Longing to do something meaningful and self driven is increasing. One of the most common themes I encounter in our groups is a desire for women to follow their hearts. Most of us are generally very content with our lives – a career that matches our ambition, a supportive and caring husband, a lovely home and a family. Yet, something is missing. A nagging feeling that enters the reality of every day life, it lingers in the background of every moment. “I feel comfortable but something is missing.”

What is it?

Many call this desire to find something greater than ourselves a quest to find a purpose in life. Perhaps that is a big statement, but what ever way you define it, it’s the feeling that life’s meaning can not be measured by having a family and a job alone. Perhaps it is a feeling that we’d like to make a bigger impact. We’d like to see our full potential and use it. We’d like to make the world a better place, somehow.

There’s a growing sense of longing not to have a career, but to follow your heart and earn a living.

Yet I have discovered a paradox. And this must be to do with how we have been brought up as individuals and how the society as as a whole is operating: the use of intellect and rationing is celebrated over our natural creativity and instinct.

I believe this is what is mostly holding women back. I believe that many women, and feminine energy as a whole (weather carried by a female or a male), is very organic. I believe that our natural way of progressing things is to iterate, to grow, to take small steps and to see how things will develop. To be successful is to always apply our ambition to those steps but it is not to know the exact destination in advance.

Yet we are held back with the operational logic of the brain. Pure logic that leaves sometimes very little to the hands of trusting your gut feeling and letting the journey show you the way.

And that’s the paradox.

How can you use your brain to figure out something that you know comes from the heart?

Perhaps that holds the secret to the biggest conflict in women’s empowerment? Perhaps we are still trying to figure things out the old way, the way of the logic?

I see and hear these examples in DrivenWoman groups all the time. Women join because they want to find their purpose yet they are trying to ‘solve the problem’ with logic. But the answer will come from the heart! And when it comes it’s often shocking as it is always in conflict with the perceived ‘correct’ way to do things.

How can I become a medical doctor and go through seven years of education at 40? I’ve spent the past 20 years proceeding a completely different career!

How can I launch myself as a designer when I’ve been trying to do everything but what I love for most of my life?

How can I leave my safe banking career to retrain as a nutritionist when my income is not going to be safe anymore?

It’s hard because it defies all logic.

But to do what you love you know it comes from the heart, so why are you using your brain to solve it?

The ‘aha moment’ will never come from rationing or researching with logic.

The only way to find out what your heart really desires, how to live a life filled with purpose, is to quieten the mind and let go of all expectations and past thinking models. This is hard as it takes you to a completely opposite direction to everything we have been taught. It’s super scary because the outcome is likely to shake your world to the core.

But you have a choice.

If you want to find out the truth let the truth emerge. It can not be forced, and it will not happen with “a little more logic thinking”.

What is holding women back is trying to force fit themselves into a this old thinking model. It’s becoming more and more clear to me that the only way for us to truly flourish is to embrace the feminine way which is organic, collaborative and often unpredictable.

Take the fist step and let your natural path emerge. That’s the only way to follow your heart.

~ Miisa