I always love to evolve and, in some cases, to reinvent myself. It’s how I can get more from life and how I can offer more to life. It’s when I put in practice all the mistakes and wins that I collected during my journey, and I use them to my advantage to give more purpose to my life and to the life of others. I’m sure you can all agree with me that everything we do in our life is always a great learning experience, if not enriching. It could be an idea, a memory from our childhood, quality time we spend with a friend or our spouse, feedback from a client, or something that we just learned, and it touched our heart (or it brought inspiration for our next project).
When I started working as an event planner back in the ‘80s, my sense of purpose was to make money and to become successful by creating marvelous and memorable experiences for my clients and their guests or attendees. Becoming rich and famous, I was convinced, would bring me happiness. I was “hustling”: I was always working, I was always busy. Unfortunately, I was giving priority to my work rather than to myself. I was putting my clients’ needs before mine. It never occurred to me at the time that this behavior would eventually change my life (no need to panic, there’s a happy ending to this story).
In the ‘90s I specialized in wedding design and planning. My sense of purpose started to shift. It was no longer based exclusively on the money I would make. I felt the desire to be involved with the emotions of those momentous occasions. Wedding planning can be extremely stressful because of the emotional aspect (family issues and dynamics, brides’ and grooms’ meltdowns, arguments about the budget, etc.), but my desire was to be part of my couples’ special days. I felt privileged to be chosen to help them plan and coordinate such unforgettable moments for them, for their families, and for their guests. My sense of purpose became emotion-based: I would choose my clients based on their vision, their dream, their expectations. Surprisingly for me, I was also able to increase my prices just for doing what I absolutely loved. Wedding couples could easily sense my passion, my true sense of purpose (helping them enjoy their first new chapter in life together), and they were willing to spend more for my assistance and services rather than hiring someone else who was just interested in the wedding for their portfolio.
In 2012 a new sense of purpose came to life. After experiencing burnout (obviously) and other – thankfully minor – health issues, I changed my lifestyle completely and I stopped being a “hustler”. I realized that I needed to take care of myself, and I needed to be productive with my time, not just busy. I educated myself extensively on the importance of self-care as a business owner. I became an expert on the body & mind connection, and three years later I started coaching busy creative professionals as a Life-Work Balance Strategist. Yes, life-work balance, not work-life balance as many are used to. Life comes first, then work can get done. I developed a system with proven strategies based on eating better, sleeping more, exercising regularly, and practicing self-care daily in order to improve well-being, personal life, and workplace. You have to start from YOU as an individual before focusing on you as a business owner.
Many people think that balance in life doesn’t exist. I think the reason is that they don’t know how to achieve it. They don’t (think they) have the right tools or resources to work on it and make it happen. However, simple and easy adjustments to their daily routine can make a huge difference in their quality of life.
Thanks to my personal experience and that transformational journey I now know what our body and our mind want: alignment. We should consider our body and mind as a system. They’re connected, they work together, they play together. When we separate them, it feels like they play against us. If we don’t give our body the necessary rest with sleep, our brain won’t function properly the next day. If we eat the wrong foods for our body, our brain will be negatively affected as well.
Sadly, this connection between body and mind is not often recognized, and people keep living an unfulfilled life between fatigue and stress, depression, poor health. Our bodies know how to keep us healthy, but we need to provide the right fuel to reach and keep optimal health, to gain vitality and feel happy and vibrant again (something that many of my clients don’t know, or don’t remember, how it feels like).
This is why I embarked on a mission to share everything I know and everything I learned (the hard way) to change and transform the lives of others. Today my sense of purpose is very clear: sharing my expertise and knowledge as much as I can so that I can inspire others to thrive and be successful in their life, personally and professionally. Not only with my clients, but with everyone around me.
This new sense of purpose brought me to choose my word of the year for 2019: Abundance. Not the abundance I get from the universe, but the abundance of knowledge and experience that I can share to help others live (and work) better.
Today I help busy creative professionals, solopreneurs, and many “hustlers”, to slow down, to focus on themselves, and to get educated about the right choices so that they can improve the quality of their life and maximize their time at work, making the money they want. They feel better, they live happier, they work smarter, and they make me happier as well because I see them succeed. My sense of purpose is now complete.
Images courtesy of Pexels