Knowing the True Spirit of Your Work Changes Everything
There is No One Like You
In all the world, there has never been another human quite like you.
With your skills and gifts. With your rich lived experience.
All your life, something has been animating you, moving you forward, shaping what you explore and the lessons you’ve learned.
You might have a feeling for what that thing is. Sense in your bones when you are in that spirit and when you are not.
But can you name it?
When you know it, it changes how you see yourself. It changes how you understand the life path you’ve been on. It changes your understanding of who you are here to be.
You connect the dots between parts of your life that seem disconnected.
Live Your True Spirit
When you name your True Spirit, you know what you are here to create for yourself, and for others.
You have a powerful tool to make decisions big and small, by asking yourself which lets you express more of your True Spirit in the world.
You have a way to bring yourself home again, over and over, when you feel lost and confused.
You have the seeds of language to tell the story of the difference you make to the world.
You have the first seed of your Real Work.
If you want to True your life and your work, knowing your True Spirit will help you do that faster and more effectively than using trial and error.
What Is the True Spirit of Your Work?
The True Spirit of your Work is words on a page that describe who you are here to be.
It names what YOU most want to feel and experience in this lifetime, and what you most want OTHERS to feel and experience through your presence and efforts.
Your True Spirit IS the spiritual truth about why you are here, as you can best name it today.
It’s not just pretty words, or a grandiose idea of what you could be doing, it’s rooted firmly in your lived experience and in the language and metaphors of your whole life.
- Knowing your True Spirit solves the problem of not being sure what your “thing” is, what makes you special or different from other people in your field.
- It resolves the tension of KNOWING and FEELING that you have something special to offer but not being able to name it or describe it in ways that helps others get it. It clears up any confusion YOU have about the meaningful difference you make when you show up, when people let you in to their world.
- When you know your True Spirit, you kind of have to stop dicking around and start doing your life’s work. When you know your True Spirit, you have something to grow into, day by day, week by week, as you bring your work into the world. Something that captures your highest aspirations and your deepest desires.
- When you know your True Spirit, you get less distracted by the next shiny, bright thing and what other people are doing, and get more focused on the thing you do and how it wants to come out into the world.
- When you know your True Spirit, you show up with a clarity and solidity you didn’t have before. People experience you differently when you are in your True. You actually start to come into focus for people. Your words ping for people because they are coming from this deeper place, this deeper source that they can feel is grounded and clear.
- When you know your True Spirit, you make better choices, because you can see more clearly which choices bring more of your True Spirit into the world, and which choices take you away from your True Spirit. (I originally developed the True Spirit as a tool to help people feel more inspired by themselves more of the time before realizing how powerful it was to develop strong messaging.)
- With your True Spirit in focus, you have a touchstone, words to read aloud, to bring you back home to yourself again and again when the world tries to drag you off course.
- When you see yourself this clearly, it gets you off your butt and out into the world taking messy and imperfect action to help more people (including you) feel and experience the thing you describe in your True Spirit.
The Most Powerful Tool I Know
I haven’t found a better way in 29 years of coaching to get people on track with their life and out in the world with more power more quickly.
Your True Spirit starts you on the path to Trueing Your Life.
It helps you figure out your Real Work, and your right way to show up in the world.
My particular genius in this lifetime is helping you put words to that Spirit.
So you can know it for yourself and recognize yourself for the gift you are in the world.
So you can communicate it to the people who want and need what only you can offer.
So that you live this live knowing you fulfilled what you came here to do.
I’m Here to Help
I can ask questions to start helping you think about your True Spirit.
But having me craft the True Spirit for you makes all the difference.
Seeing yourself clearly, connecting the dots between diverse experiences, working with the nuance of one word over another, capturing more of your energetic frequency can be hard to do on your own.
We are just too close to ourselves sometimes to see it clearly and be able to name it.
I listen in a way few people do. I track your language, your energy, and I use all my wordy skills to put it together in a statement that flows. This isn’t about fussy perfectionism. It’s about matching the words to your frequency, your spirit in a way that few people know how to do.
I can catch themes and threads you don’t see, connect dots you hadn’t connected, find the right metaphors from your own life, and word everything using the language that naturally comes out of you.
I can help you see more and ground more deeply in the stories of your own life. I can spot the metaphors that make meaning of what you are doing now.
Language is an incredibly powerful creative tool and one I am a master at wielding.
I don’t know anyone else in the world who does this process or anything quite like it.
It’s my gift and my genius to be able to listen to you and in a very short period of time put words to the essence of what you bring into the world.
I can do the heavy lifting of putting words to your essence so you don’t have to keep spinning your wheels.
How It Works
Here’s how your True Spirit session will go:
- You’ll do a minute amount of prep
- We’ll meet on Zoom.
- You’ll tell me roughly three stories from your life and I will ask probing questions to get to the heart of that story.
- I’ll take copious notes.
- When I’ve heard enough, we’ll sign off Zoom.
- I’ll spend a half hour crafting a first draft of your True Spirit.
- We’ll meet back on Zoom.
- Together we will refine the True Spirit statement until it is a whole-hearted yes for you and captures the deepest, most powerful thing you are here to do this lifetime.
- I’ll send you all my notes and the finished draft.
The whole session should be two hours or less. If we need additional time to get there, we will take that time at no additional cost to you.
What Gets Started When You Know Your True Spirit
Jeannie Campanelli
In this process of defining her True Spirit, Jeannie got in alignment with why she was here. She started to see the overarching theme of all the work she’s done in her lifetime, and she came up with a theme that was so true to her that it has been guiding her over the last six years in her business.
Jeannie had been a teacher, a consultant, a university lecturer. She said: As a therapist, as a lecturer, consulting, working with teachers and parents, underneath, it was always about self-esteem . I hadn’t realized that before we worked together, not so clearly.
So this is the True Spirit statement Jeannie put together:
The true spirit of my work is to spark the hearts of individuals to experience the inner confidence; the sense of wholeness, vitality, and serenity
that comes from deeply knowing oneself
while accepting the lightness and darkness of being human,
and living freely by standing in one’s truth.
What Jeannie said happened for her as this new language came into focus was this:
It was a release in a sense that getting really clear takes away a lot of stress. It became very easy for me to write my blog or send out a newsletter, come up with titles, to come up with a program. Everything’s centered around that focus. I felt really good about it.
It just felt so clear that from that time on. Any time I had to fill out anything on the web, sending bios out, whatever.
Because my message was so clear, I found that when clients phoned me, they had already hired me from seeing everything that I so clearly put out there. They knew what I was about. I really didn’t have the traditional consultation that people do to attract that client. I just didn’t have that. I really got my ideal clients. They knew who they were, and they were ready. I never had to talk them into it. They felt the already knew me and knew what I was about. That continues to this day, actually.
(Jeannie worked with me on Message Development in 2002.)
www.innerconfidencecoaching.com
You can read Jeannie’s full story, including some of the language she developed, here.
Helen Elizabeth Evans
Helen calls the True Spirit work “Probably the most useful piece of anything that I’ve ever done. It is honestly the most useful work that I think I’ve done in many ways for my life because I’m so much more than just a hand analyst. I’m this big person who has all these different other gifts and talents and is excited and inspired by different things. The true spirit is like a reference of what excites me.”
So now let’s hear what Helen came up with as the True Spirit of her Work:
The true spirit of my work is to get spiritually emerging souls on an entrepreneurial journey
The inner peace, confidence and inspiration
To transcend their apparent limitations
And step out into the world fully alive, free of their baggage and amour,
Allowing their own true spirit to shine brightly
As they experience the thrill of shooting for their stars in their full uncluttered glory
That comes from connecting to their inner truth, spiritual and earth bound,
Trusting in and loving their physical existence, anchored by the beauty and harmony of the space around them and ultimately knowing that they belong.
What I love is that Helen keeps her True Spirit on her phone, so on days where she is feeling down or losing her focus, she can pull it up and remind herself that this is what she does, this is what she is creating with her work.
You can read Helen’s full story, including some of the language she developed, here.
Aine Dee
Aine first worked with me in 2011 when she was establishing her financial mentoring services. We put together a True Spirit statement that captured the depth of her work. At first, she felt like the True Spirit was too big, too impossible, but over the years, Aine says, I grew into it. So, she had some trust that I could help her hold onto and speaking to the larger, and emerging, vision of the difference her work could make.
In our second round, what made all the difference for Aine was finally being encouraged to tie her money work into that larger vision of a world where more of us are making holy and healthy choices about how we live, how we use our energy, how we use our resources.
The feedback I gave her reflected back the validity of what she wanted to put forward, not the usual feedback that she was too much of an idealist. She realized, I am a cultural healer, and my work changes perceptions of money and wealth, not just what we think of as wealth, but how our culture is built to support this new vision of true wealth and well-being.
She says, what I got is that THAT is where the potency is. The Big Why of why I teach what I teach is what fuels me to go out in the world. I have the right to share my larger vision. When I just talk about managing your finances, I lose juice.
As soon as I started to own this, step into this, communicate my larger vision, I went into a whole other level of becoming. I am owning all of these archetypes: the Truth Teller, the Crone, the King. It’s like I’ve turned on the spigot.
Aine was able to take some of the phrases from her foundational language, her True Spirit and True Wisdom, and start to use them when people asked her what she does. Phrases like design and develop your own financial sovereignty OR support your business in a holy and grounded way.
What she noticed is that at public events, she would throw these potent phrases out and some people would glaze over, but the ones who didn’t would sit up, eyes wide, and say ‘tell me what that is!’
(Aine worked with me privately on Message Development in 2011, and later returned to do one of my communication training groups.)
http://www.wealthreimagined.com/
You can read Aine’s full story, including some of the language she developed, here.
Susanna Maida
A lot of people who come to me are like Susanna in that they’re very expansive in their expression. In a lot of places, people are smacked down and told that that’s not okay. What I love is to give people room to unfold a lot of stuff and then work with them to find a more streamlined expression.
Before Susanna stepped into business coaching, she was doing leadership coaching, she was leading retreats in nature, using the medicine wheel. She was good at what she did, but not very successful in it as a business.
In 2010, she made the decision to step into a high-ticket training so that she could learn how to be a business coach and she set all the work she had been doing aside. That training was incredibly valuable in the sense that Susanna was given a system for coaching so that she didn’t have to piece together on her own.
But, this is important, as she describes in her own words:
I lost myself in the process. I lost my own voice, I lost my own aliveness and I didn’t even know what my message was because I put the message that I really was passionate about aside in order to be marketable.
Or at least what she thought was marketable.
What she told herself was: No one walks around in the middle of the night thinking I have to unfold myself as leader.
Susanna’s not alone, that sometimes the fear of going in and really excavating your message is the fear of, “What if there’s nothing there,” or “What if what’s there is totally lame?”
Where we start the message development process, whether I work with you one-on-one or in a group setting, is by defining what I call the True Spirit of Your Work.
The True Spirit of your Work is the specific outcome you love to deliver that’s been a theme throughout your life.
It’s about going beyond marketing speech and trying to get to the spiritual truth about why you’re here and what you’re here to do. It gives you permission to say what’s really in your heart instead of trying to sound marketable.
Until you put aside being marketable, just for a little while, you risk circling around and never really landing on the story you are here to tell.
Here’s what Susanna said happened for her as she started to wrap her arms around defining the True Spirit of her Work:
I realized how much I had bought into that idea that in order to be a business coach, I had to inhabit this really tight terrain and I could only say things like how much money you can make and how many clients you can get. How fully I had bought into the idea that people just want to be told how to do things, to be given tips.
And that’s not me. Underneath it all, business coaching is just a strategy that I use for helping people bring their calling and their great work out into the world.
That’s really what I do, and it just happens to be that I now know how to help them build a business to do that.
(Susanna first worked with me on Message Development in 2008 and again in 2014 and 2015.)
You can read Susanna’s full story, including some of the language she developed, here.
What Happens Next
What happens after you know your True Spirit?
- You have a different sense of who you are and why you are here
- You use the True Spirit as a compass for your decisions
- You figure out your Real Work, your best projects, the ones that let you experience or express more of your True Spirit
- If you need to, we develop powerful messaging and language to tell the story of who you are and what you are here to do
- You make new choices because you can see more clearly who and what is for you, and who and what is not for you
- You take right risks to build your work and to get it out in the world
There is so much you can build on the foundation of the True Spirit.
That’s why I strongly recommend that AFTER the True Spirit you continue to work with me more closely to apply the True Spirit in your Life.
You can work with me privately to True your Life or to Develop your Messaging.
Who It’s For
I personally think every single human would benefit from knowing the True Spirit of their Work (which is really the True Spirit of their Lives).
In addition to doing this with my clients, I’ve done this with friends and family to give them more clarity, focus, and purpose. To help them apply for new positions, or make other kinds of statements about who they are and what they do.
But the True Spirit is especially important for purposeful entrepreneurs or artists who want to make their life’s work, and their income, from sharing the deepest part of who they are with the world.
Let’s Do It
If you are ready to stop wondering what makes you special and start expressing that fully, the journey starts with naming The True Spirit of Your Work.
You’ll be amazed at how you can navigate your life choices and tell a better story about why you are here and the difference you are here to make. And how much more deeply rooted you will feel in yourself and in your life.
True Spirit Session – $800
Yes, I want to know my True Spirit!
