Follow Your Wonderlust
How do you push yourself beyond your comfort zone? How do you inspire change within yourself when the idea of change can be so intimidating? How do you fuel yourself with enough longing to overcome self-doubts, limiting beliefs and settling for the status quo? How do you give yourself an opportunity to discover more of who you are even if you’re pretty happy with who you are now?
Wonderlust.
Unlike the seemingly similar and widely understood wanderlust–a strong desire to travel the outside world–wonderlust is what inspires continual movement and exploration of what’s inside us. With wonderlust, we can find our way to an entirely new life just by exploring the inner workings of ourselves.
True evolution as people comes when we journey within.
Wonderlust is the invisible force that pushed me out of complacency in July 2018. It’s the constant insistence I’ve felt inside me since then to keep searching for answers to questions before I even know what I’m asking. It’s the fuel that allows me to overcome my self-limiting beliefs and chase whatever may lie beyond my comfort zone, because wonderlust favors the discomfort of change over the regret of never asking, “What if....” Wonderlust is a commitment to curiosity so strong that we overcome the fear of what we might discover under the hidden layers of our identity. With wonderlust, a single realization doesn’t render us satisfied.
Wonderlust fuels a journey.
That’s why wonderlust is the first principle in my strategy for personal expansion.
Wonderlust was a constant ringing in my ear, forcing me to stay present with myself, alert and aware, observing my thoughts, feelings and behaviors, forcing me to wonder, “Why do I do this… Why do you I feel this way when… I wonder if I were to… I wonder who I’m meant to be…” That curiosity opened me up to seeing parts of myself I had ignored for nearly 40 years.
This is the same fuel that drives a brand’s discovery process, and for good reason. To arrive at a truly authentic understanding and articulation of a brand’s purpose in the world, you have to get curious about every potential thread that weaves a narrative that is true to who the brand is, resonant with their people–internal and external–and differentiated.
Just like my own transformation journey, when I’m helping a business articulate a brand narrative that will guide them to their next level of growth, I gather tons of material about the business and set about exploring the mass of information looking for patterns. As I dig deeper and deeper into their details, with every revelation and data point, I ask, Why? I speak with their teams to understand their feelings and challenges. I uncover their aspirations for the future. Where do they want to take their business? …Why? As I move along, I’m looking for unifying threads–the leading themes that many different points are connected to. These are the through lines in their story.
Wonderlust propels you to follow the threads of self-discovery through an examination of what you’re made of. Your strengths and limitations. The patterns you’ve been living in. How you relate to others and the world around you. Exploring the swirl of information with openness and curiosity–with wonder–is how we allow ourselves, people and brands alike, to grow beyond where we’ve been.
To find these threads and themes in your own life–to see the patterns you need to learn from, move on from or rewrite–you have to remain open. You have to want to see the patterns and be looking for them. The signs and revelations are all around us, but they are hiding in plain sight. Clearly seeing who we are and understanding the changes we need to make to evolve into who we’re meant to be requires a commitment to seeing that is so strong, we persevere to look beyond what’s visible and see what’s possible.
A sense of wonder allows us to think of what lies beyond the boundaries of the current beliefs, thoughts and behaviors we’ve been operating in. And when we evolve our thinking to move beyond our current state–recalibrate to new beliefs, thoughts and feelings–we show up in the world in an entirely new way, even if we’re physically in the same place we’d been in all along.
Wonderlust isn’t just the fuel of discovery–it’s the fuel for expansion.
