Destiny is Calling

The following is excerpted from an article to be published in the September issue of Living.Well Magazine, which is based on a recent interview I conducted with best-selling author Tama Kieves upon the publication of her newest book, Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in Your Life’s Work! Many of you know that Tama has been my beloved coach and mentor for years. She is amazingly gifted and profoundly inspiring. For those who don’t yet know Tama, she is an honors graduate of Harvard Law School who left her law practice to write and help others live their calling. In addition to Inspired & Unstoppable, she is the bestselling author of Thie Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love. She is a sought-after speaker and career/success coach who has helped thousands worldwide to discover, launch and thrive in the life, calling and businesses of their dreams. To lear more about Tama please visit www.TamaKieves.com or follow her on Facebook and Twitter. 

 “You are meant to succeed in the work you love.

Your desire will take you all the way.”

             So begins – and ends – Tama Kieves’ potent and profoundly inspiring new book, Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in Your Life’s Work! And trust me when I tell you that everything in between is so moving, so compelling, so clear and brilliant and uplifting that you will want to read it again and again. It could easily become your most trusted guide on the journey of living a truly awake and inspired life.

And yes, you are meant to be inspired. You are meant to bring your dreams to life. No matter what your doubts may be telling you, you are meant to succeed in the work you love. Let’s hear it again from Tama:

“Hello, my courageous friend – you, trying on magnificence. There’s a ticket in your bones and you know it. You know who you are meant to be.

Still you insist on doubting yourself, calling it “realism,” to limit yourself to powerlessness. You’d rather “play it safe,” hedge your bets, trust sweetness only some of the time. But dear one, Wild Amazing Visionary people are the new safe. We are agents of invincible faculties. And we’re blazing trails of abundance.

There is nothing wavy gravy about believing in your wildest dreams. Your inspired inner voice is as real as bunions or bouillon soup. It’s not putting your head in the sand to believe in a higher intelligence than mass consciousness. It’s putting your head in the game. Love is the strongest power on the planet. You want results? Trust your Inspired Self. It’s a presence and intelligence that dwarfs everything else.”

 

If you’re like me, those words not only wake you up, they light you up. And that’s the magic of Tama Kieves. I can honestly tell you that reading Tama’s first book, This Time I Dance! Creating the Work You Love, was a life-changing experience for me. It provided an alchemical mix of inspiration and uncommon sense that powerfully bolstered my quivering choice to leave a high-paying corporate job and pursue my fledgling dreams.

That was over nine years ago, and without Tama’s brilliant writing and deeply insightful coaching, I may have given up on my dreams before they ever saw the light of day. And now, as I dare to take my dreams to a new level, Tama’s voice is here once again to champion and inspire and guide me. Perfect timing.

I joked with her that she must have written Inspired & Unstoppable just for me. She said that, in truth, she wrote it for herself. Her own burning desire to wildly succeed in the work she loves kept bumping up against all the advice “out there” about how to do it. Many experts emphasized the need to take massive action – through massively unappealing action steps – that left her feeling inferior and doubting whether she could really be successful.

On the other hand, there were plenty of other, more create-your-own-reality-oriented experts telling her how simple it could be if she could just align her energy with the perfect meditations and affirmations. Simple, perhaps. Easy…not always. What she really craved was guidance about how to find her own power and her own way to succeed.

Inspired & Unstoppable arose from that deep desire within her to define and create wild, inspired success. And not only did it satisfy Tama’s craving, it will undoubtedly satisfy yours.

Early on in the book Tama offers a distinction between what she calls linear success and inspired success. We all know what linear success looks like: we line ourselves up to get the right education so we can get the right job, and we go after the right job to get the right salary and bonus, and we spend the salary and bonus on the right house and the right investments in our 401-k plan. It is predictable and firmly sanctioned by our culture.

But as Tama said so simply and eloquently in our conversation, many of us feel crippled by that kind of success. We’re longing for something more, something different, something real. (But we still want plenty of money for the homes and experiences and investments that matter to us!) We don’t want to succeed by checking off the right boxes. We want to live an inspired life. We want to experience inspired success.

Inspired success is not about formulas and rules. It comes from a different source – an inner one. Tama explains that inspired success is what happens when we learn to listen to our desires and trust them, from moment to moment. It’s all about following the heat…the heat of your innermost dreams.

And what about those who aren’t yet clear what their dreams really are? If you’re like many people, you may feel frustrated or dissatisfied with your current job but you may not have a particular desire to do something else. I asked Tama about this and she shared some golden nuggets of insight.

It is often true that if you don’t know what you love – or think you don’t know – you simply need to take some action on whatever small nudge or impulse you do have. Rarely does a fully formed picture of your bold, beautiful life show up in your mind, all at once, as this big “Aha! THIS is what I’m meant to do!”

As Tama said in our interview, this is not a “head thing.” We keep waiting in our heads to be convinced, but it’s the experience of stepping toward our passion that convinces us. I’ve often said to clients that in order to create work they love, they have to let love lead. And often that “love” is a glimmer, an impulse that keeps showing up, or an idea that delights us.

Many of us are afraid to trust something as insubstantial as a glimmer, which brings me to another of the golden nuggets Tama shared during our interview and in the first chapter of her book: We must choose to be called. Wildly succeeding in your life’s work is as much a decision as an experience. When you choose to believe you are called – and that your dreams are the call – you choose everything else differently. You think differently. You live differently. You learn to respect your desires rather than to diminish them.

It is, in many ways, the most important choice you can make.

And when you make that choice, you begin to see success differently, too. Tama explained that so many of us are basing our success on current circumstances – and too readily judging ourselves as failures, particularly if we’re not already making tons of money doing what we love. She said with great clarity and passion that success “…is not in the details. It’s in the destiny.” It’s about following your desire, inclination and instinct moment to moment. Fundamentally, inspired success “is knowing that you’re doing the right thing with your time here on earth.”

I cannot imagine a higher or more loving definition of success. And I cannot imagine a book more gloriously suited to helping us experience that kind of wild, inspired success than Inspired & Unstoppable. In next month’s column I’ll share with you Tama’s insights and wisdom on dissolving limiting beliefs, navigating through fear and – yes – facing the “money issue.”

But for now see if you can really let this sink in:

“You are meant to succeed in the work you love.

Your desire will take you all the way.” 

Until next month…see where your desires want to take you right now.

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