Have you heard of or seen a snake ‘moulting’? Moulting is a process whereby the snake sheds its skin(literally!!) and grows new skin. Moulting is a process that many animals go through at various stages in their lifecycle or at different times of the year. Some other examples of moulting are: cats moulting their fur around spring-summer to shed the extra fur they put on during winter, chickens moult feathers, hermit crabs moult their exoskeleton and consume it(eeks!!) and reptiles and lizards moult their skin. If you can sit through it, watch some videos of moulting on youtube. I personally cannot sit through a video like that!(yes, I am baby faced)
So why do snakes moult? They moult because the skin of a snake does not grow with age unlike that of human skin. And in order to survive, snakes have to go through this process. For a brief time, the snake lies exposed and vulnerable.
Luckily, WE do not have to shed our physical skin! But there are times in our lives when we DO need to shed the ‘skin’ that we have donned for ourselves. We get so comfortable in our own skin even when it gets uncomfortable. Your job, your relation, your body, your beliefs, your commitments, your wants, your goals, your vision, your desires, your problems all change through your life. In order to grow and develop and reach those goals and visions and those desires and become the ‘person’ we want to, we need to ‘moult’ out of our current mindsets.
We’ve all heard stories about people ‘finding‘ themselves. Stories such as a successful Wall Street professional quit his job and opened a yoga studio or somebody moved to a third world country to help underprivileged people or ABC dedicates his life to helping the whales that shore up. The stories are limitless and go on and on. You will find stories of reinvention all around you. Magazines national and local feature them, motivational and public speakers have stories galore about reinvention and authors write tons of articles and stories. Our forefathers and our history books abound in such stories as well.
There comes a time in most of our lives when we feel the need to shed our current skin and grow a new skin. We feel out of sync with the person we have become or the identity we have donned at some point and begin to search for our true selves, the self that give us inner peace, and give us a renewed sense of energy and purpose and a new vigor with which to approach our lives. Brendon Burchard refers to it as moving from a Comfortable life to a Charged Life, a life where you are in the ‘FLoW‘ and completely connected and where every cell of your body is alive with a reason to live and revels in living each moment of every day. Some of us may arrive at this point sooner than later in our lives. It starts with a feeling of restlessness within, feeling unsure of why they seem to have everything that others want, but they are not personally satisfied. Feeling of searching for something, searching for themselves and searching for a deeper meaning to life and a strong urge to make a difference.
The sole reason why most of us undertake this journey is to find FULFILLMENT in life. We often go through days and years of living a life of discontentment and lacking purpose and trying to fathom the list of big WHY’s – why was I put on this earth, what difference am I supposed to make, what is the unique DNA in me that makes me special and how can I use that special gift of mine to leave an indelible impact on the world…the questions are never-ending. The key to understanding and answering all these questions and to finding the answers to these questions is to first understand what is prompting this shift in mindset. One view point is from the age old Maslow’s Heirarchy theory – When a human being has the basic human needs such as food, shelter and water met, they begin to move up Maslow’s Heirarchy Pyramid. The psychological needs and self-fulfillment needs begin to overlap and the restlessness begins. The need to achieve more at work and more in relationships soon surfaces and once a certain level of mastery is achieved over those needs, the need to find that inner fulfillment becomes strong and the fervor for the search intensifies.
My own restlessness started a few years back. I was going through these intense feelings of what is my purpose in life. There has got to be more to my life than a regular 9 to 5 job, taking care of the household and kids and the daily activities. Google was my first resource that I resorted to. The numerous Why & How questions I had led me down various resources and paths. I immersed in reading self-help books, listening to audios and getting on endless ezines and newsletter lists. That slowly led to various gurus and philosophers and thought leaders who have treaded down the same path and found light at the end of the tunnel. And I finally worked with a few coaches to help me on my journey. I felt the deep need to find the one thing that I was born to do. That was what had triggered me down this path in the first place, the hunger to find more meaning in my life. The constant feeling of my life had more purpose than my routine life kept nagging at me. The urge to make an impact was becoming stronger and stronger and I couldn’t put a finger on what I should do. With the help of several coaches, I figured out that my purpose or the thing that lights me up and keep me moving forward with unbounded enthusiasm was to help high achieving people find fulfillment in their own lives. What had been missing in my life was the positive impact I could have on others, seeing them come to awareness, seeing them inspired to do things they are passionate about. And for me to be the change agent responsible for those actions. I felt a renewed sense of purpose and zest for life that was missing. That inner spark that had died down was reignited and I felt ‘stoked’. Thus began my career as a coach a few years ago.
The reason I share this story is because each of us have to go this process at some point in our lives and course correct our lives to fall into the path that gives us the inner fulfillment we are constantly seeking. The perennial search for the next best gadget or home or car or other forms of outward successes do not fulfill us and it is that inner success and peace and FULFILLMENT that finally makes a difference in our lives.
Have you experienced that kind of restlessness or have you moulted? Would love to hear.
