promise you, it’s by design in an economy rigged to keep you an employee forever, paying you the least to produce the most. It’s time for that to end. Now.

I’ll be honest, in starting my business, my hope was to help others and in doing so, earn enough income to quit my job but still pay the rent. Not greedy, right? Yet, this meant my focus was on me and my money before serving others. I was contracting from risking my finances and when we do so, it influences our every decision, it diminishes our value, our purpose, and our ability to help others. I noticed this in myself and I noticed I was contracting away from all the risky decisions required for me to live my purpose, live my values and serve others. I was trying to grab a new tree branch without letting go of my old one. I was feeling my passion on the inside but i wasn’t living its expression, I wasn’t forming connections with others around it and I wasn’t receiving the nourishment of relationships from it. Suffering in this way, I eventually came to a point where I became more desperate to live my purpose, feel connected to others and help them than I was to “pay the rent” or go to a “job” I didn’t love. I was desperate to feel alive by living my values and turning them into a lifestyle, by creating community, by finding my tribe. By the same token, I was near grief-stricken just thinking about abandoning my commitment to others or how it felt to never show up in the first place compared to how much I wanted to help them. All this grief just to protect my little nut of a rent payment? Until what? My epitaph reads, “He paid his rent on time. All the way to the end”. Oh, HELL NO.

Feel into your purpose, who you want to be unto others and what you want to give to the world… How do you feel? Did “paying rent” even enter the picture? No, and that’s because we honestly live more in our hearts than our physical surroundings. Hell, when I’m in my element, i often get so blissfully distracted that I sometimes forget to eat or get enough sleep! Have you ever felt this way? Feeling into my purpose sounds something like this: In this world, I exist in relationship to others as a sounding board to help them deepen their self-awareness of who they are, their value, and who they are in relationship to others. When we are in relationship to each other, we become more than just ourselves and an archetypal persona emerges that some call a higher self or the soul. For me, my purpose is about self-actualizing who you are and helping you become all of yourself in relationship to others. I enjoy developing and promoting your value, growing your self-worth, learning more about who you are in relationship to others and how we are more than ourselves when we do so. Anything I can do to help bring that potential out in you and into the world, translate your value to others and help you self-actualize, I will do. And I absolutely will not stop until i do so and manifest your success into existence. You are so special and unique that there is no one else like you! I believe in you and your unique value so passionately that I will do anything, ANYTHING to help you actualize your value and give your gifts to the world! In doing so, I receive the gift of discovering more about who i am in relationship to the value that you provide everyone. For example, your connection to the world might come in the form of our inner archetypal “Healer” or “Rebel” or “Explorer”. It sets my soul on fire to help you develop your value in this way and anything less would feel like I’m betraying my purpose; the very reason i was born. The secret lies in my conviction and what I’m willing to do to help you succeed… When you’re willing to do whatever it takes to bring your passion and dreams into being, it means you’re willing to get your hands dirty, to do the unpopular tasks, to get scrappy and grind it out. Is it risky to put myself and my livelihood on the line for this? Of course...but the risk is inherently worth it because I’m genuinely interested in what defines you and I give a damn about who you are and whether or not you’re successful. I’m not here for the money, I’m here for YOU. I’m here to help deepen your sense of self-worth and to help translate your value to the world so they can understand you and your value for themselves!

Income is still important but it should be attached to your value, not your productivity in a job you don’t love. Bills and housing are still important, but they will always be secondary to my purpose, my spirit. It can be scary to not know exactly how well you can pay the bills but I noticed something… Giving of yourself to others will always come back to you and karma itself doesn’t pay the rent for your apartment, but over time, as you scrap your way forward...karma will develop your value until one day, you buy the whole damn apartment building. No, things don’t always go as planned and it may not feel purposeful or triumphant as you begin but it will feel that way to others when you provide them value...and how you make them feel is the entire point.

So, even though I have been hacking away at living my purpose in small, safe, short, haphazard ways for years, I've decided NOW is the time to GO FOR IT (amid a pandemic and unemployment, of all times!). To really show up. To go all in and live my values. To scrap my way forward. To truly connect with others and provide value at all costs. To go all in and do whatever it takes to help and provide value to others. To sacrifice what’s needed along the way. To turn the tables on the “numbers game”. Yes, there’s going to be stress and it’s going to be hard, it’s going to test your will but you risk it anyway, because the mission of serving your purpose is worth it and more important.

For example: I was laid off from my last job in February and at the time i’m writing this, I’m currently unemployed, there is a global pandemic, no employers are hiring, and I can’t see friends or make in-person connections (which is my strength). In other words, I’m in a very risky situation, whether I like it or not!! Rather than lament my situation or play side hustle games of scrapping for a buck or two here and there, I’m making the choice to live my purpose despite the circumstances. I’m choosing to be of service to others by staying creative, resourceful and resilient; making content, making online connections, and considering how I can best be of service to others by lending them my talents. It’s time to let go of worrying about only myself and reducing my purpose to ”paying the rent”. Instead, it’s time to truly connect with others and nourish myself by promoting their value to others. It’s time to live my purpose; time to live from my heart; time to live my values at any “cost”. It’s time to turn this money game back on employers and be supported by my tribe, instead. Time to live my purpose...at any ‘cost’. Time to get ‘scrappy’.

I feel far more nourished in my heart and purposeful in my service to others as a means of allowing my value to generate what I need to survive, live, and eventually thrive. How do your values inform your purpose and how does your purpose nourish you and your soul? Make you feel alive? Help you survive hardship? When your purpose feels great enough, there’s no hardship you can't endure and overcome. In the end, it’s all worth the risk because things will work out one way or another so stay creative, stay resilient, and stay scrappy!

How does the risk of living your passion and purpose make it all worth it for YOU?