What Lights You Up Doesn’t Have to Make Sense For It To Have Impact
There is probably a dream or an idea that, when you think about it, it feels exciting, it lights you up. And there is a very good chance you have already talked yourself out of it.
Maybe it’s an idea for a business or a dream to pursue a new hobby or a travel destination. Maybe it’s an idea to start a totally unique type of dental practice or maybe it’s an idea to do stand up comedy. But as soon as the excitement sets in your very logical mind interrupts and poops on the party. “It doesn’t make sense.”, “It’s impossible”, “It will never work”, “It won’t lead anywhere”.
You tell yourself it’s selfish or indulgent. Impractical. Maybe even “ridiculous”.
And because you are a capable, high-achieving woman who has spent most of her adult life being “the responsible one”, you have become very good at asking one particular question:
What is the point?
What will this produce? Where will it lead? Is this really a good use of my time?
We have been taught to trust the things that make “sense”.
The problem with “making sense” is that it relies only on the past. You can only imagine what your mind has experienced or read about or heard someone else do. More importantly, your mind colors that experience with danger signs trying to keep you safe. Your mind is not there to bring you excitement or intrigue, the thoughts in your head have one job: to keep you safe. And that often means, to keep you small. To keep things predictable.
The truth is that what will bring you even more success and impact, and most certainly, happiness, lives in the UNKNOWN.
It lives in the FEELING of what LIGHTS YOU UP.
Because when you feel good, you do good. (I know you’ve heard that somewhere before ;))
And sometimes the things that make the least sense are trying to lead you somewhere you could never have planned.
She kept seeing a house
One of my clients was doing a visualization exercise inside my Radical Happiness program. (pause here to explain: this is a program I offer exclusively for women dentists who are feeling overwhelmed, disillusioned, frustrated, and wanting more sovereignty in their lives). As an exercise in the program we use visualization to get really clear on the life you actually want to experience, not simply what you want to accomplish, but how you want your life to FEEL. We need a directional compass because if you don’t know where you’re going you could end up anywhere!
For some women, this visualization exercise is extremely difficult.
And that is no surprise.
You know you don’t want stress or financial pressure. You know you don’t want to dread going into the practice. You know you don’t want to feel disconnected from your partner or your children or yourself. But what do you actually WANT?!?!
As a brilliant, capable, deeply caring woman, who have probably spent decades taking care of everyone else’s needs and desires that you have forgotten how to hear your own.
You knew what you wanted when you were 19. You knew desire and excitement and the meaning of having a dream… But after years of asking what your patients need, what your employees need, what your children need, what your spouse needs, you become practiced at ignoring a much simpler question:
What do I want?
My client was struggling with this. She couldn’t find the image of the future she wanted. When, as I encouraged her, she leaned into the FEELING of she wanted to feel, she kept seeing something else. Her childhood home.
She didn’t live there anymore. Her family didn’t own it. Nobody she knew lived there. There was absolutely no logical reason this house should be part of the future she was envisioning.
But every time allowed her body to FEEL the way she wanted to feel she envisioned this house. The one her father built. It represented everything she was wanting to feel. It lit up her soul.
In this moment, she had a choice. She could reason herself out of this “vision”, judge herself and keep searching for something else, or she could trust it. She could lean into the unknown. And instead of dismissing that feeling because it didn’t make sense, she decided to do the latter.
She kept going back to the house in her mind. She allowed herself to feel in her body what that house represented to her. She stopped requiring an outcome.
When you feel good you can do good.
There were a lot of things going on in my clients’ life at the time: transitions in the office, her mother passed, her children were experiencing a lot at school, leaning into something silly that had no outwardly facing “purpose” could have been judged. But giving herself permission to FEEL GOOD opened a window to an idea.
She decided to write to the people who lived there. Again, this could have been the moment she talked herself out of it.
This is weird.
They don’t know me.
Why would I do this?
What am I expecting to happen?
But she didn’t. She wrote the letter.
She told the current owners about the house. She explained that her father and grandfather had been involved in designing and building it. She told them about the love and care that had gone into it and what that home had meant to her.
And she mailed the letter off.
To her absolute surprise, the woman who lives in the house wrote back.
And this is where the story gives me chills.
The current owners love this house. They have been carefully restoring it to its original design. A family who owned it in between had allowed parts of the home to deteriorate, and these new owners had taken it upon themselves to honor what was originally created. The details her father had chosen. The craftsmanship. The history. The home itself.
Since then, these two women have developed this beautiful connection. My client and her husband are planning to visit the house and the family restoring it. She even found THE ORIGINAL BLUEPRINTS for the house. She’s having them framed so she can gift it to them when she arrives.
Just sit with that for a moment.
Because none of this needed to happen. None of it made any sense. Every step has been predicated on one question: “Does this light me up?”
There was no goal, no strategy, no ROI. There was simply a woman who noticed that something made her feel good and instead of immediately shutting it down, she followed it.
And look at the wealth that came from that one decision.
Not financial wealth. Human wealth. Connection. Meaning. Excitement. Generosity. Love. A story both of these women will probably tell for the rest of their lives.
All because my client followed something that lit her up.
We have become suspicious of feeling good
I understand this because, in the past, I’ve caught myself shutting down these moments, too.
Years ago, when I was still seeing patients all day, I started stopping at a little park between work and home. There was a beautiful river there and I would sit for a few minutes before going home to little kids, dinner and all the busyness waiting for me. A brief transition moment that allowed me to be fully present for my family after a day of constant patient care and running a busy ortho practice.
One afternoon, as I sat there with the sun on my face, I remember closing my eyes for a few minutes, the play of the water on the rocks in my ears. It felt so good.
And almost immediately my mind said:
Get up. You need to be doing something.
Nothing was wrong. Nobody needed me at that exact moment. I still had time. But my nervous system had become so accustomed to productivity, responsibility and “doing” that simply sitting beside a river and feeling good felt uncomfortable. Dangerous, even. I felt GUILTY.
So I jumped up and rushed home to get started on dinner.
I see this in women all the time.
You start thinking about the trip you want to take or the class you want to sign up for, the change you want to make in your schedule, the idea of writing a book or climbing a mountain, or baking bread. For just a moment, something inside of you comes ALIVE.
And then… your mind gets involved.
And just as quickly, you jump you cut yourself off from the very thing that made you feel alive.
Feeling good is not frivolous
Feeling good matters.
When you are fulfilled, energized and connected to yourself, you show up differently as a leader, as a dentist, as a mom.
We forget the incredible ripple effect of who we are being because we’re so focused on what we’re doing and whether or not we “deserve” to feel good.
You lose sight of the incredible impact you have on the world just by doing what lights you up. You may never know what that changed for the people that you interacted with simply because you chose to follow your desire. But every single time you said yes to you, other people benefited. Magic and synchronicity happened, you left the world a better place.
You don’t always get to see the end of your own ripple.
And you most certainly can’t see it from the start. Because the impact lies beyond what your experience has known. It lies in the UNKNOWN.
That’s the point.
My client couldn’t possibly have known that picturing her childhood home would lead to a framed set of blueprints hanging on the wall of that very house. She could never have imagined the stories that will now travel in that other family and her own. She couldn’t have planned that. She simply followed the next thing that felt good. Then the next. Then the next.
Your job is not to know where it leads
Your desires do not need a business plan. Your joy does not need to justify its existence. And everything you spend your time doing does not need to produce something measurable.
I KNOW! It goes against everything we are told right now. It goes against everything your mind is telling you is “responsible” and does and doesn’t make “Sense”.
But those little moments of inspiration and desire are precious.
Pay attention to them. Especially if you have spent years silencing them.
So here is your invitation this week. Notice what lights you up. Not what you should want. Not what makes sense. Not what everyone else needs from you. Notice the tiny whisper inside of you that says:
You know what would feel really good?
And before you tell yourself why you can’t, why it’s silly, why it’s selfish or why it doesn’t make sense…
stay there.
Give yourself permission to feel the excitement. And then take one small step toward it.
Send the letter. Sign up for the class. Book the trip. Sit beside the river. Try the pottery. You do not have to know where it is going. In fact, because you don’t know where it is going you are giving it MORE power.
You only have to stop abandoning the parts of you that are asking to come alive.
Because feeling good isn’t a reward you earn after you’ve taken care of everyone else.
Feeling good is your directional compass.
And when you feel good, my friend, you do good.
A personal Invitation
If you’ve been talking yourself out of something that lights you up because it doesn’t make sense, I want you to know that you don’t have to have the whole path figured out before you take the next step.
As an orthodontist and Self-Leadership and Stress Management Coach for women dentists, I see how easily high-achieving women can become disconnected from what they actually want after years of being responsible for everyone else.
This is the work I love helping women explore: listening to what is happening within you, trusting what feels good, and creating a life that feels as fulfilling as it looks from the outside.
If something in this article spoke to you, I’d love to have a conversation.
You can schedule a time to connect with me HERE.
I can’t wait to meet you.
Only love,
Tarryn
