Today we’re continuing on the Thursday theme of “Leading Your Life” by reconnecting with what’s most important to you, being fully self-expressed and realizing the contribution you’re uniquely placed to make in the world.

So far we’ve explored:

• Leading Your Life By Deciding Who You Want to Be
• Leading Your Life By Getting Into the Flow
• Leading Your Life: How is the World Broken?
• Leading Your Life: Your 10 00hrs
• Leading Your Life by Noticing Your Smile
• Leading Your Life By Re-Playing Your Childhood
• The Grumpy Old Man’s Guide to Figuring Out Your Life Purpose
• Who Are You Not To?

You’ll have noticed that these Thursday posts are all about questions, and about tapping into that part of you that knows what would make you most happy – the quiet part of yourself that Martha Beck calls your Essential Self. There are no right or wrong answers – the emphasis is on finding your own answers to each of the questions. And the more attention you’ve been paying to trying to find “the right” answers, and the “successful” answers, the more difficult you’ll find these questions.

So here are a few tips if you’re finding these questions hard to answer:

• Sit quietly for 5 minutes, just noticing your thoughts, and breathing deeply. Don’t worry about trying to “meditate” and stop the thought-stream. Just watch your thought-stream do it’s thing. Then do the questions.
• Start with a “grounding” exercise, to get out of your head and into your body. Your unconscious, intuitive self tends to communicate through the body a lot of the time, and the body never lies. So take some time to just sit quietly and do a body scan – just be aware of how your body feels, your body’s weight, your body’s volume, and whether there is any tension or particular unusual sensation in any part of your body. You can even have a little “chat” with a sensation in your body or a part of your body, and ask it what message it’s wanting to give you.
• Add music that relaxes you. I find that music helps me drown out my critical self-talk, which helps me to more easily access my Essential Self – the quieter voice.
• Draw, rather than write. Writing tends to rely more on your left-brain thinking processes, whilst drawing helps you to more easily tap into your right-brain thinking processes, which can deliver more tangential, intuitive, surprising answers, and give you a totally different angle.
• Don’t try to come up with good answers, don’t be attached to any type of answer, and don’t judge your answers. Any answer is fine. Just be curious about any answers you come up with, and write or draw them all, even if they don’t make any sense.
• Guess. If you can’t come up with an answer, then acknowledge, “I don’t consciously have an answer right now, but if I were to guess, what would I say?” Often your intuition and unconscious wisdom can be unlocked when you just guess.

So if you found any of the previous exercises tricky, try doing them again, experimenting with these tips, and let me know how it goes.

And please add any tips you have, for accessing your quiet inner voice, in the comments below… I’d love to you to share them.

Learn more about how you can be the person you want to be

I’ll be releasing August’s Bottom-line on 1 Aug, and the book I’m Bottom-lining is “Finding Your Own North Star” by Martha Beck. If you’ve been following and enjoying these “leading your life posts,” you’ll love the Bottom-line On Finding Your Own North Star – powerful tools for becoming more of the person you want to be.

In the Bottom-line on “Finding Your Own North Star,” you’ll find out:

• How to tell whether you REALLY want something, or whether you’re just thinking you SHOULD want it.
• How to use your body as a compass (the body never lies!) to know what your Essential Self wants you to say “yes” and “no” to, and to dissolve the confusion you’ve been feeling about what you really want.
• How to separate out your own desires from the expectations being put on you by other people in your life.
• How to manage that part of yourself that freaks out whenever you start trying to change something in your life.
• How to stop being held back by worry about what other people think.
• How to deal with each stage of the change process, so that you don’t get stuck in the middle of making a change.
• How to dissolve your own internal resistance and inner conflict, so you can stop fighting yourself and start living the life you want.

Click here to join the Bottom-line Bookclub

Join before 1 Aug, and you’ll get TWO Bottom-lines in your first month: you’ll get the Bottom-line on Pam Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation immediately and on 1 Aug you’ll get the Bottom-line on Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star.

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