Good Life Project - Be Your Own Guru

Episode Date: July 30, 2014

What if the person you were looking for, the one with all the answers, the one who could help you feel better and give you direction was...you?We spend so much of life looking for someone to give us permission to live. To tell us what the right path is or verify that we're on it. Someone to give us permission to be ourselves and take action aligned with our essence.We just want someone to tell us it's all going to be okay. A teacher. A guru.Teachers, guides, mentors, they've all got value, but what about you?That's what we're talking about in today's GLP Jam Session. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Good Life Project, where we take you behind the scenes for in-depth, candid conversations with artists, entrepreneurs, makers, and world shakers. Here's your host, Jonathan Fields. So I spent the better part of the first 40 years in my life looking for a guru, looking for that person who would just blow me away with her or his prescience and kindness and compassion, vision, and guidance. The one who would give me the answers, who would tell me what to do to get to that place where I finally felt like I had made it.

There's so many others that I knew had found that one, and their lives seemed just so much better, more directed and purposeful, but that never really happened to me. And I would attend lectures and teaching seminars, you know, trainage retreats, and inevitably I would end up leaving early because some combination of information, integrity, pace, whatever it was, didn't resonate. So why can't

I find that person? And it finally really dawned on me eventually. The person I was looking for was the one that I would need to become. Now that's not to say I don't seek out teachers or desire to learn. Others can certainly offer guidance and insight. Classical texts, things like the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Tmud, Quran, the Tao Te Ching, they lend intelligence and humility and humor to the process of discovery. And I am and will always be an eternal student. But I'm not driven by the quest to find and place upon a pedestal any single teacher who will make everything okay, who will show me the light or bless my decisions and actions and diminish my uncertainty

because in the end, no one else can stand in my shoes. No one else can live my fears, my dreams, my love, my relationships, my desires, intellect, challenges, life and lifestyle. No one else can enjoy or suffer the outcome of my decisions or actions. Nobody else is better equipped to know me. Nobody else can act but me. So upon these realizations, I really began to accept responsibility, not only for my life to date, but for the process of making it come alive from that point forward, not for anyone else, but for me and increasingly for those I serve. And I continue to listen to conventional wisdom, but realizing most who followed it ended

up not more, but less fulfilled. I really started to commit to following my own decisions another way. And I adopted a standard that kind of guides nearly every decision in business that I make. Ask a question, will this choice allow me to spend the greatest amount of time absorbed in activities and relationships that make me come alive while surrounding myself with people I can't get enough of. And I also realized that much of what makes not only me but most people come alive comes from a place of service and impact. So when I started making decisions from that place, the world seemed to increasingly become my partner in the career and adventure of a lifetime. Now, does that mean everything started to come

easily? No. Creating your life and livelihood that blends meaning and joy and prosperity, it's a gargantuan challenge, but it's not about whether it's hard or easy. It's about whether it's worth the effort. And the answer is, yeah, it is. I can't tell you where or how this journey is going to end for me or for you. And frankly, taking full responsibility for the state of my life and happiness skill scares the hell out of me on a pretty regular basis. That's the nature of working the edge of convention and owning up to the inevitability of uncertainty. But it scares me far less than it would to turn my life over to someone else and simply hope for

the best. So I've increasingly better defined goals, core qualities that are important to build around and experiences. And I want to bring to my and my family's life these things, but I've also discovered the wonder that presents itself seemingly spontaneously when you consistently act in alignment with your authentic self, then open to relationships and opportunities you never saw coming. This much I know. So I cannot conduct the balance of my life in a vacuum of inevitable regret. I cannot imagine the sorrow of leaving this earth one day filled with visions of a life I dreamed of living but never had the will to live. And I cannot rest with the notion that in my actions or inaction, I may have taught my daughter to do the same.

Helen Keller once said that life is either a daring adventure or nothing. So my question is, when does your adventure begin?