Episode 162 - Design a Deeply Fulfilling Life
If your life doesn’t feel like home, you might have made decisions based on cultural expectations that were not in alignment with your unique nature. The best way to increase your level of satisfaction is to figure out your core values - what lights you up and makes you feel complete - and explore how they can be fulfilled in your everyday activities. Tune in to learn how to get this process started.
Topics
The concept of core values and their importance in creating a fulfilling life.
The importance of consistently fulfilling core values to avoid a spiritual drought.
The tendency to seek external solutions for internal issues, such as trying to fix mindset without addressing the root cause.
The benefits of seeking support and validation in making intentional life changes.
Links
👉If you'd like to create a life by design, Book a FREE Discovery Call here!👈
Resources:
📙Book: Finding Inner Courage, by Mark Nepo
Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the Self Growth nerds podcast. I'm your host Marie, a courage coach, creative soul and adventure seeker. Since thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions, and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello, nerds. How are you? I'm doing so good. This week I had no inspiration for the episode, so do you know what I did? I picked up a book, I opened it to a random page, and I read one of the sentences I had highlighted. And the book is Finding Courage by Mark Nepo.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:05]:
And the quote I stumbled upon is feed the inner hunger, and the outer hunger will dissipate. Ignore the inner hunger, and nothing in the world will satisfy you. This got me thinking about deep life satisfaction, and how do we create it? How do we increase our level of fulfillment? I've done this very intentionally in the last 6 or so years, and I've seen a massive difference, so I wanna tell you about my approach, while also exploring what what the author, Mark Nepo, has to say on this topic. So at the beginning of the chapter that I stumbled upon, Mark writes, quote, if chickens don't get enough light, they start pecking at each other. The truth is that humans are no different. Once the pecking begins we are called to 3 forms of work: stop the pecking, heal the wounds, and seek out more light. The eternal squabble has always been which of these efforts comes first: governance and law, medical and social healing, or education. Of course, an enlightened community does all 3, but the deeper question is what combination will provide a lasting solution.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:02:26]:
End quote. This takes us back to the, eternal debate about how to help people in need or countries that are struggling in a meaningful, lasting way. So many humanitarian aid efforts end up failing because if you, for example, build a water pump somewhere, but you don't teach the locals to fix it when it breaks, then it ends up being just a short term solution. And if you bring a bunch of food, let's say, in a group of people who are starving, they're likely to fight each other, and the strongest people will take most of the resources. The intention is to Self, but it ends up causing more problems. Now I want to explore in today's episode how that applies on an individual level, And please bear with me while I make a very funky analogy. So we were talking about the chickens. When your inner chickens don't get enough light, they will start pecking at each other.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:23]:
Those inner chickens could represent our basic Nerds, but I think we can safely assume that all of you listening to a self growth podcast have their basic needs met. So we're pretty much at the top of Maslow's pyramid of needs and our inner chickens, what we're seeking to meet are our higher order needs. Not what makes us survive, but what makes us thrive. What makes us feel fulfilled. What makes life feel meaningful. In my practice, I call them core values, and there's a an exercise I sometimes love to do with my clients, and it's to identify their top five core values, What's most important to them, what lights them up, and what ensures that they feel nourished when they go to bed at night. Nourished on a soul level. I'll give you mine as an example.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:17]:
My five core values are creativity, depth, adventure, growth, and connection. Once we have identified our core values, we need to learn how to fulfill each of them on a consistent basis, otherwise we're going to experience what the author calls a spiritual drought. If, for example, I am in a job that's super strict and gives me no opportunity to use my creative skills, I will feel depressed quite fast. That's what I meant when I said that if the inner chickens don't get enough light, they start to peck at each other. A more charming analogy would be to imagine a bunch of plants in your inner garden. You need to know how to take care of each individual plant, and make sure they don't get too much water or not enough light. Let's say in a given week, you've gone to lots of parties with big groups of people. Then you might start feeling irritable, and the reason for that might be because you didn't get enough sleep, which is one of our basic needs, but also because it was not in alignment with your need for depth and connection.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:34]:
That was basically me all the way through college. Another example is, a few weeks ago, I tried to get on TikTok because everyone was telling me that that's that's what you gotta do. That's where the cool kids are at. I just felt so annoyed every time that I opened up the app. And at the end of the day, I realized that it's just because it was drying up my need for depth. It's it's quite the opposite of depth, that platform. So instead I decided to let go of TikTok and double down on what I already love to do which is this Podcast, and I've been researching how to, for example, optimize SEO in my descriptions so that more people can stumble upon this podcast. See how instead of choosing variety, I chose depth because I know what my core values are I am able to course correct.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:06:35]:
The problem is that too many people just don't know their core values, and so it's like they're taking care of a garden not knowing what each plant needs, just winging it, just googling how to garden, or like gardening for fools, and then following a set of instructions that doesn't apply to them, to what's unique to them. They're looking at the people around them and how they're taking care of their own gardens without considering that theirs might have completely different kinds of plants. If for example, everyone in your family is super career focused and you think you've always thought this is how you have to be but it goes against your core values, you will feel miserable. Now if we go back to the actual chickens, what I find fascinating is that before farmers realized it was the lack of light that caused the chickens to peck at each other, They just believed that that's how chickens were, that that was their nature. They they were just nasty little beasts. And that's what happens in our society, too. If you cannot be content with a 9 to 5 job, we tend to make it mean that you're the problem. You're lazy.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:51]:
It's in your nature. Same thing if you don't want to spend the rest of your life having sex with only one person of the opposite gender. If you can't motivate yourself to do something you find uninteresting, we tell you that you have a disorder. We tell you that you have depression if you struggle to function within a system that requires you to spend all your time hustling just to pay your bills and not have any time left at the end of the week to do something that you love without worrying about the next week and whether or not you're going to make it. We've been conditioned to believe that if a plant is not growing as fast as we think it should, instead of giving it more light, we're gonna just add pesticides into its soil. And so on a human level that means we look for quick fixes, and we believe that the problem must be inside of us. And that looks like trying to fix our mindset. So you're in a toxic work situation.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:08:52]:
Your boss keeps piling work on top of your desk and when you tell them it's too much, they tell you to think positive. Or they quote Henry Ford who said: Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. And don't get me wrong, you know I love mindset work, but having a good mindset is not going to fix a broken system, and having a good mindset is not going to make your deepest truth disappear. I see this all the time. People trying to think more positively about their marriage or about their career as as a way to avoid the truth. Let's say you're pretending to be straight, when you've always actually been curious about exploring your sexuality. This you can't mindset your way out of your truth. Let's say you've been called to do a different kind of work, but you really wanna stick to your career because you've studied in that field for years years years, you can't just try to think positive thoughts about your job and hope that your profound calling is going to disappear.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:10:00]:
That's not how it works. Or you can try. You can white knuckle your way through and feel pretty miserable or like have backaches. Because, you know, if you can't bullshit yourself successfully, no worries. You can also numb your truth with TV, with drugs, alcohol, with processed foods. There are all kinds of ways. A personal example of mine is when I felt stuck in a relationship that was no longer right for me, I started having mood swings and looking into my hormones and thinking that maybe I had PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. I even mentioned it in one of my podcast episodes.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:10:44]:
But as soon as I left that relationship, all the symptoms disappeared. Same thing when I was dating someone who wasn't right for me more recently. I was half in half out, and I started believing that maybe I had avoidant attachment tendencies. So I I started reading a lot about that. But as soon as I stopped dating this person and met someone who is much better suited for who I am, all of these avoidant behaviors disappeared, and I started feeling super secure. To me, these are all examples of how instead of getting the chicken more light, we just try to find ways to stop them from pecking at each other and heal their wounds. We just don't go to the source. We don't figure out what they actually really need in order to feel good.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:42]:
Other examples that come to mind is I see a lot of people changing jobs without exploring the root cause of their dissatisfaction in the first one. People telling me that they have depression when actually it is clear to me that they're just not doing what lights them up. They're trying to fit themselves into a box that's not them. Now don't get me wrong, I know depression exists, but in so many cases I sense that it's not a problem of chemicals in the brain, but of wrong environment and wrong nourishment for your inner plants. In the book, the author makes a super thought provoking comparison. He writes quote ecologists and civil engineers are discovering that a disturbing byproduct of urban sprawl is how the relentless building of roads, parking lots, malls and condominiums is literally sealing off vast surfaces of the earth. Over time we are learning that this is preventing rain from seeping naturally into the earth, where it nourishes root systems and replenishes underground aquifers. The importance of this is that without water to feed root systems, the healthy magic of spring is stunted.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:57]:
When the rain cannot replenish the aquifers, then rivers and streams cease to be fed, which chokes the life cycle of fish, which interrupts the natural food chain. Then he writes, furthermore, when the rain cannot penetrate the concrete lining we are building, it has to go somewhere and so it floods. Given this, we are seeing an increase in resources being spent to control flooding, which only diverts the much needed water further away from the very land that needs it in the first place. In systems theory this form of thinking is known as doom loop. End quote. You don't wanna be doing flood control in your whole life. That is short term thinking and it's just going to lead to more and more problems down the road. I remember when I came home after 6 months on the Pacific Crest Trail, I went back to work as a freelance designer in an office in a design agency, and the woman there asked me how I was feeling.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:02]:
So I was super honest with her. I said it's hard. It's hard after being in the woods for 6 months to be in an office. And she replied something like, Self, that is life. Such is life. We have to work to pay our bills. I remember internally responding, no. No.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:18]:
I refuse. There must be another way. I do not want to do just flood control in my own life, only to fall into a cycle of burnout, get back into the woods, then go back to make money, burnout, get back into the woods, and on and on and on. You might feel the same way, going on vacation a few weeks a year, then getting back to work, feeling refreshed for a certain period, then feeling exhausted again, then going back on vacation. No. To me that's on that surface solutions and we've got to find the root cause. I believe the solution is to decide to go against the current of culture and create a life that's aligned with our nature. It requires courage because people will look at you weird.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:15:09]:
But to me it's worth all of the judgement and the weird looks. You're the one living your life. No one else is. But I can hear you say: that sounds good Marie, but how do we do that? How do we create a life that's aligned with our nature? Put it simply, by figuring out what your core values are, what makes you feel complete, then removing everything we possibly can that doesn't feed them and adding more of what does. It's challenging though, because a lot of the issues are rooted in our systems, and we cannot change the systems overnight. We kind of have to figure out the best way to live within them as we try to change them. It's quite the balancing act. And unfortunately, I have to acknowledge that the more privilege you have, the the easier that is to do.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:00]:
In the book, Mark Nepo writes, quote, of course we we cannot always find work that will keep us whole and pay the bills. Our only recourse then is to not define ourselves by what we have to do to eat. While preserving who we are we have to tend to our inner hunger any way we can. It is as imperative as feeding a starving child, for the soul can starve too. End quote. So your job might not be in alignment with your values. It might just be there as a way to pay your bills, but then with the rest of the time that you have, you get to be intentional about how to fulfill your core values. Personally, I was able to apply these 5 core values to all aspects of my life.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:50]:
I'm I'm feeling super grateful about that. It has meant becoming my own boss, so I could create my own schedule, sleep as much as I need, work when I feel like working, rest when I feel like resting, read when I feel like reading. I also love challenging myself setting either financial goals or learning new business skills that is all in alignment with my core values of growth and adventure, and creativity too. And then my values of depth and connection are fulfilled through the conversations I have with my clients and the impact in their life that I see in the day to day. They are also fulfilled outside of work because I've chosen 3 friends to invest in more than the others when I realized that deep connections made me feel so much better than trying to maintain 10 different friendships. Because I am a super social person. I had to figure out what makes me feel whole. These are just a few examples.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:57]:
Right? But my whole life is designed based on my five core values. Creativity, depth, connection, adventure, growth. And it wasn't always the case. It was an intentional journey to get here, a lot of tweaking, and I will need to keep tweaking as I evolve and life circumstances change. To me this is groundwork that's so important to do. You can do it on your own, but there are three reasons why I suggest doing this with me. It's easy to say this is what I value, but it's much harder to translate that in actual behaviors. There will be a lot of resistance.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:39]:
You'll need to let go of a lot of stuff and people that bring you comfort. You'll need to let go of the image that people might have of you, and that's going to require, 1, someone to call you on your bullshit, on the ways you're holding on to the old comforts and limiting your expansion. 2, someone to validate the journey because everyone will look at you like, what are you doing? You think you're better than us? Are you delusional? And that will make you doubt Self, that may that will make you want to quit and stay put and stay small. And 3, you will need someone to teach you tools to help you build resilience because you're when you decide to create a life in alignment with your values instead of in alignment with the culture you are going against the status quo. You're going against the current and willpower is not gonna be enough to keep you going, especially at the beginning. It's kind of like a a plane when it takes off, it needs to deploy a lot of energy in the beginning in order to be able to fly. Same thing, that's why I work with my clients intensively for 4 months. So then you don't need me anymore, you can fly on your own, but we've invested a lot of energy in the beginning to get you started.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:20:04]:
So if you wanna learn more, if you wanna meet me, see if we're a good fit, talk more specifically about your situation and how my framework can help you, then book a discovery call. Just go to selfgrowthnerds.com/audacity. Book a call. It's free. It's 45 minutes. We're gonna get to know each other. I'm gonna ask you a lot of questions. If I think I can help you, I will tell you more about how.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:20:29]:
If not, I will refer you to someone else and that's it. So you have nothing to lose. You'll have all the information and be able to decide if you want to move forward and work together. Now before I let you go, I want to leave you with a question of the week. Or I'm not sure it's a question, it's more of a piece of advice. When you feel empty and frustrated, and like you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, Ask yourself which one of your core values might be neglected, and what does it need? What would it look like to give it more light or to give it more water, to give it the environment that it needs to bloom. Okay. That's it for this week.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:21:17]:
Hope you do some journaling on this question, and I will talk to you soon. Bye. If you love what you're hearing on the Self-growth nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together on selfgrowthnerds.com or message me on Instagram at self Growth nerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago. So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait. Get in touch now, and I cannot wait to meet you.