Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast Episode 19: How To Begin Living My Dream And Purpose. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to this series in the footer of the website bipolarexcellence.com.

How to begin living my dream or purpose? Well, this is going to sound trite. You simply begin. Now, what is that? What’s the actual action step? I’m big on journaling. Journaling’s a first step.

When whatever you’re trying to do, is thoughts in your head and that’s it, then you’re your only audience. You’re not doing yourself any good. At the bare minimum you need to get these thoughts on paper.

I’ve said before, writing is the doing part of thinking. It’s not my quote. Came from another guy that coached me through the writing of my book many years ago. I got a book! You know, I never say much about that. The book’s called It Takes Guts To Be Me, How An Ex Marine Beat Bipolar Disorder.

I would like to revamp that thing at some point.

Do like I don’t know, I think it’s been 20 years now. Oh, it’s over 20. Maybe I’ll do a 25th year revision. I don’t know. But anyway, that book was me living my dream and purpose. It started with journaling and then it became chapters in a book.

So writing’s huge. You don’t feel like writing? Then type it out, at least. You need to type out your thoughts… at first freeflow. And do this for however long feels like it needs to happen. I mean, even if it takes months.

Just write whatever it is you’re thinking, or even type it. The act, the physical act of writing down your thoughts gets them out of your head and helps you think about them in a way that can’t be done by just thinking.

Getting your body involved by doing the typing or the writing is the beginning of helping you make sense of what all these thoughts mean and what to do with them.

Free flow. Don’t edit. Don’t try to make sense of it. Don’t try to organize it. None of that matters in the beginning. Just get your thoughts out of your head and onto your paper or screen. Do that for however long feels like is right. At some point, you’re gonna be like, I think it’s time to organize some of this or review it.

You don’t even need to review it right away. You can if you want, but there’ll come a point when it feels natural, organic, you start reviewing it all. And you start trying to find the through-line, which I’ve thought about or spoken about before. And you start to get a better idea of who you are. To yourself.

That’s how you begin living your dream or purpose. If you don’t know who you are, whatever lofty goals you have after that, you’re just going to really struggle to get them off the ground.

There’s certain people that are loose cannons, they’re like bottle rockets without a tail, and that they can get things done.

But I even wonder even wonder… you see that, like with, I dunno, you see it with rockstars and musicians and actors… they win everything, but then there’s all these horror stories of how the crash comes later. None of the marriages ever last. Things like this. They pay in some other way for the fast growth.

I don’t know how much that applies to what I’m talking about here, but I think it does, to a degree. You need to know you, so that you can properly express yourself to the world and resonate. You need to resonate with the people that are like you, who can benefit the most from whatever it is you have to offer.

So really I have so much I could say about this, but I want these episodes to be short and sweet, these learning episodes. You need to understand who you are. Once again, Centerpointe can help you with that because you need a lot of quiet time. Centerpointe with an E .com. Centerpointe.com. Go over there and use their system.

They’re not the only one. That’s the one I use. Once you to know what they are, if you want to go some other way have at it. But do whatever it takes for you to sit quietly and not even think, so that your subconscious mind is free to express itself.

Your subconscious is what drives you. You have zero conscious access to it.

Your conscious self is you. Who you are, your name, your likes and dislikes, your beliefs, how the world perceives you.

It’s all a construct that you’ve created in your mind to interface with the world with some degree of safety and security. None of it’s real. You can change any of it at any time. That construct is partly in the way of you becoming who you must, to begin living your dream or purpose. To finding out in this case, to finding out just who you are.

Cause that’s really what this episode is about. You just want to find out who you are. You need quiet time before you even move on into the systems that I’ve mentioned before that are like strength tests.

You can do them simultaneously. I don’t, I don’t really think it’ll hurt anything.

But you need to really be able to go deep. And you need to let the quiet part of yourself out. And it only comes out when you leave it alone. When you turn off your conscious self, the subconscious has a way of showing itself…later.

It’s like going to the gym. You do not get big and strong in the gym.

The gym is the stimulus. You get big and strong when you go home and hydrate and eat the right foods at the right times in the right way and supplement and rest. That’s when you get strong.

Same thing here, except you’re just trying to find out who you are. When you get good with that, it’s going to become much clearer how to proceed pursuing your dream and purpose.

See, I already got other thoughts tripping up in my head that I want to share but I believe it would get way too muddy and overly complex. Let’s just leave that one at that. If you need any help from me with figuring out how to do all this, go find me over at bipolarexcellence.com.

All righty. Be well, guys.