Alaina Love is a healer.
Her discipline is not health care, though she was once a medical school student. Her expertise lies in helping others heal by discovering meaning through their purpose. In her new book, Permission to Be You: Discover Your Purpose and Passions to Bring Your Best Self to Everything—and Everyone, Love reveals her journey to healing and purpose, and in the process, provides readers with a guide to their own journey.
For Love, purpose is the starting point, but it only works when you add passion — what you like and want to do. When purpose and passion are aligned, individuals gain a deeper understanding of who they are and their place in the larger world.
Passion is rooted in your value system. As Love writes, “In essence, your values define how you will show up in times of ease and times of challenge, allowing you to apply your passions to navigate situations as your best self.”
Love bases her book on decades of research she has conducted into these topics. One result is the Passion Profiler, an assessment that individuals and companies use in professional development efforts. The book also integrates key attributes and definitions of personality styles (archetypes).
Career choices
While much of the book focuses on self-development, it also contains key insights into defining one’s career. Love posits the “evolutionary mindset.” “Careers are not fixed pathways; they are transformative experiences. As you develop deeper self-knowledge, grow incapabilities and progress through different roles, your career will evolve as your passion mastery grows, and how you manage all this will evolve with you.”
In other words, as you grow and develop individually and professionally, you may want to pursue new opportunities as well as new careers. To this end, this chapter provides self-assessments and questions to help individuals identify their personal drivers and apply them accordingly.
Giving yourself permission
The book also contains a handbook-like section that distills the essence of Love’s teachings. Called “Ten Permissions to Give Yourself,” it focuses on life’s challenges and the shortcomings that we face in our lives. The first is “Permission to Receive Love,” followed by “Permission to Fail.” These two obstacles address the notion that we are not worthy and, therefore, unable to accomplish our goals. Nonsense, argues Love. Each of us has the capacity to give as well as to receive. By identifying such negative thoughts, Love gives us the permission we need to give ourselves.
Love concludes her book with this exhortation: “Wrest the megaphone of opinions and perspectives from the hands of people who are not living your life, and begin listening to your intuition. You can be confident that it will guide you correctly. Yes, you are where you’ve come from. But you can also decide to live the life you want to create. Give yourself permission to start now.”
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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