The Seven Steps to Personal and Professional Freedom

Except from …

Step 4: Take Inspired Action

… You can take action from a mindset of fear: ‘any activity is better than no activity – I just need to be doing something’ or from a mindset of trust ‘strange as this next step feels, I sense it’s the right thing.’

The difference between those 2 approaches is like navigating a 500-mile road trip by either jumping in the car, heading out in the general direction and working the rest out as you drive, or by confirming the final destination and listening to the sat nav instructions on the way.

Your route-planner for living on purpose is your soul. It had an expected destination long before it entered the body that everyone now knows as ‘you’. Your life however is not pre determined. You can choose your journey - your jobs, the company you keep, the goals you set and your relationships. When you give yourself enough listening time though, you’ll hear your soul letting you know whether each choice you make is moving you closer to, or further from, that purposeful destination.

Some situations and conversations will ignite your soul and add to your fulfilment, whilst others will leave you feeling disengaged and possibly in conflict (with yourself or those around you).

To become masterful at taking inspired action it’s essential to learn to spot the promptings of the soul in any one moment. For most of us those triggers present themselves through our intuition, which is ‘the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning’. So it’s not conscious, it’s not from the mind.

A Director in a UK government agency said, “Whilst practicing the 7 steps, my ability to take inspired action was tested with a situation at work. A staff member made an off the cuff remark about her safety at work to a junior staff member. I immediately had a feeling that this was something that was deeper and was going to become a real issue. I cleared my diary for the afternoon and met the staff member.

“I then found out that she had been getting advice about her employee rights and that she felt unsupported although she had not escalated her concerns. I was able to put measures in place in the short term and then in the longer term take legal action to ensure that her safety was not compromised”.

Your intuition can be a feeling in your core (your stomach area), on your skin, or around your heart area. It’s different for different people and it develops as we practice listening to it and taking action around what we understand in the moment.

Have you ever noticed how little silence we factor into our daily lives? Distractions are everywhere and on the increase. There’s the radio on in the morning at breakfast, ipod on the bus, back-to-back at work, lunch with a colleague, ipod on the way home, tv at the gym, internet in the evening before a few drinks, a bit more tv, and half a chapter of a book before your eyelids become so heavy you switch off the light and move swiftly into a deep sleep. …