In today’s celebrity and personality-focused culture, we tend to only highlight a person’s external actions. We make much of the people who are vibrant on social media, the people who do extreme things and the people who are loud with their opinions. Meanwhile, we ignore or gloss over the small, meek and quiet.
This imbalance can falsely lead us to believe that those who make a difference are those who commit many actions for the public to see.
I mention this because we largely ignore the inner canvas of a person—who they are and what beliefs they have. We tend to believe it is a person’s external activity that makes them live a meaningful and fulfilled life, but really, it is a person’s quiet cultivation of their inner life that allows them to sustain happiness.
It is not what people see but what people don’t see that often matters most—meaning our beliefs and our character.
I say all this because many people today are only focused on committing actions and shaping the world around them to find happiness, meaning and fulfillment. They believe it is only what they do that matters.
As a result, many people live divorced lives—where their beliefs don’t make sense of their actions. In other words, many people don’t have a strong, driving internal force that compels their actions. They try to shape the world around them while not being inspired by their personal why.
When we can couple our behavior with our beliefs, then we can experience the happiness, meaning and sense of fulfillment we were meant to have.
This is what I call whole living—when our internal beliefs drive our external behavior. Everything is cohesive and whole. Everything makes sense.
Too often, people today don’t know what they believe. They don’t shape their inner life, and instead, spend their time trying to change their external surroundings. Consequently, people burnout, get tired of their jobs, feel like they don’t know why they’re struggling and can’t understand where to go next.
Knowing our beliefs and allowing them to shape the world around us is the key to whole living, and the key to living a more fulfilled life.
