6 steps to personal fulfillment
Summer is over, Autumn is back, and My Growth Café blog with it, warmly welcoming habitual and new visitors!
In opening the new season this article reconnects to what we talked about in July (retrieve July article here): envisioning, planning, and tuning into the pleasure of it,
but now going deeper with a full six steps guide to create and experience personal fulfillment as a new habit and way of living.
Ready to embrace a life you don't need to take a vacation from?
The arrival and the journey
What makes the difference between a traveller and a tourist? I guess you pondered this question already.
Paul Theroux, travel writer and novelist, put it this way: “tourists don't know where they've been, travellers don't know where they're going.” Simplistic? Maybe, yet think again😉
A tourist is generally aware of where she's going and will get there, even when having little or no clue about how she arrived. Possibly she will forget after some time many details of the places visited along the way. What matters to her is the destination.
Now, the traveller. She can leave even without a pre-defined destination, she's exploring. What she needs normally is a good compass, an intentional direction, and often a notebook; she will likely make stopovers, and often rethink her roadmap based on what she encounters on the way. Her notebook will help her remember the details of the journey, the discoveries, and the feelings and sensations along the way. What matters to her is the travel process and the direction.
Why bother? Well, because in our life experience we are in the end more travellers than tourists.
Whatever is in between the moment we are born and the one we leave this world, is rather uncertain, and subject to a number of changing conditions.
Our life is a journey, that we travel finding our best paths and making every day those choices that appear to us as the best ones, based on our compass (values, priorities, assumptions), direction (purpose, meaning, objectives), and our notebook (our experiences, emotions, lessons learned, mistakes).
THE JOURNEY NOT THE ARRIVAL MATTERS.” – T.S. ELIOT
Yet, raise your hand if nobody asked you when you were a young boy or girl the famous “what do you want to be when you grow up?”.
Family and social environment have likely pushed us, in direct or indirect manners, to think that we should kind of know what we want to become.
In other words, what our destination is.
The long term effect of this question (and the related expectation attitude) is that, if you are that young boy or girl, over the years you may lose your travel and explorer attitude in life without even noticing it, and the focus on your expected destination eats up those alternative paths which are not, plain and straight, leading you towards it.
Most likely, your studies, academic path, acquaintances, living place and habits, will consistently bring you someway closer to your destination.
Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not, if all these choices do nourish you and make you feel more alive.
If you enjoy them "per se", someway ignoring what you want to become "after", thanks to them; paradoxically, someway lowering the importance of your destination.
You may feel reward, pride or happiness for very different reasons,
and these reasons are what will make the difference between a nourished, fulfilled life and an unfulfilled one.
Fulfillment has nothing to do with what society standards define as success and which is generally based on apparent signs of status and wealth.
It is instead about the very experience of life itself, and because of this, it makes a huge difference if your feeling of satisfaction is because of what you are experiencing in the here and now or if it's linked to the expected effect of that experience in the more or less near future.