I haven’t formally launched my book yet, because there are still a lot of details to sort out with online sales and systems, but I’ve already sold a bunch of copies just to friends who’ve been watching for it, just through word of mouth.

I confess that I waited anxiously for feedback from people to begin to come in. (Self-doubt is such a human thing, isn’t it? And even though I’ve been using these exercises for years, and know their power, this is the first time I’ve created them as a do-it-yourself system.)

The first person who bought my book was an online-turned-real-world friend of mine. She’d had the book for more than a week and I hadn’t heard back from her, and I was hoping she’d gotten started. Then one day I got an email saying she had finally found time to get going on the first chapters, and she was learning some things about herself and her life that didn’t feel so great.

I know that feeling. It’s not unusual when you shine the light on your inner workings, of course, because we tend to ignore some of the realities of our lives and our experiences. And sometimes we hold value judgments about how we “should” be or what kinds of things we’re “supposed” to be doing, and when we take a hard look in the mirror, and see how things really are, and it doesn’t align with those ideas of “should” or “supposed to”, we don’t like it because it feels like something is wrong.

I emailed her back encouraging her to stick with it, to look for the patterns and at what was behind the things she was finding, and not to judge herself too harshly. She soon reported back that once she faced and moved through the stuff she thought was bad news, t wasn’t so bad at all.

In face, she discovered a reason why she’s had some jobs in the past that appeared to be very similar in content, but in reality, she hated one and loved the other… what she learned about herself in that exercise shed light on a secret ingredient to loving her job that she’d never known before.

And now she can use that in making choices about jobs, and in making choices about everything in her life.

My exercises are shortcuts to knowing yourself, what makes you tick and what you have to offer. But even shortcuts can have a few potholes or unexpected turns… what’s important is that you know you’re going toward a destination that is worth more than just about anything… the destination of a life you love. A little thought that lets you in on the secret ingredients for the life of your dreams? What could be better than that?