Brilliance

A Coaching Guide to Clearing Inner Obstacles and Letting Your Authenticity Shine

Amy Lombardo

• Publisher: LifeTree
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781928055471
• eBook ISBN: 9781928055488
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Transform your inner potential into meaningful, authentic change in the world with this unique coaching guide.

Many are working to live purposeful lives, but subconscious obstacles can often prevent us from opening and connecting to our potential to make meaningful change in the world. Brilliance presents a coaching method to clear out the baggage and activate our inner wisdom. In this book, empowerment coach and author Amy Lombardo teaches readers how to think, feel, act, and live from an inner source of radiance. With exercises and examples drawn from Amy's own life and her practice as a coach for a wide range of clients—from CEOs and top celebrities to front-line activists— Brilliance is an essential guide to living our unique paths and most authentic lives to the fullest.

CHAPTER 1

Let the Journey to Your Brilliance Begin!

Nature has always been one of my biggest inspirations. In fact, nature’s brilliance in some ways is so abundant that it might get overlooked and mistaken for being commonplace. So that we don’t fall prey to such insensitivity, let’s take a closer look at one of nature’s most magnificent beings—the giant sequoia tree.

For those of you not familiar with these beauties, giant sequoias are found in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and are the world’s largest trees. They are also among the oldest living organisms on earth—the oldest was dated at over thirty-five hundred years old! Sequoias grow to an average height of three hundred feet and a width of over thirty feet in diameter. These towering redwood evergreens are truly a sight to behold. On occasions when I’ve stood in a grove of sequoias, I’ve felt as though I was in one of Mother Nature’s most sacred cathedrals. They inspire awe like few other things can.

But I think what makes their enormous size and splendor even more remarkable to me is the seed that gives life to one of these giants is the size of a dime. Even more fascinating, this little seed won’t germinate unless it’s been heated to an extreme temperature, one possible in its environment only when a raging forest fire blazes through the landscape and leaves the soil extra fertile and ready for new sprouts to take root. How’s that for a brilliant adaptation?

It’s mind-boggling to think that the largest and oldest trees on our planet began as unexpressed potential in the tiniest of seeds. It’s a fine example of the first concept we need to understand on a journey toward our brilliance: intention.

What Is Intention?

Well, in a word, intention is everything.

Like a sequoia seed holding the potential of a whole tree, your intentions are the seed energy from which all your actions arise. Intentions give meaning to everything we do. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine I am in a room with you and I cut you with a knife. Is that a bad or a good thing? If I’m a robber and my intention is to steal your valuables and kill you, then the action is a harmful one. If I am a surgeon and I intend to save your life by making a specific incision, then my action is definitely life-affirming. Notice how the intention behind the action is what determines its true value and meaning.

From time to time, you may have had a version of the thought, “I’ll just change ‘X,’ and then everything will be all right.” There’s a problem with this logic, though. Even if you succeed at changing “X,” you often still feel unfulfilled. Why? Because it’s not only what you aim to do that matters, but also how you aim to do it. In other words, to feel fulfilled and empowered in life, both our expectations and our intentions count. Let’s take a closer look at what each of these things means.

A Critical Distinction

Our results-oriented world tends to focus almost exclusively on expectation, which is what we aim to accomplish. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with this, but if we neglect to look at the intention, or how we want to be, then we’re missing a key component to our brilliance.

Expectation: The specific goal you hope to accomplish

Intention: How you want to be on the journey

An interesting thing to note is that you can be wholly successful at living your intention even if you don’t end up achieving your intended goal. Let’s look at some examples.

Expectation (My Specific Goal)		Intention (How I Want to Be on the Journey)
Save $20,000 this year.		I want to be more mindful when it comes to my finances.
Get a new job.		I want to be patient while I search for the best career for me.
Run a marathon.		I want to be more disciplined when it comes to taking care of my body.

If we look at the first example, we see that if I don’t fully achieve my goal of saving $20,000 this year, I can still be successful at being more mindful about my finances. Perhaps I learn to save more, spend less, and be more aware of situations in which I waste money. Even if I don’t quite make it to my goal yet, I am still aligned with my true intention and make progress in the right direction.

Read through the chart again. Notice how the intentions are contextual, while the expectations are narrower in scope. Intentions activate the feeling part of our brains. They create space in our minds (and hearts) and open us up to our creativity and our innovative side. As a result, it’s important for us to know that we need to use both our feeling and thinking capacities as we move toward our goals.

Energy Goes Where Intention Flows

Your intentions have an impact on your beliefs. Imagine I have a goal to lose ten pounds. Let’s explore a few of the intentions that may motivate me and affect how I feel about myself.

One possible intention I could have is to be more attractive so that others will like me more. Do you see how this intention could affect my self-esteem? Even if I lose the weight, I’m still likely living with the fear that I have to behave and appear a certain way to be worthy of love. This keeps me in a constant battle to “maintain” myself so that I can be accepted. Not only is this mentally exhausting, but also the intention will probably propel me to constantly compare myself with others.

Now let’s imagine I have a different intention behind my goal of losing weight. Let’s assume my intention is to be kind and compassionate to myself by being more conscious of the diet and exercise choices I make. Think about how dramatically different this journey to weight loss could be. In this instance, I take the focus off the pounds and off meeting others’ expectations. Instead, I make the intention about self-acceptance and self-love. In this scenario, I’ll not only be addressing the weight loss, but I’ll also be supporting myself to change underlying belief patterns that may have led me to make poor choices about diet and exercise in the first place. Which journey do you think is going to feel more empowering?

Now that we understand the important distinction between expectations and intentions, I want to share with you the first of fourteen brilliance principles we’ll explore throughout the first part of this book.

BRILLIANCE PRINCIPLE #1

Be Firm with Your Intention and Flexible with Your Form

Brilliance Principle #1 asks us to be clear and firm with our intentions but also understand that life demands we be flexible at the same time. It’s important to note, however, that being flexible doesn’t mean you have to compromise your values. You can certainly hold true to your values, even if how those values are outwardly expressed looks different from moment to moment.

Here’s an example. I have a firm intention in my life right now to be more patient. A few of the forms that intention may take are

•not honking my car horn in a traffic jam;

•not interrupting my husband when he’s talking; and

•not freaking out if I don’t get an email or text response right away.

No matter the action, I am clear on the quality of energy I want behind it: patience. The intention stays the same, but the expression of it looks different, depending on the scenario. You get the idea. Now it’s your turn to practice.

♦ SELF-INQUIRY EXERCISE: Clarifying Intentions and Expectations

For each of the following areas of life, list any specific expectations (goals) you have in that area. Then note one overarching intention that describes how you want to be while moving toward those goals. If you’re not sure of all your goals, just do your best to write what you know. This exercise will help you focus on your path (and the way you want to be on it) for the journey ahead.

Example: In the area of spirituality, one expectation (specific goal) I have is to meditate every morning. My intention (how I want to be) in this area of my life is to be more calm and centered, no matter what’s happening in my life.

Now you try. Good luck!

Life Areas

•Spirituality

•Profession/livelihood/career/studentship

•Finances/prosperity/abundance

•Intimacy/sexuality

•Body (physical health and well-being)

•Mind/intellect (mental health and well-being)

•Emotions (emotional health and well-being)

•Friendships/family/personal community

•Environment (home/personal space)

CHAPTER 2

The Road to Brilliance

When I was twenty years old, during my senior year of college, I had the great fortune to work in Tanzania for six months. This was my first time traveling internationally, and I knew it was going to be an epic adventure. Before heading out on this transformative journey, I poured over every guidebook I could find (this was before the internet existed!) so that I could prepare myself for the experience. I wanted to know what types of situations, cultures, and opportunities I might encounter, and what I should pack for my trip. I also wanted to know how to be a smart, sensitive, and responsible traveler and to avoid any unnecessary challenges during my stay. The preparation for my trip was essential to making the most of my experience abroad.

In a similar way, preparing for the journey to uncover your brilliance will allow you to embrace the experience wholeheartedly as it gets underway. To that end, let’s think of this chapter as a guidebook to the Land of Brilliance.

The journey to the Land of Brilliance is really one of evolution, from unconscious to conscious choice. You are choosing to connect with the part of you that already aligns with your highest potential and intentionally live from there. When you orient to life from your brilliance, the negative patterns and habits you’ve struggled with become a lot less compelling, and your true essence can start to emerge more organically. This might sound great, but indeed, how does one prepare for such a journey as this?

In chapter 1, I discussed the first brilliance principle, “Be firm with your intention and flexible with your form,” so that you could clearly outline your intentions and goals in the different areas of your life. This exercise gave you an idea of where you want to go in the Land of Brilliance.

In this chapter, I’ll outline Brilliance Principles 2 to 14. These introduce the major themes you’re likely to encounter on the path ahead, time and again. You’ll have the opportunity to do self-inquiry with each principle so that you become more aware of where you, specifically, are likely to get tripped up on your journey.

For example, your self-inquiry might reveal that you’ve been making a lot of choices for your life based on what other people want and not on what you want. Or you might discover a harsh inner critic that keeps preventing you from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: What is Brilliance?
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright Page