Welcome to A Little Bit Unstoppable. This podcast is for artists, creators, and change makers in any industry who have powerful ideas that might just change the world or at least a small piece of it. My name is Brielle Goheen and I am a clutter coach for creatives. I help people declutter their minds, declutter their physical and digital spaces, and most importantly, declutter their dreams and hack their habits so that the most important things become the easiest to do. I believe that creativity will change the world, so I want to equip you to release your creativity with power in a way that is effortless and sustainable. One of the small, simple ways that I do this is through my weekly newsletter - Unstoppable Bit by Bit. If you’d like to receive encouragement, inspiration, and an inside look into my life, head over to briellegoheen.com to sign up. Without further ado, let’s get started with today’s episode.
Hello and welcome to episode 8 of A Little Bit Unstoppable! If you’ve been tracking with all the episodes so far, I really hope you’ve come away with some really practical nuggets of information. Practical nuggets that you’ve been able to implement in your life. And I also hope that you’ve come away with some larger concepts that you’ve been able to mull over through the week! You might’ve noticed that the episodes kind of oscillate between really practical, small, in-the-weeds type of questions and conceptual, big, overarching questions. I do this because I think vision without action is useless. But, so is action without vision! So in this podcast, I want to serve you by asking questions that both cultivate an expansive, inspiring vision and equip you to take really practical action. There is so much magic available in the oscillation between these two things.
Today the question that I’m asking skews toward the conceptual end of things. But the only way to really answer it is in the embodiment of one person’s story. The question is, “What does purpose feel like?” I honestly don’t know what purpose feels like for everyone else. But I know without a shadow of a doubt what it feels like for me. So, in telling my story, I’m not giving you a blueprint or a checklist toward what it should feel like for you. Instead, I’m giving you my experience so you can pick up whatever poetic resonances speak to your experience and to your situation.
A colleague of mine, who maybe I’ll have on the podcast one day, is just a beautiful singer and songwriter. He has a bright, upbeat spirit, and when you interact with him, he just lifts your mood. And he is just killing it as a musician. He sings his own original music for audiences in the thousands on a regular basis. The most impressive thing about him, though, has always been his commitment to his purpose. He has been so determined toward this vision of sharing his songs for people for the purpose of really impacting their lives. At the end of every social media post, he would always write or say something about walking in his purpose. Or how there’s no better feeling than to know you’re in your purpose.
Every single time I would see or hear those words, I would feel a twinge of something that actually hurt. And I came to know that it was a twist of jealousy. The whole time I was reading the post, I was cheering him on, so happy for every good thing that was happening for him. And honestly, I felt proud just to know him. And then that last line would just kill me. And I’d end up thinking about it all day. How did he know he was walking in his purpose? How could he possibly have such confidence in saying that? And then the dreaded question - was I walking in my purpose? I would have to literally shake that feeling off by distracting myself with busy work, or it would’ve stay with me for a lot longer than a day. But here’s something I’ve learned: distracting yourself from jealousy is the worst possible response. Because jealousy is actually a really helpful thing if it’s acknowledged, accepted, and then examined. You can follow your jealousy like it’s a clue. Question it. Dig a little deeper than you think it goes. It will point you toward what you perceive is missing in your own life. But, even once you’ve dug to this level, keep digging. Don’t take it at face value, because the thing you think you are jealous of is rarely the real thing itself that is missing from your own life. The thing that alerts you to your longing for something that’s missing is usually another person’s manifestation of the thing that you feel you don’t have. And most of the time, you don’t even want the specific thing that your jealousy pointed you to as an alarm bell…you want your own manifestation of an underlying thing, and your own manifestation will probably look completely different than it does for somebody else.
But, I have to be honest, I didn’t know that yet. And so I reacted by pushing it down, criticizing myself for the quote-on-quote “bad” feeling of jealousy, and distracting myself from the discomfort by getting busy. I felt confused by it because, I mean, from the outside looking in, I had all kinds of purpose! I had a great life with an amazing partner, a 3 year old and a newborn baby, I had a really fun and busy career as a violinist playing awesome music with great people, and I had an incredible community of friends to invest in. So of course I thought the feeling had to be “wrong.” But every 6 weeks or so, I would just break down asking Brad, “What am I doing with my life?” which was a question that just left him feeling quite bewildered because, from his persepective, I was doing so much - it was such a silly question.
And that’s the thing - I was doing so much. I was doing far more then than I am now because I was trying to be everything that everyone wanted me to be. I was saying yes without thinking because I didn’t have a framework to evaluate opportunities. But it wasn’t all the right stuff. A lot of it was the right stuff, or adjacent to the right stuff, but there was just so much of the wrong stuff and so much that was missing of the stuff that was the most right as well.
For me, my sense of purpose came slowly. It started with the question, “Who am I without music?” when covid hit and my job as a musician vanished. I realized that I am, at my heart, a poet and a storyteller. The thing I have always loved so much about music is its ability to convey a poetic sense of story even without words. And when music is linked with words, it completely changes the impact of those words. One night, in chatting with a good friend, back in the day when we were only allowed to have distanced porch visits, I was visiting with a friend late into the night. And through conversation, I realized that my original music project, Calcedon, was really a story. And it had always been a story. So I thought, “What if I’ve always known this story? What if this story was built into my bones and I just have to begin to excavate it?” And that’s what I started to do. I found that the story was inexplicably inside me. It had been literally seeping out all over the place in my work up until that point, just trying to get out.
And so I started writing and writing and writing. I filled pages with this story. And the story was beautiful and rich and complex. And weird. I’ve always had a penchant for the strange things. And as I wrote, I found that my purpose become clear. That at least vocationally, my purpose is in telling that story.
Part of the journey to do this, though, involves all of you. Because I know that a huge part of the reason I was able to have that epiphany of purpose that evening on the porch with a glass of wine - the only really I was able to have that epiphany of purpose in the first place was because someone taught me how to declutter my brain. And somebody taught me that my physical spaces would follow. Someone taught me how to make my daily life easier so there was more time to play with the big questions of life. And someone else taught me that I couldn’t do it all - but that there were ways to decide what to let go of and what to hold on to. And somebody else taught me that I was an artist. If I sought to create change in the world and create something new, then I was an artist and an artist gets to choose what they create. That I don’t have to follow anyone else’s playbook, but that I can create anything.
I started A Little Bit Unstoppable - the podcast, the course, and the community - because I know that things come full circle when you teach them. Part of my purpose is to create what my bones say to create. And part of my purpose is to teach you how declutter your brain, declutter your spaces and declutter your purpose. To show you how to make life easier for yourself so that your creativity can be released with power. Because your art is important. Your art will inspire my art. I am sure of it.
So what does purpose feel like? I guess I don’t know what it feels like for everyone. But for me, when I wasn’t in my purpose, I felt too busy, overtired, constantly stretched thin, putting out fire after fire, and muddled in my own mind. I would start projects and then quit them a few months in. I had way too many ideas, and no framework to evaluate which ones to keep and which ones to let go of.
Inside my purpose, it feels like home. My thoughts and dreams aren’t a mystery to me. I know them. My days are filled with purposeful activity, so that when I go to bed, I’m tired, but it feels like the right kind of tired. I am able to say no to things that aren’t in line with where I’m going. And, even though I have even more thoughts and ideas than ever before, now they have a place to go and I have a way to evaluate them to decide which ones to keep and which ones to let go of.
I really really want to help you, wherever you are in this journey to purpose. And I have some exciting news!
I’ve planned something special for you next week on July 20, 21, and 22, to help you get going on purposefully working toward a future that’s beautiful to you. It’s a 3 Day Interactive Challenge to help you Kickstart Your Momentum. I’ll lead a session on each one of those days where I’ll do a bit of teaching, and we’ll do some work together that’s designed to Kickstart Your Momentum. Day 1 is all about how to Set Goals that Stick. Day 2 is all about how to Declutter Your Purpose. And Day 3 is all about how to Never Give Up Again. This challenge is completely free, but you do need to register to get the links to the live sessions and the replays of those live sessions. So DM me on Instagram @brielle.goheen or visit briellegoheen.com/momentum to join the challenge!
Also, next Monday, June 20th, I’ll be opening up the doors to join my course Become Unstoppable. This is your chance to get purposefully organized this summer before the next school year starts. Starting the first week in July, we’ll begin a 12 week group coaching community that has been designed to help you Declutter your Mind, Declutter your Physical Spaces, Declutter your Digital Spaces, and most importantly, Declutter your Ideas and Dreams. I’ll teach you the skills (and I call them “skills” because they’re things you can learn and and they’re thinks you can master). So I’ll teach you the skills of prioritization, goal setting and habit hacking. And I’ll be there to support you through it every step of the way. This course has video trainings, actionable PDF’s, live implementation sessions, and coaching hours to help support you as you put what you learn into practice.
The best part of all this is the price. I’m going to wait until next week to dish all the details on that, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll be doing something that’s a bit insane, so it’s something that I’ll be only offering this one time.
I really hope you join me this summer because this quite honestly will change your life. I’m going to teach you the very best of what I have to teach, and I am here to support you every step of the way. I admire the heck out of anyone who has the courage to step forward, put their hand up and say, “I’m ready for this, and I need help.” I want you to know that I am rooting for you. I can’t wait to celebrate your successes because I know that you can succeed. And I know that you will!
It takes bravery and it takes courage to walk the artistic path, and we need to support and encourage each other as much as possible. If you found this episode helpful, consider sharing it with a friend or leaving a review in your favourite podcast listening app. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already so that you’ll be notified each time a new episode is up!
Remember: the worlds we imagine are the worlds we build. So, ambitious creators, imagine something beautiful and take the next step - no matter how small - toward building it.