I listen to creative minds, visionaries, and entrepreneurs all day long in my coaching practice and I am moved by the spirit that moves them. They bounce off walls with ambition, hunger, and frustration. They secretly dream big, because they are big. Still they whisper their most gorgeous desires, swallowing hard, as though they are confessing, say, a small hygiene problem or a third head.
“I don’t even know if I’ll ever have what I want,” they say. But I do. I know they are relentlessly drawn to where they belong.
We don’t choose our wildest dreams. They choose us. They point us toward our natural environment. When we’re not using our deepest gifts, we can feel like trout thrashing about on a dock, desperate to find water. It’s that necessary to live our calling. It’s eventually unbearable to deny our love, strength, and essence. We’ve said “yes” to some sacred arrangement in the ether and, here on earth—until we live our most meaningful dreams—we ache with the pangs of blessings unfulfilled. We can golf if we want to, but it will never fill that hole. We can shop, but we can’t buy our freedom. We can even hire a “life coach,” but then, and I hate this part, we still have to do our life.
“You’re just so restless,” my mother, a torch-bearing worshipper of security, used to say to me. I thought wanting to “be all you can be” in life was a good thing, not a personality disorder to cover up with a TV Guide, or a tri-level house in Long Island. But, like many inspired souls, I’ve often felt lonely in my consistent desire for true expression. I’d envy those who could kick back in “normal” lives, enjoy a few burgers at a backyard barbecue and some nice, conventional success. They’d fix a garage door, buy a house at the lake, or take a cruise to Alaska, and that would be enough. They didn’t wrestle with some unnamable gravitational pull, a colony of inner voices, or the secret claustrophobia of their own trapped potential. They didn’t need to change the world, chant some mantra, become a brand, or win a Pulitzer or a Grammy. In other words, they could just turn on the news. They didn’t need to be the news.
But a therapist of mine once said she believed my “restlessness” was an essential prerequisite for progress and abundance. Therapists always say these things, serving up hot cocoa for the soul and wiping our chins, which is why we pay them half our gross income. She explained how restlessness wouldn’t let me fall asleep to the presence of my gifts, and the difference I could make in the world. She saw longing as a wonderful capacity to “stay attuned to what my Inspired Self wanted to become.”
Just so you know, this is why I’ve never fit in at barbecues. I just can’t talk to a financial analyst or a plumber in a Hawaiian shirt or baseball cap and insert the words “attune” and “pass the dogs” into the same sentence.
“You want more,” said my wise counselor, “because you are more. There’s more in this lifetime for you to become.”
And that’s what I’ll tell you. You have more to give us. You have a built-in, divine assignment to employ all your gifts and to realize your exponential capacity. Your inspired self has bigger fish to fry and it doesn’t perceive any of the limitations that you do. That’s why it graciously kicks you in the ribs at night and tells you to stop dreaming small. Your desire is the full moon that stirs and pulls the tide. It’s compelling because it’s more real than anything else. You dream of the life that calls you because everything under the sun is hardwired to know where it belongs. You don’t need reasons or evidence when your bones trill with longing. Birds and fish just migrate. Everything living seeks to unfurl its own true nature.
Gregg Levoy, author of Callings, says a key is made to fit one lock and only one lock. “Anyone who feels made to do one particular thing in this world but is unable to do it becomes in a sense, an unreconciled key,” he says. Your relatives might think you’re going off the deep end with a savior complex or an impractical business plan, a fat head and some bad bee stings in store. Your guru or yoga instructor might think you need to banish yearning, stop “searching outside yourself,” and simply find peace in this moment. But I think you are searching to reconcile your key or even your whole paradigm key chain. You are migrating toward your destiny.
I remember talking to my friend Angela one night. I felt suspicious of my own desire to take my creativity to the next level. I wondered if I’d just watched one too many Oprah shows. Or maybe I wanted bigger success because I was still hunting for approval or love, admittance into some elusive club, an addict on a spree. Hey, I’d been to therapy. I’d sat on enough leather couches to know to ask myself a question or two.
“I wish I could say I wanted to help the world, like Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela, and that’s why I was doing this,” I said to Angela. I did want to help, but that didn’t seem to be the fuel in my engine.
“Well, then why are you doing this?” she said with a voice full of love and confidence, encouraging me to sound out possible truths. She had no fear of anything I might say. Meanwhile, I cringed as I pinpointed a slippery feeling in the back of my consciousness, something crouching and uncomfortable.
“I want to win,” I said to her, and it felt so ugly and unenlightened, competitive, and calculating. Goodbye, Dalai Lama—enter the beast with beady eyes.
“I want to win,” I said again. Having confessed it, I decided to explore that naked desire more.
“It’s not that I want tons of money,” I said, though of course I’d welcome a padded bank account.
“What is it?” she said gently.
“It’s not that I want fame, though I wouldn’t mind the benefits that come with that,” I admitted.
“Then what is it?” she repeated.
Finally, I felt an encrusted door swing open inside me. I looked at my friend and said, “I want to win because I think I have a home run in me.”
Everything within me relaxed in that moment, so I continued, “It’s just the note I came to sing,” I said. Then my words and tears just flowed. “I want to be big. I want to be known. It’s the level of expression that I feel like my talent was made for. It’s my note. I think it’s the only note that will feel real to me.”
Then she repeated back to me, “It’s just the note you came to sing.”
Suddenly my desire didn’t seem so evil or garish anymore. Suddenly it wasn’t narcissistic, slimy, or base. It was just the truth. It felt as natural as the inclination to write with my right hand, and love red maple leaves and coffee ice cream, or to hate sauerkraut, humidity, and anyone, anywhere, who could wear Lycra and look decent. It felt neutral and ordinary and even involuntary.
I realized then that we don’t get to choose our calling. We get to choose whether or not we will listen to each nudge or flare, whether or not we will believe, and whether or not we will dedicate ourselves to this territory of homecoming within us; but we don’t get to choose which doorway has our name on it, which one swings open for us, into the wild country of heightened capacities, love, and awe.
Suddenly this need for boundless expression and a sweeping life was no longer about my ego. It was about my integrity. It was about staying true to the evolving, amazing life force within. It was simple. I needed to breathe fire so that I could breathe.
I urge you to stay true to your integrity. I urge you to listen to what only you know inside. You dream big because you’re called to dream big. It doesn’t matter if you feel like a frightened beginner, a star-spangled fool, or a beaten, wilted cabbage in the sun. It’s not about knowing how to make it happen or being “worthy.” You didn’t choose this dream. It chose you.
Say yes to your only reality and unimaginable adventure. Say yes to the ride. You belong in the life of your dreams. And you don’t belong anywhere else.
