Meridian Coaching & Consulting Blog

Are you looking for success and happiness by choice or chance?  It is so easy to get caught up and not live the life you intended.  It can feel like you are drifting along and living on auto-pilot; that your life is defined by the expectations of family members, friends or colleagues; that your life is directed by the outer trappings of what you are supposed to achieve by a certain age: homes, jobs or fat retirement accounts.  It starts to feel like everyone but you get to decide how you’re supposed to live your life.

You are not alone.  It is easy to be sidetracked by the external world when clarity is elusive and you find it difficult to articulate “who am I, how do I contribute in the world and what calls to me in life.”  If that internal clarity is missing, it throws off your inner game and you tend to engage in these actions:

• Define yourself by the external indicators: Job, clothes, cars, houses, electronic toys, vacations, titles, money and status.
• Get distracted because you don’t know or have your own goals: You are influenced by the goals and aspirations of others and you join their journey – instead of creating your own.  You float along, go along to get along, do what seems easy or do what is necessary at the moment, and the results get are unsatisfying.
• Remain un-awakened: You have not identified and clarified your internal feelings or thoughts and you find it difficult to articulate what is inside.  This makes it tricky to give people what they need from you; causing anxiety, frustration, tension or anger for you and others. 
• Influenced by external factors: Like to focus on the next bright, shiny and exciting situation, thing, person or thought, which derails you from your purpose in life.
• Feel trapped: Mortgages, college funds, needs of aging parents, bills, retirement requirements, the expectations of parents, spouses and children or financial reversals.
• Swayed by others: The people we meet in our lives can be electrifying or terrifying, with lots of folks in between: they can push, dominate, punish, manipulate, stifle, blackmail or ignore us if we do not give them what they want.
• Listen to old tapes: “I’m not good enough – I always mess it up – It is too hard” this limiting self-talk cause untold suffering that takes you in the opposite direction of your deepest needs.

All of these experiences are part of the human condition, and yet, many individuals meet these situations with equanimity, because of they live their lives from the inside out, not the other way around.  The good news is that when you seek to uncover, explore and value what you find about yourself, your “positive inner game” comes to the forefront.  Giving you the personal mastery to know and do the right thing, and if you don’t know how, you trust the universe or you “know” that can find out and make it happen.

Sometimes the greatest journey you can take is within yourself; being crystal clear about what’s important to you, what wounds you and paralyzes you, what makes your heart sing and what let’s you sleep at night like a baby.  Mastery of your inner game is the difference between surviving and thriving – living life on purpose.