There’s a new trend, both in the broader zeitgeist and among my clients and social networks.

A Little Backstory

You’ve probably been feeling the need for Clarity. Courage. Confidence. I hear this a lot in my clients, and it’s part of the existing societal narrative. 

Your “urge” to understand yourself, to know who you are, occurs organically as you evolve, or as your perspective expands, You’re more able to see who you really are. You want to be more of yourself.

These patterns of how Purpose evolves in the human developmental stages is the underlying thesis of my upcoming book, The Golden Thread: Where to Find Purpose in the Stages of Your Life.

But you don’t necessarily see your own unique contribution. Most of us are not great witnesses of ourselves. 

So we need those things:

·         Clarity about who we are.

·         Courage to claim and live into that more authentic version of ourselves.

·         Confidence about how to do that, to integrate it into our lives, relationships, and everything we offer in the world, including our careers and businesses.

The end result is that we get to experience both more meaning and impact as we become more of ourselves. Whatever that “self” is. Hallelujah. We certainly need more of that.

But Here’s What I’m Hearing Now

This new trend in the social narrative is a new thread in our unconscious awareness. Probably related to the absolute lack of it in our broader infrastructures. 

And paradigmatically, it’s a huge tension for us, as our Center of Gravity, the place we’ve begun to arrive in our human development, is shifting to a more evolved perspective.

The new narrative I’m hearing about is Trust, or the lack of it.

You’d think that if we live in a free society with justice, equality and democratic values, that Trust should be a basic value, native to our traditional, modern, post-modern and evolving integral culture. 

But here’s the rub.

Even as many of us are evolving as humans, shifting into wider and wider perspectives of consciousness (many of us have been doing work to wake-up, grow-up and clean-up), so that we can now see the critical importance of collaborative, cooperative and inter-related ways of being…. 

…. our social structures aren’t necessarily following suit. And that traps people into an old paradigm of me-first and competition-oriented structures. [Note: Gallup released its poll March 2019- only 40% of Americans have confidence in the integrity of our elections, source: Statista, 2019] 

And that’s a down-shift in evolution. Rolling backward on the uphill climb.

To be clear, I’m NOT making a political statement here. You have your perspectives, I have mine. But you get the drift.

If we’re not creating social, political, economic and other structures that promote Trust, then we lose faith in each other AND ourselves that anything can change. That we can grow and adapt. 

That it will all work out just fine.

Here’s what Happens When We Lose Trust

When we lose trust in each other, and ourselves, it has a huge effect on our neurological and biological systems. And our will to persevere. We lose faith that we can have any effect. Any impact on how things are. And of course it spirals from there.

Does that sound like what’s going on to you, too?

Here’s a New York Times interview with David Rock, Director of the Neuroleadership Institute. Rock describes how SCARF (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness) affects how we respond to others at work, which can also be extended to other social environments and culture in general.

We lose trust in each other when these basic relational needs are not met. We become defended. Shut down. We lose our sense of clarity, confidence and courage.

And then, we don’t trust ourselves, which limits our own ability to move forward in life.

And Then We Ask…

And it follows that we’d ask, “Why would I want to bother making my own unique contribution? Why would I go out of my way to live into a purposeful existence, if the broader culture is rolling backwards?” Basically because

You have to care for and trust in yourself and others because it’s the only chance you have in this human lifetime to be truly happy, to affect your own personal welfare, and to have any impact on the planet.

It’s a stretch to imagine that we can learn to Trust ourselves better than we can trust our social structures.

And we have to start somewhere.

How about starting here. Where you are.

Choose to be You. 

Nothing left out. When you start to make sense out of your own life, there’s no turning back. You Trust yourself, and know that it will be alright.

Are you ready for Clarity? Confidence? Courage?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

Feel free to share more about how you plan to live into more clarity, confidence and courage to create a purposeful and impactful life.