Declare Your Embodied Purpose through Intentional Commitments

“They really lived.” This iconic line from the movie, Secondhand Lions, has caused many to ask, “Am I just going through the motions, or am I really living?” If you’ve experienced this, then declaring your embodied purpose can energize you and make you feel vibrantly alive.

When you’re born, your life is an open book filled with empty pages waiting to be written upon. We have the privilege and responsibility to write our unique story. Yes, our DNA and external forces, like our parents or culture, provide a structure on which we build our story. But it’s up to us to make sense of it and choose to write new chapters.

The question is: Will you let outside elements control your story, or will you pick up your pen and declare for yourself how you want to be? You can shape the person you are by intentionally declaring your commitments and purpose in life.“Commitment leads to action. Action brings your dream closer,” noted Marica Wieder.

Declaration is the third step in the proprietary PADLE model I use to develop leadership skills. How do you declare your embodied purpose? It’s more about what you do than what you say…

Primarily, you declare your purpose in the way you approach your self-care.

Leaders who make a real difference do so by embodying their commitment to self and others. They embrace routines and practices that focus on self-care and being grounded because this energizes them to take daily action toward their purpose.

Yet, isn’t self-care the first thing you neglect, because “you’re too busy” or “you don’t have the time”? Essentially, you’re declaring that your purpose isn’t important to you. In contrast, taking time for self-care allows you to be centered and mindfully find the balance between your mind, body, and spirit. When you value and nurture yourself wholly, you empower yourself to direct your energy toward building any skill and cultivating any chosen behavior.

There are four steps to connecting self-care with declaring your embodied purpose…

1. Learn to feel and identify your body sensations, as you experience life. Reflect on how the first light of morning warms your skin and opens you up to another day. As you eat, nourishing food floods your body with renewed strength and vitality. Your loved ones cause you to soften or tense, depending on the current state of your relationship. Increase your awareness of sensations like these throughout the day.

2. As you connect body sensations to your emotions, you build trust in your Primal Core. Without judgment, you can see things as they are and accept them in the moment. Each reaction and emotion informs and teaches you what serves you or doesn’t.

3. With this increased clarity, you can form or un-form boundaries in your life. Define how you want to interact with the world and all living things. Define what you stand for, what you value, what you’ll allow, and what you won’t. Your interdependence and interconnectedness are lived and felt, rather than being a vague concept of “right” behavior.

4. Your embodied purpose becomes actionable and observable. For example, when your purpose is to help women become leaders, you’ll embody a healthy lifestyle — you’ll eat nutritious food and exercise regularly, so you have the energy to keep going. You’ll value education and learn all you can in your chosen field. You’ll master leadership behavior and skills, like communicating effectively.

Regrets usually arise from what you don’t do, from unfulfilled dreams. These four steps will help you become more mindfully aware, so you can declare what matters to you each day. Have you clearly identified your embodied purpose? Have you declared your commitment toward living that purpose? Sometimes we can get lost in the busyness of life. If that’s true of you, why not take advantage of the  Newave PADLE leadership model quiz to assess where you are and where you want to be.

Your “Dream Big, Start Small” here’s the one thing you can do today.

To embody your purpose is to live it with your every thought, word, and action. This calls for a heightened awareness — feeling the life in your body and using each body sensation as a building block to the life you want to live. 

The first step is to slow down and identify each body sensation you experience. Putting words to your body sensations can be difficult so here’s a graphic that can help you. Once you build this vocabulary, the next step will be connecting body sensations to emotions. This exercise will awaken you to your embodied feelings. Life will take on a depth and breadth beyond what you’ve ever experienced before.

Observe without judgment, then direct the energy of the body sensation into an action or virtue that supports purposeful living. To achieve this powerful state, there must be harmony between your mind, spirit, and body. If you’d like to accelerate your ability to use your innate energy masterfully, please contact me and schedule a 30-minute complimentary consultation by phone or via Zoom, to see if we’re a good fit for each other.