Awaken Your More

Ep 4: How to ACTUALLY find your purpose

• Rachel Yve • Season 1 • Episode 4

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0:00 | 9:45

There's enormous pressure to have a calling, a clear sense of what you're here to do — and for sensitive, intuitive people that pressure lands differently, because meaning actually matters to us. In this episode I'm getting honest about why you can tick every box on paper and still feel like something's missing, and what I've learned about the difference between the life you build and the life you're actually living.

Tune in to learn:

  • Why you can achieve everything you set out to and still feel hollow — and what that disconnect is actually telling you
  • The difference between your outer purpose and your inner purpose, and why mixing them up causes a very particular kind of suffering
  • Why "finding your gift" isn't about searching harder or collecting more
  • The questions I come back to when I've lost touch with what makes me feel alive

Check out the blog post that accompanies this episode: Found on my website

Rachel's links:

Other links mentioned in this episode:

Are you a sensitive, high-achieving woman who's ready to stop playing small and step into the life you know you're meant for? I work with women like you in my 1:1 coaching programme, Meant for More — a deep, somatic and coaching journey to help you find peace, reclaim your power, and move toward your purpose.

🌿 Meant for More 1:1 Coaching: https://awakenwithrachel.com/contact/
 ✨Book a discovery call: https://awakenwithrachel.com/contact/


SPEAKER_00

Hi and on today's episode we are going to be discussing why finding your purpose can feel so difficult. Hi and welcome to Awaken Your More. My name is Rachel and I teach sensitive, high-achieving women to step into lives of peace, power and purpose so they can start living a life that finally feels like theirs. This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently because there is a pressure in society, and I think especially if you're in your 30s and you're in your late 20s, to have everything figured out, to have the life on paper, to have the boxes ticked, to have the career, to have the purposeful life. And I think this pressure within society causes us to have this stress, causes us to be like, ah, I must live this purposeful life. I must be somebody. I must make my print in the world. And I think this is the issue when we look at purpose through solely this kind of external focus. We really lack the understanding of what living truly with purpose actually is. And that was what we're going to be unpicking in today's episode. And for much of my life, I thought purpose was something that you had to externally achieve. As somebody who is a high-achieving, highly sensitive person, I am no stranger when it comes to setting goals and being ambitious and striving for the next thing. But there are two kinds of purpose. There are two kinds of purpose that actually make up that bigger picture of what purpose is. And when we can tap into both of these, not one of these, when we can tap into both of these, that's where we lead a fully purposeful life as best we can. So there is the external purpose that we have. Maybe that is a job, maybe that is a relationship, maybe that is a family, whatever that is, that is purpose outside of us. But Ekartuly kind of coined this idea that purpose is actually within us. It's how we show up in the small moments, it's how we we move through the room, it's how we interact with people, it's how we actually live our values in the world. And that's internal and it can't be taken away from us. And this is not a new concept. This is actually taken from one of my favourite spiritual books, which is the Bhagavad Gita. I'm probably pronouncing that horrendously wrong. The Bhagavad Gita really kind of shows this as well. And it says, sort of in a roundabout way, that when we move through the wisdom of ourselves, that's when we can really kind of live the most authentic life. And that's all about being in tune with our authenticity as a person. And that's how we live our purpose, that's our unique gift. It's not anything that we do outside, it's not the job, it's who we are. That's our unique gift, and that's how we show up with our purpose in our life. And I think that's a really important thing to remember because lots of us have chased those milestones. We've got that corporate job, we've done the things that we were told to do in society, but we're still feeling hollow and empty, and that's because we haven't connected to that inner purpose. We've not really understood who we are and our unique blueprint in this world. And this idea of external purpose is kind of really pushed and is sort of pre-programmed within society, and by that I mean like we are constantly as a society obsessed with this idea of being something, of having an external purpose, and we only have to look at some of our first interactions with people in new groups or on dates. And some of the questions that come up are like, So, what do you do? What are you achieving? Where are you from? And these are all external markers of kind of success, although it's good to strive for things, and you know, want to to share a purpose in this world, when we're constantly tied to external success or purpose, we often don't understand or see that our purpose is not actually external purpose, for instance, is not always going to be the same, it's actually kind of constant and moving and fluid, dependent on the rhythms of our life at that particular season, maybe in our life. And you know, we only have to maybe break up with someone or our family move or our children grow up, and then what happens to our purpose then when it is built on external purpose? So, what I'm trying to like sort of really get at is that to live a purposeful life, we have to have sort of that internal purpose really hardwired and sure within us, and that's about knowing our authenticity in this world, and then we can shine that external purpose out as brightly as we can because it's aligned with who we are, and that external purpose is not going to crumble if like other things crumble in the world, because we'll still have that sense of self within us, and I guess this can be really kind of confronting for lots of us who have built our lives chasing the next thing and not really getting to know who we are but what we want, and especially for people who are highly sensitive or heart-led, who want to do meaningful work here in the world, but also maybe feel the pressures of society and what others want, and they've kind of maybe like sort of gone into careers that don't really align. And there's a process of really kind of stepping back and thinking, okay, who am I? What is my authentic code beneath everything else? Looking at our inner purpose is really about checking in with who we are. I talk a lot about this, knowing our values, so knowing what maybe drains us or sustains us. How do we move when we're with other people? Like, how do we show up? What is our unique kind of blueprint that we can bring to the world? Because we're all going to have unique blueprints and different ways of doing things. And when we tap into that and we stand in that authenticity of who we are, then we can really shy and live an aligned external purpose. So if you've been somebody who's maybe been living an external purpose that they thought was aligned, or maybe it is still aligned, but you're a little bit unsure about what your internal purpose is. I really start to do practices like journaling that can be really effective. Making a list of your values, maybe your top four values that you want to embody, and then kind of check that against all am I actually doing these values? Am I living these values? And you can know that quite easily by just simply assessing what you do on a day-to-day basis. And I think it's really important also to take some time to actually get to kind of know this question, who am I? And I say this question can be quite confronting, but this idea of who am I? And a lot of us think that we are yoga teachers, we think that we are maybe writers, maybe we think that we are whatever, you know, a doctor. And yes, this is purposeful because what we're doing is we're doing something maybe that is meaningful for us, but we are not our external job. We are unique beings with a message and a way of showing up, which is completely unique to anybody else. So, really getting to know that what lights you up, who you are, how you move, maybe you're quirky, maybe you've got a sense of humour, and just allowing this to be something that you explore because we have to really embody our internal purpose for that external purpose to mirror and feel authentic, and for it to actually give us that deep sense of, ah, you know, I feel good about myself, I feel whole and I'm not feeling empty. And this is definitely something that I've struggled with a lot as well. Um, you know, I've always kind of known that my external purpose is, you know, I am spiritual, I want to share my spiritual messages and beliefs within a community. But when I compare myself to other people and how they do it, that's when I start to feel a little bit like, oh, I'm not good enough, I'm not really able to do that as well as other people. And that's because what I'm doing is I'm disconnecting each time when I'm comparing how I'm showing up with my external purpose, I'm disconnecting from my internal uniqueness, my unique authenticity. Okay, so it's really about tapping into that. So I really encourage you to have a go at some of these exercises that I've shared. In if you liked it, please do leave a comment. I'd love to hear from everyone in the community. And of course, please like and subscribe to this YouTube channel for more weekly videos. I will see you next time, Namaste.