At whatever age you contemplate making some adjustments in your life, the clarity you gain will be  your very best resource. Taking action on that clarity is a close second.   In the following examples, gaining that clarity involves some “deep” work.

• When you are clear about what matters to you, where you want to go, and what you have to offer, you can create a path. The others in your life, friends or strangers, are able to better assist you.
• When you are clear what reluctance or hesitancies are blocking your ability to go forward, you can dismantle them, go around them, heal them, or take a different path.
• When you are clear about the undeniable realities of the trends and forces which challenge our daily existence, you can better prepare for, and create, new possibilities.

Gaining necessary clarity in each of the above areas  requires going below the surface to uncover what lies within and to ferret out the truth about the nature of the world in which you hope to thrive. Below the surface is the place where you can enter a Deeper Clarity. It’s a world available for exploration, containing special insights, fears, and beliefs, which tend to express in invisible brakes and barriers.  We need to “go deep” to identify them, remove them and supercharge the process of moving into doing what you most care about.

Let me point to three examples of the deeper clarity that is essential to crafting a life that’s fulfilling.

1. For some people, it is a significant challenge to actually “know” what matters to them and what they want.  Going a little deeper, they might discover that in childhood that a parent always criticized their ideas. So they learned to “stuff” them/basically not have them. And now, as an adult, the task is to give themselves permission to begin to notice what they like and to declare it out loud. Building a new habit of noticing and naming, starts the process of bringing forward the truths about you which have been deeply lodged within.
2. I  often ask clients who are in the process of setting goals for themselves, why they might  be “unwilling” to achieve those goals, the very goals to which they had just committed.  An unusual question you might think.  We often are both surprised at what is under the surface awaiting the rarely posed question. Once given permission to probe, people do know the answer:    “If I achieve that goal, I won’t know what to do next.”  “If I achieve that goal, I’ll have to go for something higher and better and I don’t know if I can.”  “If I don’t achieve that goal, I’ll feel like a failure.”  Interesting the number of “brakes” we carry deep in our psyches.  Raising hidden beliefs and fears to awareness allows us to deal with them in a variety of ways.
3. Additionally, there is a necessity for a deeper clarity about the state of the world we inhabit and in which we hope to live out our lives.  If you haven’t noticed, things are changing–big time.  The politicians pretty much fudge it for us, as sounding fact-based warnings and telling the deeper truths are not good for re-elections.  But as I am coming to my own clarity, the bottom line is this:  The days of cheap oil are basically over and our whole society’s infrastructure and growth model  happens to be dependent on cheap energy. Also converging are the issues of climate instability and an economic volatility due to massive debts and unfunded liabilities. With this triple whammy facing us,  the premise that our economy will grow strong again in the near future, may actually be ungrounded.  Our aspirations for ourselves will need to take into account a world that will offer different opportunities and benefits than those we may have assumed for ourselves.

As I am beginning to understand for myself,  the lives most of us have known during the last 20 years will not be the lives we will be living over the next 20 years.  On the one hand this is a bit scary.  On the other hand, for me,  having a nagging feeling over the last three years that something was falling apart and having had no name for it, has been much more disconcerting than than the relief of observing the trends which comprise the triple whammy. It is real; and there are some choices we can make.  Our new world in break-down-mode is even more likely to be hungry for our gifts, though perhaps not in the way we had perhaps previously imagined.

Therefore, it’s important to seek deeper clarity on two fronts:  What is our own actual internal alignment with our values and stated intentions, AND how will the changes going on in the world affect us?  Creating a way to cope with and thrive in a less materially abundant world, need not be any less fun; it will, however, require all of us to think about how each of can best contribute, how each of us wants to contribute,  and what it will take for each of us to prepare to contribute and to thrive, under the new circumstances and their unknown consequences.

In the unexamined world within us, and the unexplained, changing, outer world around us, lie plenty of viable options and possibilities. I encourage you to be willing to delve into both these arenas, seeking a more complete version of the internal and the external realities which will ultimately free you to make more informed choices about your life and work.

Dr. Chris Martenson provides facts, his interpretation and his opinions, about what’s happening in the world around us.  Disconcerting and important:  www.ChrisMartenson.com.  Another basic book is The Transition Handbook:  From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins, a pioneer in the UK, describing the “first” transition town.  Other respected authors, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Richard Heinberg, John Robbins have long studied these world trends and their 2010 books are clear and helpful.

Offered by Martha Johnson, your Life Clarity Catalyst and Coach