3 Questions to Put You Back in the Driver’s Seat of Your Life

“Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to, it’s not for them.” —Unknown

Have you ever had the thought, “Is it possible that I’m destined for something greater than what I’m doing right now?”

Have you ever been told that you should be doing anything other than what you’re doing now? You might hear statements like, “You’re not smart enough, fast enough, or strong enough.” No matter the words, they all lead to the same belief of, “I’m not enough.” Period.

Have you ever felt inadequate, dissatisfied or unfulfilled with your life? I have. I know these feelings intimately. Something I know with absolute certainty is that you are destined to Accomplish Magnificent Things in your life.

If you had known me in 2006, you would have thought that I had it all together. I was working in corporate human resources making good money. I had a nice house, a nice car and to all outward appearances, my marriage was rock solid. Everything looked great.

Except that it wasn’t.

Although I had a high paying job with all the perks, I felt unbelievably unfulfilled and unhappy. I tried to tell myself that all was well and that I should be happy doing what I was doing and in my relationship. For quite a while I believed what I kept telling myself.

I grew up believing I wasn’t an interesting person—that who I was and what I was doing in the world were unimportant. In my most intimate relationships, especially my marriage, I was frightened to rock the boat. I was terrified of how people would judge me. I was afraid that the life I had created couldn’t handle the truth of who I really am. I was right. I created a life that didn’t allow me to shine. I had to dull myself in order to fit in.

One day my husband, the only man I had ever had a real relationship with, came home and told me he wasn’t sure he loved me and that he wanted to move out. I was devastated and shocked. I spent the next few months of my life feeling powerless, confused, frantic and lost. I spent countless hours sitting on my kitchen floor sobbing, not knowing what to do and wondering, “How did I get to this place in my life?”

But, somewhere deep inside my heart I knew that I was supposed to be Accomplishing Magnificent Things. God designed me to live magnificently; shouldn’t I be doing that? There on my kitchen floor, I started to pay attention and dare to believe in the magnificence that awaited me, if only I’d embrace the necessary changes.

I am now thankful for those moments of personal torture because they became the catalyst for me to wake myself up from the fog in which I was living my life. I spent a few months being a victim to what happened in my marriage. I realized that because I didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know how to set boundaries. I was not okay being alone. I had allowed this behavior to happen to me. I stayed and tried to work it out for seven years, but in my healing, I couldn’t stay any longer.

In actuality, I’d spent those seven years preparing to take a leap of faith to leave my secure job and go back to graduate school to finish my studies in Counseling Psychology. I made the decision on my own without the approval or support of my spouse. It was both an exciting time and a challenging time. I was excited about where I was going, but I also had a person and circumstances in my life that I was allowing to hold me back.

I had my breakthrough moment at home in Issaquah, Washington, while I was getting ready for graduate school to start. I was reading a book called The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. In it, Senge asked the reader to consider three questions:

Who are you?

Where are you going?

How will you get there?

These questions shook me to my core. I was 35 years old and I couldn’t answer them. I had no clue who I was, where I was going, or how I was going, to get there. I realized that I had a lot of work to do to be able to honestly answer the questions. Between the ages of 35 and 41, I went through a process of reshaping my life.

Fast forward to the present and my life is completely different from how it was then. I revisited these three questions time and again. I worked through them until I could answer each one with clarity and confidence.

When it was time for me to start my practice as a psychotherapist, to help my clients, I turned to these powerful questions once more. I knew that my ultimate desire was to help my clients Accomplish Magnificent Things in their lives, but I wasn’t sure how I would help them do so. I sat down with a bottle of wine and my laptop one night to think about how I wanted to help people get unstuck. I asked myself, “What do I do with my clients? How do I help them see their beauty? How can I help them Accomplish Magnificent Things?” The answer didn’t surprise me. It was all of my work related to the three questions that had confounded me several years earlier. Naturally, I would ask my clients to ask themselves those three powerful questions and I’d help them discover the answers. With my help and using the tools I created, my clients have been able to achieve incredible success and live the life of their dreams.

If I could bottle life up in a condensed essence, which I call your life equation, comes down to this: ultimately, your life is a sum of three parts. The first tool I want to share with you is best expressed as a mathematical equation:

Thoughts + Beliefs + Actions = Your Life

To take this equation a step further and to correlate them with my three questions, the equation also looks like this:

Who are you? = Your Thoughts

Where are you going? = Your Beliefs

How are you going to get there? = Your Actions

By exploring these questions in your life, and using the tools that I share in my practice as well as in my book, Live Your Life from the Front Seat: Accomplish Magnificent Things in your life, relationships and career, you’ll be able to step forward confidently to Accomplish your own Magnificent Things!

© 2015 Jessica Butts. Adapted from Live Your Life from the Front Seat: Accomplish Magnificent Things in your life, relationships and career.