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As we approach a new year, it is a time for reflection on the past year, and for many a recommitment to the visions, goals, and dreams we wish to make a reality in our lives. As you reflect on this past year, acknowledge your accomplishments, big and small, and most of all accept yourself as you are right now. Deep change only occurs when we love and accept ourselves and then from that place seek to create change with no need to prove ourselves, but just out of a desire to do something different or differently. Give yourself this gift as we enter into 2012. Support yourself in creating the changes you desire for the new year. Fully love yourself and open the door for an abundance of possibilities to arise.

Wishing you a glorious 2012, and may all your visions become a reality!

Susan

Finding Joe, a new documentary based on the wisdom of mythologist Joseph Campbell, will be opening this Friday. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to discover their life’s work, and “follow their bliss” as they express their talents in meaningful ways that serve the planet. Playing at Riviera Theater in Santa Barbara. Read about it below (from their website):

Finding Joe is an exploration of famed Mythologist Joseph Campbell’s studies and their continuing impact on our culture. Through interviews with visionaries from a variety of fields interwoven with enactments of classic tales by a sweet and motley group of kids, the film navigates the stages of what Campbell dubbed The Hero’s Journey: the challenges, the fears, the dragons, the battles, and the return home as a changed person. Rooted in deeply personal accounts and timeless stories, Finding Joe shows how Campbell’s work is relevant and essential in today’s world and how it provides a narrative for how to live a fully realized life - or as Campbell would simply state, how to “follow your bliss”.

Featuring: Deepak Chopra, Mick Fleetwood, Rashida Jones, Tony Hawk, Catherine Hardwicke, Laird Hamilton, Robert Walter, Akiva Goldsman, Sir Ken Robinson, Robin Sharma, Lynne Kaufman, Alan Cohen, Brian Johnson, Joseph Marshall III, Rebecca Armstrong, Chungliang Al Huang, David L. Miller, Gay Hendricks, David Loy and Norman Ollestad.

“The hero, in living her own life, in being true to herself; radiates a light by which others may see their own way.” —Laurence Boldt

In the 20+ years I have worked with the principles in Zen and the Art of Making a Living, guiding career coaching clients on the quest to discover and actualize their life’s work, I have seen firsthand the power of questions in shaping our lives. As Laurence Boldt says, “For all of us, the question is the Quest-I-on. In other words, the questions we ask or fail to ask shape the journeys of our lives. While most blindly go where the conventional questions of their society take them, heroes consciously choose and earnestly pursue the questions that shape their lives. . . . Will you live your life spontaneously from the heart and its pathless call, or conventionally from prescribed role?”

Many clients come to me full of questions, and almost immediately within the first session, they become aware that many of the questions they are asking are not taking them where they really want to go. For some this process is a big wake up call, for they realize they have not been listening to their hearts or being true to themselves. What questions are you asking? Do you like the direction your life is going in? If not, change your question and your life will change. Go on a quest for your best. The world needs your love.

Was pondering a discussion I had with a client about being guided from the heart, believing in ourselves, and recognizing our gifts. These excerpts from How to Find the Work You Love by Laurence Boldt sum it up:

Love gives us the courage to believe in humanity and in ourselves. The word courage means, literally, “with heart.” It takes great heart—great courage—to believe in humanity in the face of what sometimes seem like overwhelming problems.

It takes courage to affirm that the possible world that many of us have experienced in glimpses, moments of imagination or spiritual insight, is more than an idle fantasy. It takes the courage to say, like Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream”—to affirm against all evidence to the contrary that one day, we shall overcome our fear, doubt, hatred, violence and pettiness.It takes courage to commit yourself to building bridges between the world that could be and the world that is—the courage to say that you believe the world will one day be a better place and that today you are ready to do your part to make it so.

Hello All,

Just home from watching an amazing film: Man on Wire, the 2008 documentary film directed by James Marsh that chronicles Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center.

For those coaching clients who have worked with the Creative Empowerment process you will enjoy seeing the Manifestation Formula in full swing, as Philippe moves from Vision to accomplishment. For those who have worked with the Career Empowerment process, you will see the Hero’s Journey, where Philippe, as Parsifal, faces the darkness of the unknown with only a blazing dream he can not shake as he harnesses the powers of the four archetypes — support cast at his side — in following the call of his inner Hero beckoning him from deep within to do it - and he must.

And we are no different. We must in order to live fully answer the call of our inner Hero and make happen what it beckons us to do. Whether you are wanting to create a life’s work or to achieve goals and dreams in other life areas, this film will inspire. Remember, the most important and first step is to have the courage to be aware of what you REALLY WANT, then the courage to take action.