What mountain are you climbing?
In the 1st half of our lives, we climbed the mountain we believed we needed to climb to be happy.
It was a mountain of shoulds, expectations, and the opinions of others.
It was a mountain of perceived safety.
Get good grades, go to a good school, land a good job, and live in a good neighborhood with a good school district.
Buy certain things, go to certain places, and join certain clubs.
We chase those shoulds, expectations, and opinions all the way to the summit.
And it feels great until we look around and realize everything we expected would be waiting for us isn’t there.
We feel empty, living with a success-sized hole in our lives, what Viktor Frankl aptly described as an “existential void.”
The emptiness hits us around the midpoint of our lives, and with the days in front of us shrinking as the days behind us grow, we want our lives to mean something.
We want a mission; we want something that gets us out of bed in the morning and fills us from the inside with connection, purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.
We need a new mountain, and it’s incumbent on us to build it.
That new mountain isn’t handed to us on a silver spoon because we feel empty inside.
There’s no department store called “Connection, Purpose, Mission, Meaning, Fulfillment and Beyond.”
However, there’s a store of wisdom inside each of us holding the keys.
The foundation of our new mountain is built on a deep connection with ourselves.
We must travel within and connect with our authentic selves to discover our life calling (we all have one) and craft our remarkable life stories.
Here are 3 Simple Steps to Build Your 2nd Mountain:
Establish Your Core Values:
If you don’t know what you stand for, what do you have to stand on?
Core values are the foundation of your life. They provide the groundwork for your actions, decisions, and behaviors.
When you align with your core values, life feels “right.”
Reinvention tip to get started:
Identify and write down three people who are important role models or valued connections for you.
Then, think of the attributes they exhibit that you admire; how would it feel if you also had those attributes?
Stop Chasing Purpose, Start Creating Intentionality:
There’s so much pressure to find your purpose, do this instead.
Live purposefully. Live with intention.
Give yourself the gift of clarity on why you do the things you do.
Something I like to do is ask myself this simple question:
“Why am I doing this?”
I will even do this before I shower or brush my teeth because it snaps me out of autopilot.
Start With the End:
Life begins for everyone the same, and it ends for everyone the same.
Focus on the end by writing your own eulogy.
What do you want it to say? How do you want to be remembered?
When you write your own eulogy, you tap directly into your authentic desires and create a blueprint for how you want to live.
These 3 steps will provide you with the foundation of your second mountain.
And remember this: as you build, you also climb.
Enjoy the journey because, in the end, that’s all we have.
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If you’re feeling stuck, and tired of the status quo – but don’t know what the next step is, check out the Reinvention Reset.
It’s a highly focused, tactical, 60-minute call designed to get you unstuck, reinvigorate, and build momentum.