It’s easy to say YES to some things in life, but what if it’s about your soul’s path? Is it easy for you to say yes to your calling? Or do you find yourself doubting every path you take?

My path to being an intuitive life coach was filled with self-doubt, “shook” dreams, and unexpected twists and turns. But, man, IT WAS WORTH ALL IT! I have learned to say yes to my calling by breaking from the usual path, the linear movement that we are all so familiar with. 

If you have been listening to this podcast, you know that my intention is to open your heart and mind and help you become the best version of you. And in this episode, I will share with you and focus on how you can build that confidence to finally say yes to your calling. To finally embrace your life’s purpose, even when there are voices and forces that seem to stop you from doing so. So, ladies and gents, lend me your ears and let’s start being bold in saying yes to our calling!

Heather: 

Today, I want to talk about finding the confidence to say yes to your soul’s calling and we’re going to go over a few tips to help you accomplish this. Four to be exact, and then I’m going to get super fricking vulnerable and read a letter that my beloved little brother Adam wrote me on the day that I graduated with my master’s degree, one of the most triumphant and victorious days of my life. I’m going to read you the letter he wrote me and I am going to do that because I think that it’s not just my letter. I think it’s something that applies to so many of us who face down the demons that tried to hold us back and find on the other side of that great battle of victory and a triumph, not just in worldly pursuits and having accomplished exterior goals, but in being able to look in the mirror and say, Oh my gosh, baby girl.

Heather: 

You did it. To have the inner victory of knowing that you bet on yourself and you won. Because really, that’s all that matters in this world is that we can learn to trust and love ourselves and listen to our hearts so that we can find the purpose and the meaning that we are called to in this lifetime. There are three fundamental guiding principles of my life, and I’ve talked about them in previous podcasts, but the first one is that we are more powerful than we can possibly imagine. And I really do believe that. I think that each of us have gifts and abilities that are latent within us, that we actually have no idea that we possess. And I think that as we learn to say yes to the reason why we’re here on this earth, we activate those powers. And the second principle, of course, I believe in, is that each of us are born.

Heather: 

That you are born with a divine purpose, that your life is meaningful, that you’re here to do something very, very, very important and very specific with your life. And as you learn to listen to your inner guidance, to your intuition, you gain the ability to find the courage and the bravery and the persistence and the determination and the grit that you need to finally give in and say yes to that which you know you are supposed to do so that you can go where you know you’re called to go. I’m going to tell you a little bit about naming. I’ve had many things, you know, in my life that I have, I’ve had to constantly fight. You know, the, the voice of, of self doubt. Uh, if, if I were to, if somebody said Heather, whatever your top three core wounds, self-doubt would certainly be one of them.

Heather: 

It’s actually, I would say at this point in my life, it is probably the one I’ve had the longest in my life that still causes me the most problems. I used to have a serious problem with loving myself, but now I don’t have a problem with that shit at all. Girl, I’m just pretty much having a serious love affair apparel and myself, I pretty much got that one nailed. But the self doubt thing, um, it is still to this day, that is something that’s very, very, very hard for me to, to feel really good about my strengths and my abilities. There’s always still this little voice in my head with every move I make, even in my business to this day telling me, Oh Heather, you’re never going to be able to do that. You’re never going to be able to do it. Or what if, what if?

Heather:  

What if? What if? Right. So I think the first, the first thing I want to say with respect to finding the confidence to say yes to your calling is this, the first thing is this. You already know what your calling is with all of the clients I work with, sometimes they come to and they go, Heather, I’m not sure. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do. I think I’m supposed to become a coach or I think I’m supposed to do this or that, but I’m not really sure. And I actually don’t believe that this is true. I think that we actually do know what it is that we are called to do with our lives. The issue isn’t not knowing the issue is not believing that we can actually pull it off. I remember the moment that I discovered that I wanted to become a mental health counselor.

Heather:  

I was maybe, I can’t remember, maybe 29 years old. I had read the book the Alchemist. It’s a book about a little boy who has a dream one night and he is told in his dream by a very wise man that he has to go on a journey to find his treasure. And as I read the book, as he went on, he had all of these trials and tribulations and when he finally gets to the end of the book, he’s digging and digging at the Egyptian pyramids to uh, to unbury his treasure. And in the book as I was reading, it was almost like I was him as he was digging through the sand. And when he got to his treasure, the moment that he realized what his treasure actually was, is when I found mine. And two things hit me. Then one is, Oh my gosh, I am supposed to be a healer.

Heather:  

And the second thing that hit me was, and I’ll never be able to make it happen because I’m not smart enough. I’m not good enough, and I’m never going to have that kind of opportunity. And so in that moment, what could have been a really beautiful moment of me understanding my purpose in this world, that jewelry was taken from me by my indulgence in my own self doubt and my own lack of believing that that desire that I had was possible for me. That it was actually for me, that I had that desire because I was so opposed to who manifested here in this world. And another thing with being able to claim our calling is that I think what we do is we sit around and we try to make the fear go away, right? And that is absolutely never going to work. Um, when I opened up my coaching practice, so when I went back to school, right?

Heather:  

I, I, I was 29 when that happened. I didn’t go back to school until I was 32. I was terrified. I remember my first day of undergraduate school, um, I had a backpack on fricking like 32 33 years old, rolling up to campus with a backpack on and I just felt so stupid. I felt like a kindergartener. Right? Like what are you doing Heather? You’re such a loser. Like what? You’re 33 and you’re going back to school. I mean, of course I look back on this now and I’m like, no man, I was a badass. That’s so cool that I, I knew what I want to do, that I had the nerve and the humility to, to do that. But at the time, of course I was terrified and I felt stupid, but yet I said yes. I said yes to what I knew I wanted to do.

Heather:  

I was willing to take that to, to walk that hard road despite the fact that I had fear. So I think that’s the second thing is that we actually don’t have to do anything with the fear that we feel. We just need to be okay with being scared and doing it anyway. We just need to be okay with like, okay, so I’m terrified. Okay. Can I, can I get over the fact that I’m terrified right now? I don’t ha, I don’t have to be geeked out about the fact that I’m scared and when we approach our fear that way, it actually really takes the sting out of it. It goes from this big bad, scary thing to something that’s almost, I mean, to be honest, quite boring. When we really start to look at what we’re afraid of, um, through the lens of like, ah, it’s okay, I’m scared.

Heather:  

Uh, that little monster shrinks down really, really quickly and to something that is almost laughable, you know? So yeah. When I went back to school, I got and I got my undergraduate degree, I have to say that like top five moments in my life of being happy. The day that I got my undergrad in psychology. Truly, it’s probably the second happiest day of my life. The first happiest was the day I became a mother. The second is college and the third is when I married Brandon. Just kidding Brandon second. Okay. Okay. They college degrees. Third, I have to say that in Casey’s lesson. So, so yeah, so that, that day was incredible. It was absolutely, um, one of the most amazing days of my life because I proved to myself that my yes was more powerful than my no and that all of those fears that it’s okay that I feel them and it’s okay to move forward anyway.

Heather:  

And so, but yet the strange thing this, and this is, this is really kind of one of the salient points here of this podcast that I’m, I’m trying to make in this episode is that even when I was moving through that to get that degree, I still felt scared. I still felt inadequate. The voice was still there, you know, telling me, Oh my God, you know, are you really going to be able to make it to the end? And of course I knew that I wanted to continue on to go to graduate school cause you know, I wanted to get a master’s, you have to get a masters actually to be a mental health counselor. And I didn’t know how I was going to be able to get in. I had no clue how all of that was going to turn out. I just knew that I had to try.

Heather:  

I had to give it a shot, so I did. I graduated. I continued on, and you know what happened? I didn’t get into graduate school. That was 2013 when I graduated with my undergrad and I applied and I didn’t even get an interview and I was absolutely positively devastated. I thought, here’s my soul’s purpose. I’ve said yes to it. I believe that I could. I did. I had the nerve to bet that I was more powerful than I thought I was. I had the nerve to bet on my sole purpose. You’re sitting here telling me I, and I don’t get in what I was. I had never been so heartbroken or disillusioned in my entire life, but just like it is with most things in this world, our conscious minds are simply not smart enough to understand the true path that we must walk to our destiny.

Heather:  

I was thinking this linear model, right? Undergrad grad Tena year finished. That’s how I thought it should go. But spirit had different plans for me. And so I knew in that moment that I had a decision to make, I, I could say, okay, fine, I’ll go do something else. I’ll go into sales, I’ll go into marketing or I could stick my finger in the air and true to my Southern roots, tell everybody to fuck off and continue on. Um, and the helping profession in whatever Avenue I could muster. And as luck would have it, I had a mentor in, in town here where I live in Jacksonville. Say to me, Heather, you should just start a coaching practice. And she had actually said this to me while I was applying to graduate school. So I was, I was thinking, Oh yeah, that’d be cool. I can earn some, you know, aside money on the side while I’m, I’m, uh, going through my graduate school training.

Heather:  

And so I had already begun that process. And so what I said to myself was, man, I’m just going to become a life coach. That’s what I’m going to do because I’m not going to let this world tell me no, I am not going to give up on what I know is a yes and I, I know it’s a yes. And despite how this looks, I’m going to believe that the universe is doing this benevolently and I don’t care how long it takes and I don’t care how hard it is, and I don’t care how many times I get knocked down. I’m going to get back up and I’m never going to give up. I’m going to be like the frickin Terminator on this thing. Okay. It’s like I am so recalling or like I, I’m, I’m here for it. I’m here for you, baby.

Heather: 

Got this. So I started my coaching practice and within, within eight months, eight months, I was making as much money as my mentor. And again, I thought, Oh wow, cool. This was the path, right? I was just supposed to be a coach, you know, even though it really was devastating that I, that I wouldn’t be able to continue on with my degree because I’m a total nerd and I love education. I see education as the sort of the pathway of, um, at least for me in my life. Um, it’s sort of my pathway into expressing, you know, the fullness of who I really feel that I am. So I went on with my coaching practice, it was great. A few months in, I started, uh, using my intuition and sessions and I’m finding incredible results with that. And, and then, you know, a few years later began coaching other and teaching other coaches how to do so as well.

Heather: 

And lo and behold, this whole intuitive coaching thing, uh, was born out of, out of the, of the not getting into graduate school. And so that became pretty clear to me. I thought, well, you know, had I gone into the, to the old system, I never would have been able to discover this whole intuition thing, which is of course, the fuller expression of my purpose. Right? And so that brings me to my, kind of, my third tip here with, with having the confidence to say yes to your calling. It’s, you have to understand that if you’ll be will, if you’re willing to say yes to the whisper, the little whisk, the little whisper in your heart that’s telling you to do it. If you’re willing to say yes, please understand that you are going to find and receive help in very, very, very unexpected places and that you aren’t going to always know which road you’re supposed to be going down.

Heather:  

Things are always going to be different than what your plan is because when you’re on your soul’s path, it never, ever looks like what you think it’s going to look like because your soul’s path by definition is something beyond your own comprehension. It’s your soul’s destiny is something you’re supposed to discover. It’s not something you’re supposed to know. So understand that that help is going to come to you and those knowings will come to you, but you have to say us first. You have to jump first. You can’t know at first, then jump. You have to jump and then know it. So I did that with getting my degree, my first degree. I did that and starting my coaching practice. And then about three years in being, uh, about three years after starting my coaching practice, that little voice inside me said, Heather, it’s time to go back to school.

Heather:  

And I thought, this is insane. I already am doing this work, man. I’ve been in the chair, I know how to do this stuff. Like why, why would I go to school? That’s a pain in the ass. I mean, of course I still had the dream in my heart, um, that I wanted to go to school, but I just didn’t know how I’d be able to pull it off. I mean, I’m a mom. I had a full time coaching practice. I’m married, I have like a life that I was wearing every conceivable hat a modern woman could wear. How am I possibly going to have time to go to graduate school? But yet I said yes to that little voice in my heart telling me to go. And again, still all the doubt was there. All that fear was there and I chose to listen to the yes.

Heather: (15:48)

And so that brings me to the fourth tip and then I’m going to read the letter because I think this letter, what my little brother wrote to me is what I want to say to you. And my little brother is a writer, so he is far better at expressing himself then I will ever be. So I’m going to borrow his words and give them to you. And so the fourth tip is really to have the courage to honor the version of you that’s waiting to be born more than your fear wants you to remain safe. And in the known you will be guided into expressing that version of yourself that you are called to become so that you can then do what it is you’re born to do. After listening to that little voice and going back to graduate school to get my master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling, which was the fourth happiest day of my life when I got my degree, my little brother Adam wrote me this letter and I’m going to read it to you now.

Heather:  

Dear Heather. So you went and did it. Not surprised, really. I don’t think any of us are, but I do seem to remember an evening on the phone, you and I talking about the sheds or shut-ins, the pros and cons of this next step for you. I suspect you had already had your mind made up at the time. You just needed another set of eyes on the matter to help you see the field more clearly. You are usually so confident and determined, so I admit it was strange to hear caution in your voice. I suppose we could take that as evidence of a practical mind, keen on the magnitude of such a venture along with an uncertain heart, weary of the toll physically, mentally and emotionally. But I also synced within you some lingering vestige of an insecurity, a shady, primeval voice asking frankly if you’ve actually got what it takes best not to shoulder that burden, right?

Heather:  

Better not test fate. It’s good to be satisfied and settle with what you have and as I’ve observed you, Heather, I’ve seen enough to know that you are incapable of indulging in that frailty and remain happy. Something in your soul. I think something that compels you through the thorns and briers that turn so many away just to get at that thing, that glimmer of something greater in your life moving forward. I imagine you’ll hear that voice again, telling you to hold back, to wait to keep safe. It’ll never be through with you, Heather. Never, but when it comes to you again, I ask you to do something for me and for all of us who have watched you rise. Remember today, remember this victory. Remember this feeling, the sensation of a freshly trodden path beneath victorious steady feet. You’ve heard it said, don’t rest on your laurels.

Heather:  

Well, I say, go ahead. You’ve earned this, but as you do, let them along with all of your crushed obstacles be the new foundation from which you build. Your time has come, and as far as prudent caution goes, the time for that is over. To be bold out there, sis, the world is open and waiting for your next move. I think you’ll find it guiding you more than you realize and any one moment leading you to parts you had not expected and to people you may have never known, and they’ll need you to be a voice in a dark world, a steady hand, to spur them out of learned despair. What was once your passion is now your responsibility and I know that you will bear it well. We are all so proud of you, Heather. Whatever force or energy or gods that may bind us, I wish all of that strength on you. I love you, sissy. Adam. And so I’ll say the same to you. Be bold out there, sis. The world is waiting for your next move. All you have to do is say yes.