It Takes Courage to Live an Inspired Life

When people live Inspired lives where they live on purpose and do what they love, it often looks really easy from the outside looking in.  However, in reality, from the insider perspective, living an Inspired life takes a lot of courage.

The reason for this is very simple.  We are here, on this planet, to learn and to evolve and when we follow our Inspirations we live our lives in a constant process of unfolding lessons and conscious growth.  Becoming an Inspired Money Maker is not about finding something that you enjoy doing so much that it’s super easy for you and you can do it in your sleep, and then finding a way to make massive amounts of money with it.  Becoming an Inspired Money Maker is about finding your Inspiration, your purpose and passion in life and learning to follow it even when it’s easier not to.

There are a lot of things I can do in life that pay good money and I could easily spend the rest of my working life doing them, without really having to learn much more than I already know.  However, these things don’t Inspire me anymore and I know that if I settled on doing just those things, I would be selling myself short.

In order for me to stay on my Inspired path, I have to constantly follow my heart and listen to my intuition even especially during times when my “rational” mind is telling me to do exactly the opposite.  The reason for this is that I know that my “rational” mind is not speaking from a place of courage.  It is simply a “prediction machine”, programmed by my upbringing and the society I live in, speaking from a place of fear.  It’s only concern is safety.  Given the choice to follow a path which I’m inspired and excited to take, or the path which is safer, it will choose safety 100% of the time.

The big challenge with this is that safety is an illusion.  If we truly listened to our logical minds and took the “safe” path at every point in our lives, it would actually destroy us.  We would turn into paranoid people that are afraid to leave their house to go to the supermarket in fear of possibly being involved in a hostage situation because of what we saw on the news that night.  Staying at home is not safe either, with all the home invasions we saw on the news last week.  I guess we better build a bunker and hide, right?

Even if we could find safety in seclusion, or by not taking any risks, eventually the clock runs out on our physical bodies anyways and at the end of the day what will you have accomplished with your life if you just hid from it your entire life?

What’s your current inspiration?  Are you following it, or are you hiding?

About six years ago, I was inspired to look into the “spiritual” side of building wealth.  Up until that point, I studied all kinds of personal development strategies which all revolved around the physical and mental parts of life only.  However, I was increasingly running into an invisible wall and I could not figure out why.

Then, through a series of meaningful “coincidences”, my True Self began talking to me.  I started to see constant examples of successful people who kept talking about their success coming to them only after they got their spiritual life in balance.  At first I didn’t really want to accept this.  I didn’t want “spirituality” to have anything to do with the “rational” work of business and wealth.  I also equated Religion with Spirituality, and never being a very Religious person I thought that if success depends on going to church every Sunday, I’m screwed.

During this time, I had to face my rational mind and when it told me that spirituality and business/wealth have nothing to do with each other I had to learn to ignore it’s stupidity and follow my Intuition to look into this further.  It’s not easy ignoring the logical mind.  However, I’ve always been a highly intuitive person and whenever I’ve ignored my intuition in life I’ve always gotten into trouble, so I decided to listen to it.

This single decision, to NOT ignore the spiritual side of my life completely changed my life, especially in the field of business and wealth.  I learned about the power of Intention and about tools like the Law of Attraction, for example.  All of a sudden, I was getting past the invisible walls that used to drive me nuts.

I learned very quickly that going against your spirit is a losing battle.  It may be comfortable to hide behind the rational/logical mind, but when our spirit wants us to explore and learn and grow, it is very resourceful at bringing these lessons to us, so I found it much easier to just go along with my spirit than to try to fight it.  It is such a more exciting and joyful way to live too.  Most of the people I know who ignore their inspirations and intuition and live “Rational” lives are miserable people.  No thanks, I’d rather be happy.

The funny thing is that even though I don’t question something like the Law of Attraction anymore because I’ve seen so much proof of it’s existence in life, I still know people who think I’m nuts in thinking that Law of Attraction exists.  They think me and everyone else who believes in that “crap” is delusional, and that’s OK.  It just means they haven’t yet built up the courage to open up their minds to explore the possibility of such things existing because they’re afraid it would completely shatter their current model of reality.

The truth is that I still do the same kind of thing all the time.  An example of this might be “psychic abilities”.  Three years ago I was highly skeptical of this.  Intuitively I always knew that psychic abilities could exist out there, as it always made sense to my Intuition that they do, but my rational mind was always skeptical of “Psychics” and I was always afraid to even go in for a reading.

The thing for me was that I was continuously being Inspired to look into it further though.  Much the same as with the Law of Attraction, my Intuition kept telling me that there is more to it so I decided to look into it further.  I ordered readings from a handful of different psychics and with each reading, my skepticism diminished and my belief levels went up as the readings got more and more accurate, until one day I got a reading that proved to me that psychic abilities are possible.  It’s not easy for our rational minds to accept these kinds of things though.  I mean, how you see life completely changes when things like this happen.

It takes courage to live an Inspired life.  It takes courage to listen to your Intuition and your spirit when it’s pointing you in the direction of your next learning lesson.  It takes courage to explore spirituality and things that most people claim they don’t believe in.

The funny thing I actually found is that some of the very people who I thought would think I’m nuts for believing in things like Law of Attraction and Psychics, ended up believing in the same thing but they just didn’t have the courage to talk about it openly until I told them I believed in the same things.  Honestly, I had no idea how many people in my personal life have had psychic readings done until I told them about mine.

Launching this Blog was another one of those things that my spirit encouraged me to do, even though my rational mind was scared.  It’s not easy publicly sharing your beliefs with the whole world.  It may seem easy, but until you run a Blog of your own, you don’t know that it takes courage to share your thoughts with the world.

When I wrote 101 Tips to Help You Make Money Doing What You Love, I listed “#48. Get a Psychic Reading” and it was amazing to watch how some people reacted.  I had one person email me and tell me that he used to love my Blog and read every single article, but when he read that I believed in Psychic abilities, he told me that he’s immediately unsubscribing to the Blog and never coming back.  I thought that was quite funny.  My beliefs threatened him so much that he had to completely erase me from his existence, even though up until that point everything I wrote was extremely helpful to him.  “#9. Stop Letting Fancy Sounding Coffee Steal Your Dreams” and “#95. Sleep When You’re Dead” pissed off a lot of people too.  They’re obviously not practicing “#3. Have a Sense of Humor”.

At that time I had about 250 RSS subscribers, and now I’ve got about 1,600.  Him and I’m sure a few others left because my beliefs threatened their rational minds, but a whole bunch more came and stayed because even though some may not believe in things like Law of Attraction or Psychic abilities simply because they haven’t been Inspired to look into such things by their spirits yet, they at least respect the fact that I have the courage to publicly state what I believe in.

This article isn’t about me though.  It’s about bringing to your awareness the fact that following your Inspiration, your purpose and passions in life will very likely require courage.  Don’t shy away from that.  Don’t expect everything to be easy before taking action.  Don’t expect your rational mind and everyone around you to agree with your ideas before implementing them.  In fact, if your inspired to do something and it feels good to you but doesn’t really seem to make a heck of a lot of sense to those around you, you’re probably on the right track.  Take a small step in the direction of courage and follow you Inspired dreams.  Nobody else can do it for you.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes:

“A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.“

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Man and Superman (1903)

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