As a mentor, I often find myself working on the same bottom line with clients — are you letting your heart sing? This is a powerfully loaded question that deserves some unpacking here.

First, let’s look at what it means to let your heart sing. Think of a time or times when you have been in your glory. It could have been a particular meeting, job, relationship, a song you sang, a book you wrote, or just a humble yet essential moment in your daily life. These moments typically engage a person in the flow of creatively expressing something they are deeply passionate about. It’s as though your body, heart, mind, and soul are in a personal harmonic convergence and you can feel your heart smiling. There is a fulfillment — a sating of a piercing hunger that has been building in your soul.

I’ve come to recognize that my heart sings best when I am experiencing a loving oneness with another — whether someone close to me, a client, or a total stranger. For example, I can be walking down the street and have my eyes meet deeply with the eyes of a stranger for the briefest of moments and zoom past all the things that normally prevent such an essential connection from occurring. My heart also sings when I am effectively being of service and when I am able to communicate well. What about you? What makes your heart sing?

Once you have identified one or several strong examples of you at your best, ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What did it feel like in your heart? Soul? Mind? Body?

• How did you know you were in your zone?

• What were the characteristics of the experience? For example, did certain people, circumstances, forms of expression, or heightened experiences facilitate your reaching the point where your heart was singing?

• What specifically do you need to be, do, or have to make your heart sing?

Notice the question isn’t is your heart singing? It’s are you letting your heart sing? In this crazy world we live in, very few hearts simply sing anymore. It’s not that it is not important, but rather that we are too busy giving our attention to other matters. We need to make our lives conducive to allowing our song to emerge — even within the simple moments of our everyday lives. So, if your heart rarely or never sings, here are some things you might want to do:

• • Listen deeply to yourself: When our lives are filled with stress and more activities than time, our focus tends to be outward rather than inward. We need to deeply immerse ourselves in quiet contemplation and focus on the urges of our heart and soul. In the absence of such inner grounding, we are likely to live our lives hoping that this person or that job will somehow bring us greater happiness. In other words, we give over the power to yield our happiness to others and we become the recipients of whatever they happen to give to us. This kind of passive living rarely makes our heart sing. It is far more likely to get us to focus on manipulating this other person or situation to yield that nebulous and ill-defined happiness we seek. Our heart’s song comes from a deeper place within us that we must visit and become familiar with to create the pathway for its expression.

• • Be mindful of living from the inside out: In the business of our lives, it is very easy to lose track of our essential self — the part that imagines and dreams about creating, promoting, and allowing our inner yearnings to manifest in our lives. Too often, we find ourselves at the end of our lives with a voluminous bucket list of unfulfilled dreams and desires. If something deep within us keeps seeking our attention and we keep ignoring it, it eventually gets drowned out by the drumbeat of daily life. Then in the quieter days of our life’s end, we have too many regrets. So, take time to listen deeply and to create an energy flow that moves from deep within you outward into expression in your life. This could be as simple as wanting a particular color in your environment or taking the time to call an old friend. We must not only listen to our inner yearnings, we must honor them through action so we can bring them to fulfillment.

• • Dare to sing: Letting your heart sing means making that a priority. It means going for “it” — daring to give expression to your heart’s desire and best vision of what your life could be. Get in the practice of doing at least one thing each day that evokes your soul’s expression. Make that important enough to make it a habit.

• • Set clear intentions: Seeking a vague sense of being happier yields only disappointment with the present. If you want to create more health, wealth, happiness, and inner fulfillment, then you have to be specific with yourself about what exactly you need to do differently to move in the right direction to fulfill your dreams. This year, for example, I have set four very specific intentions for what I want to bring forward in my life. Every day, I affirm those intentions morning and night and challenge myself to spend as much of my time as possible bringing those intentions into reality. If you want your heart to sing, be very clear with yourself about what that involves and don’t try to do it all at once. Set manageable, doable intentions that affirm your willingness to do what it takes to bring them forward in your life.

• • Focus your attention on your intentions: You must breathe life into your intentions through action every day. Don’t wait for someone else to magically appear who will recognize what brings out the best in you and allows your heart to sing. Take ownership of your own life — get in the driver’s seat and go for it!

There is only one you. So, please give voice to your most beautiful inner song and share it with the rest of us.

Some of the greatest life wisdom is articulated by the dying.  In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware shares what she has learned about the dying by serving as a caregiver to many.  She notes, “of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all.  It was also the one that caused the most frustration, as the client’s realization came too late.”

So, what does it mean to be true to yourself?  A lot of people throw around the term ‘authenticity’ to describe it.  On some level this term suggests that there is a truth that resides within each of us that is unique to our specific being.  It also implies that there is an opportunity to somehow maximize the experience of living our life and meeting our death that involves being attuned to that truth and living a life that is a reflection of that truth.  But, how do we do this?  How is that different from simply living and doing the best we can?  What does it look like?  What does it feel like?

In the process of living, we come to know things about ourselves – experiences we love and those that leave us unengaged.  We discover certain talents, abilities, and inclinations within us.  My favorite food group will always be chocolate, for example, that’s simply not negotiable.  Each of us will have different preferences from the same menu in a restaurant – or the de jour offerings of a given day.  As time goes by, if we pay attention – if we listen to that pure, inner voice that simply says an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ or an emphatic ‘no!’ – we come to learn that that voice seems to have our best interest in mind.  It is not the voice of our ego preferences or greed.  It comes from a far deeper place than that – I sense mine in the area of my solar plexis.

The real challenge is that there are other voices that we hear too and our inner voice of truth often gets lost in the shuffle.  Our insecurities and fears speak to us.  Our wants and desires demand our attention.  Outer influences, norms, and authorities seek our allegiance as well.  What do you do when your parents or teachers – the gods of your youth – are steering you in a direction that doesn’t match your fragile and emerging sense of self?  When outer authorities or social norms insist you do or be something that is in conflict with your sense of who you are, what do you do?  Do you trust the outer authorities, perhaps out of fear of the consequences of not doing so, or do you somehow hold to your inner truth, in spite of the judgment, rejection, and ridicule that might bring upon you?  I know a man who paid a heavy price for following his passion to become a concert pianist when his father insisted he stay in Idaho to tend the family potato farm.  What must it be like for a child who knows he or she is gay to survive and find a path through a family or world that will judge and reject them?  What do you do when you know that how and what you are is likely to never be favored or acceptable to your family or the society you live in – even though you are a good person?

It’s ironic that it’s just not that easy to simply be yourself.  But, maybe therein lies the secret to living and dying well.  The real prize in life is to come to know your very own truth and to learn to be obedient to that truth in a way that does not harm others.  They may not like it, but if we are lucky, we teach them how to love us in spite of our differences.  We teach them to respect our ways of being and to let us be.  You have to be willing to claim the privilege of being yourself in a social context.  It’s not an easy path and typically takes dedication, devotion, endurance, and sometimes the willingness to proceed without the support and understanding of those we love.  It requires listening to inner truth and figuring out how to honor it.  It takes time to develop this inner attunement.  But the prize is a peacefulness, an experience of being who you are rather than resenting yourself and others for what you didn’t get to do or be or have that was essential to you.  To know that you are living your life with obedience to what you know to be your truth may be as good as life gets – especially when you find a community of support of others who are walking to the beat of their own drums as well.

Take a look at your life and ask yourself these questions:

• If I were to die tomorrow, would I have any regrets?  If so, explore what you could do right now in your life to prevent yourself from reaching the end of your life with those regrets.
• Is there anyone in your life with whom you are not at peace?  If so, what are you willing to do about that either within yourself or in relationship to that person?
• Are you at peace with yourself?  If not, what changes could you make to bring yourself to a state of inner peace?

As long as we live, it is never too late to be ourselves and to make peace with our choices and the people in our life (past or present).  So, if you want to live and die really well, befriend, honor, and love yourself madly and deeply.

One of the fundamental themes I weave into my work with coaching clients has to do with fully embracing and focusing upon what hurts in them and how they have learned to deal with or avoid their suffering. This is usually the antithesis of where they want to look. Usually people perceive the source of their suffering to be ‘out there’ in the circumstances and relationships of their lives. Most get lost in their stories about what is happening to them out in the world and they want to find a strategic solution to achieve their desired success. Many operate under the assumption that if they change the outside, the pain they feel inside will go away. This is true when you have a nail in your shoe, but when your pain is emotionally driven, external changes never yield permanent results.

Those seeking external solutions are typically residing in what I call “the land of if only’s.” It sounds like this: “if only so and so would change in the way I think they should, then my suffering would be relieved.” Or, “if only I could lose twenty pounds, then . . .” Or, “when such and such happens, then I will be really happy.” These are all forms of emotional hunger and wishful thinking.

There are several key problems with this approach:

1. The imagined happiness, if achieved at all, will be temporary at best and the hunger will return.

2. Attempting to sate emotional hunger displaces our focus away from the present into an imagined future that we then attempt to create.

3. We fail to examine the real source of our hunger, thereby forfeiting the possibility and opportunity of knowing what is really going on within us.

Emotional hunger runs far deeper than we imagine. For many, it expresses in addictive behaviors. As in the examples above, our hunger takes the form of present yearnings and cravings for something that we imagine will make us feel fundamentally better than we do. The fact of the matter is, the satisfaction of our hunger does not lie outside ourselves, but inside in the form of unresolved wounds from the past coupled with our early reflexive responses to pain and suffering that have now become autopilot reactions.

Consider the fact that when we are infants, in the absence of language, we are socialized to communicate our perceived needs by crying out to let our caregivers know what’s going on with us – “I’m hungry.” “I need to be touched and comforted.” “My diaper is dirty.” It’s a very effective way to get our needs met. However, if in adulthood we continue to empower others to determine our sense of well-being, we will live as victims rather than as authentic, self-empowered creators and participants in our own lives.

Most of us have been emotionally wounded as a child – often without anyone realizing it. If we have not healed that wound, we develop emotional baggage and adaptive behaviors that unconsciously seek to get the outside world to give us what we didn’t get emotionally as children. The impulse is to heal, but we go about it the wrong way. If we continue to cry out and make our problems other people’s problems and/or to see ourselves as powerless victims of circumstances or the behavior of others, we never learn how to handle our emotional challenges in a healthy way.

If you are in a persistent state of emotional hunger or dissatisfaction, you may need professional help in getting to the bottom of your own particular pattern, but personal observation can also yield amazing results. If you really want to sate your emotional hunger, you need to understand what beliefs are driving your experiences. Here is a process that should help you get to the bottom of it:

1. Pay attention to your own self-talk. If you repeatedly hear yourself saying things like the ‘if only’s’ listed above or some other statement like ‘I never . . . ‘ or ‘I always . . . ‘ recognize that every time you reach that conclusion you are claiming to believe that to be the truth. For example, if you have a belief that you never get what you want – guess what! You will make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2. Take ownership of the fact that you hold such a belief. Write it down and make a conscious choice to change your belief.

3. Pay attention to the ways that you repeatedly affirm your belief by creating, promoting, and allowing experiences that are consistent with that belief. Write down every example you see with enthusiasm and neutrality and never with self-judgment. Remember you are in the process of healing this pattern instead of remaining an unconscious victim of it.

4. Play detective gathering evidence of how and why you make the choices you make that keep bringing you what you do not want.

5. Pay attention to and document how it feels inside of you (physically, emotionally, mentally, etc.) when you do not get what you want.

6. Challenge your belief. Pose ‘what if’ questions to yourself of what might be so if you let go of your limiting belief. For example, if you hold the belief that no one will ever love you, be creative in breaking down that belief. Use affirmations that claim your worthiness – do them in front of the mirror with great enthusiasm – “I am lovable!” Play the ‘act as if’ game of behaving as if you are lovable, smile at total strangers and start letting other people in – open up to the possibility of being loved. Love yourself!

Remember that your beliefs are powerful self-fulfilling prophecies. The bottom line of this is that if you change your beliefs, you will change your experiences. You are not a victim unless you choose to be. Health and well-being in adulthood is not achieved through the accumulation of external successes, but rather through cleaning out your internal emotional closets.