inner peace
“Here’s the thing. Throughout most of my youth and early adulthood, I believed the external achievements would alleviate my inner turmoils. If I wasn’t at peace, I figured that there was some ambition I needed to actualize, or some milestone I had to reach to justify a period of ease. In my mind, peace was not a given. It had to be earned, over and over again.
This, of course, is a false belief, but it’s one thing to know it and a whole other thing to understand it.”
-Lawrence Yeo, The Inner Compass
I’ve followed Lawrence for years on Twitter and LinkedIn and have been a loyal reader of More To That, his newsletter–I even have some close friends who are friends with him, but I’ve never asked for a formal introduction to officially meet him. I will be after getting his new book, The Inner Compass.
I’m looking forward to reading it this weekend, and since it’s about 100 pages, I know I’ll be able to finish it quickly. I think this will be a book I pull a lot from to help people connect with their intuition—the subtitle is “Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself”.
This morning I cracked The Inner Compass open just to read the intro and as I read the quote above a lightbulb went off…the key to the periods of my life that experienced accelerated personal growth, “success”, financial gain, and professional accolades were all during times of inner peace.
And not inner peace in the sense of an absence of being unhappy, depressed, or anxious.
But inner peace of just focusing on doing what I love, taking care of people, and letting everything else to fall into place.
I’ve been talking to my coach lately about feeling like bumping up against a glass ceiling right now—financially, the growth of my reach, new clients for Santiago, and in the awareness of the authentic life by others.
Lawrence’s quote made me realize that I’m spending too much energy thinking about the outcomes that I want, which disrupts my inner peace. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to think about the outcomes I am pursuing because I want to achieve them for good reasons–but the focus on them is where the disruption comes.
And to be honest, until I read that quote, I hadn't even considered that my inner peace could be disrupted because I'm not unhappy, frustrated, or sad. The thinking about the outcomes feels exciting because of how I envision things playing out, but quietly, it's interrupting the peace I experience by just doing and being.
I need to get back to my old mindset of just doing the work and doing it in a way that serves others, and just let everything fall into place; it’s that mindset that allowed me to get to the point where I developed these new goals I’m focusing on.
Inner peace means that I’m staying out of the way of the progress, and if I stay out of the way, everything will fall into place as it is supposed to, just like it always has.
See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,
JC
🦅 Some ways I might be able to help you live your authentic life:
🤝 One-on-Ones Let's hop on Zoom to do a guided meditation, a creative brainstorming session, or an overcoming an obstacle session.
💸 AlignedLife+ A unique relationship offered at Santiago that combines life planning, financial planning and advice, and ongoing coaching to help you discover your authentic life, design a plan to bring that life to your reality, and support to help you evolve with the evolution of your authentic life. Learn more here.
📪 If you were forwarded this note and want to get the Daily Note, you can click here to subscribe.
