Purpose, your passionate interest(s) that brings joy to you and people around you, is the path to fulfilling your life’s meaning and ultimate value. Unfortunately in most cases, you utilize your analytical mind to make decisions rather than “giving credibility to your feelings and accepting their messages as valid.”

Why is it that most of us think of our hearts as an irresponsible force that is only looking for fun when it is the greatest tool to unlocking purpose?

4 Steps to Trusting Your Heart

1. Acknowledge: that your feelings contain messages. Being unhappy is an idea that begs for change. Your inner feelings, subconscious stream of thought, are always expressing how you really feel about something. Often times these feelings are expressing ideas that you may not yet be willing to accept.

2. Credibility: Give credibility to your feelings and accept their messages as valid Do you discount your feelings and try to rationalize “why” you feel a certain way?

A good example is boredom. Boredom is a syndrome in someone who is not passionate about their work. Rather than understanding this as a valid sign, people discount this sign and suggest that they may cure this syndrome by finding a new work environment. The same job in a different place is only a short term fix at best. Changing workplace locations or environments is not going to cure the fact that you are bored with the work itself; instead this thinking serves to prolong the syndrome rather than cure it.

3. Believe: Believe that your heart will lead you to a better way of life than your analytical mind. Recognizing and giving credibility to messages from your heart is a key step to happiness in all areas of your life.

4. Act: act upon the messages! If you act upon what you trust then it’s important to make the shift to trusting the messages that come from your heart just like you trust your analytical mind.

Once you have built your confidence and belief in yourself, the next step to shaping your reality is to maintain a high level of commitment toward your vision. Commitment is defined as a “pledge or promise, obligation, engagement or involvement.” It is the glue and strength that holds together an action plan.

Four Steps To Maintaining Your Commitment:

1. Key areas for development: Break your vision down into areas for development.

2. Create step-by-step goals for each area of development. This gives you an instant measurement tool for your progress and a method to chart your time

3. Add detail to your goals by working through each one step by step.

4. Repeat the confidence building ideas above as needed. The process of commitment requires repetition.