As a well-traveled soul — a woman who has walked this earth for a while — you want to be in the world in a way that makes a difference. Whether it’s through your personal interactions, your art, your activism, or a boutique business, you want to know that all the good stuff inside of you — the gifts, the insights, the wisdom — has a place to go where it can be seen and felt and appreciated by other people.

The goal is not maximizing revenue. Or amassing followers. Though those things might be means to an end. The goal isn’t legacy, or ensuring that you are remembered long after you are gone.

The goal is to create a beautiful, balanced life for yourself that includes you joyfully sharing the deepest, sweetest parts of who you are in healthy exchanges with other human beings. Sharing in a way that lets you know that the unique being you are is making a contribution to the world around you. Sharing in a way that lets you receive something back. Sharing in a way that is deeply fulfilling and rewarding to your soul.

And part of what makes that possible is giving that deepest, sweetest part of who you are enough shape and form and presence that you can see it clearly and remember why you are here, and so it can move out into the world and be tangible and visible.

Look, you are who you are, and your essence, what indigenous people call your medicine, is always with you, and always emanating from you. You don’t have to do anything — become someone different or get somewhere out there in the world — to have a presence that brings goodness to the world.

But, because humans are kind of complicated and messy, we can muddy that signal. We can interfere with what is trying to come through us.

You do that when you fail to embrace all of who you are, by not looking at parts of yourself you decided long ago were not okay. Your temper. Your intensity. Your lack of focus or your hyperfocus. The speed or the slowness of your thinking. Your traumatic history.

You do it by being indifferent to or judgmental of what makes you different. You do it by overvaluing old stories you picked up about needing to be exceptional or hide your vulnerable feelings or talk less. You do it by giving more weight to old voices in your head telling you that it’s your performance, your productivity, your appearance, or your achievements that matter.

Knowing what’s you, and what’s yours to do, is a relief. Because it takes everything else off the table.

The depth of your impact expands the clearer you are what the impact is that intend to have. When you claim what makes you come alive, what you believe matters most. Those are things that no one can take away from you.

Without that clarity, you are so vulnerable to other people’s ideas and plans and blueprints and directions. You are vulnerable to the shenanigans of your monkey mind. Unfortunately, most conventional business training is all about molding yourself around what you perceive other people want from you, not what wants to come through you. And that’s fine if you want to build a market-driven business. But it won’t fulfill that yearning of your soul to be seen, and heard, bringing forward the deepest parts of who you are.

Your potential for impact comes from how true you can be to the callings of your soul.

And being true to the calling of your soul requires you have some kind of symbol to capture what you understand about yourself, something that holds the energy that defines you in some kind of form you can hold on to and come back to. A symbol that brings you home every time you see it or hear it or feel it.

You could do that with an image, with a sound, with a movement, with a scent.

But my favorite way to create that symbol is with words.

I’ll talk about why in my next email.