Soul Sense

Your Breakthrough To Soul-Full Living and Leadership

Adrienne Arien Duffy

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781683502784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781683502791
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

From the innovative leadership coach and co-creator of The Moon Project® comes a book about finding your way back to meaning and purpose in work and life.

Through the hundreds of people Adrienne Duffy has guided toward the realization of their full potential, and in the hundreds of workshops she has facilitated, one message has emerged universally over others: "We want something in addition to the achievement of goals and results. We are people who aim high and take risks, but we also long to have meaning and to be grounded. How can we create a more centered, purposeful life and workspace, in this era of constant change, chaos, and minute-by-minute progress?" 

Soul Sense is the answer: Listening to your Soul Call, stoking your Soul Fire, and practicing Soul Care brings depth, growth, and balance. Soul Sense can be thought of as common sense seasoned with the sixth sense. It is what is known as good, and right, and just in one's personal and professional life, while embracing the powers of intuition that transcend such definitions. Soul Sense is logical and instinctual, practical and untamed. Tuning into and trusting your Soul Sense brings increasing fulfillment to your life, and to the lives of those around you. The courageous choice to honor your Soul Sense, ultimately, is up to you—and it is Duffy's joy and intention to lead you toward this profound gift. Your Soul Sense awaits . . .

CHAPTER 1

CONNECTING THE DOTS, WEAVING THE THREADS

A very successful young entrepreneur of about forty approached me at a seminar recently, and blurted out, “Some unforeseen changes are affecting my business and the markets we serve, and it looks like I may not have a business by the end of this year!”

This man’s absolute sense of disruption and loss of control was in part being driven by the rapid rise of technology and the impact of volatility on the business model that had for many decades been reliable and profitable. But because we have reached the tipping point, where change is constant and volatility and disruption are on the rise, many people are becoming ungrounded.

Through our discussion, he was wisely able to discern that he needed to keep his center, exercise, focus on his values, and focus on loving his family.

This is one man’s story, but you don’t have to look far to see that a large number of people are losing control over what they thought was predictable. Some are fighting desperately to maintain the world they once knew, but it is gone; others are seizing the opportunity to change their point of view and grow.

This forty-year-old entrepreneur became conscious of the soulful choice he could make in regard to handling his struggle—there was an opportunity. And by fundamentally recognizing the need to stay grounded, he was heading in the right direction.

“You’ll get through this volatile time with grace,” I told him. “You are getting through it.”

This man did more than just overcome the challenges that faced him; he is now living an even more fulfilling and successful life than he was before. Wouldn’t it be great if people at similar points in their lives or careers could do what this man did—on a conscious level, develop their Soul Sense, starting today?

Times are challenging sounds so cliché, but times are challenging. You have a choice is also cliché, but you do have a choice—and now, more than ever, is the time to consciously take advantage of it.

A HOST OF CHOICES

When the bottom of what they once thought they could count on falls out, some people choose to be victims. They make everybody else guilty-as-charged and complain about all the wrong being done to them. In doing so, they give away their power and the opportunity to live more soulfully.

Others attempt to control more of the uncontrollable factors we all invariably face. These are the people you see pedaling faster and faster just to maintain the illusion they’ve got everything covered. The energy they expend is astounding, difficult to sustain, and eventually depleting.

And still others attempt to stick to the familiar tactics and strategies that worked in the past, not wanting to acknowledge that the present is urging them to do something unfamiliar—which entails risk.

Even for those with the entrepreneurial spirit, which is generally regarded as “risk-friendly” as opposed to “risk-averse,” a new type of risk can bring on fear or doubt. It is natural every once in a while to find ourselves stuck, no matter what our level of experience or success is. And those ruts we get stuck in might seem to come about more frequently today, because of the rapid pace by which everything is moving.

But you have this book in your hands because you are ready to break away from the roads most frequently traveled.

This book can be a doorway to your new journey, and I’m glad you’ve opened it!

Perhaps you are ready to respond differently now to the circumstances that are presenting themselves. You are an open mind and courageous spirit. You’ve experienced success on a variety of levels, but you know that there is more beneath the surface.

Right now, you can make a choice to develop Soul Sense, to step back from the old landscape and step up to that great telescope into the soul. Think of those machines you plunk a few coins in so that you can gaze across an entire city skyline—everything gleams gold. When you take this kind of deep, broad, long survey, you understand that you carry some of that gold within. When you put your eye right up to that small circle and change your point of view, you begin to see that amid disruption, you can make the choice right now to pay more attention to your soul. Stick with that deeper level of soul attention, and you can alter the way change has been controlling you.

Start by telling yourself this: “I am going to receive what’s happening right now as an opportunity to evolve. I’m going to grow and expand not only my own potential, but also my leadership or way of being in the world. I am going to be fully accountable and continue to believe in and live into an abundant future.”

Balance and unite the distant gleaming landscape with a focus on your inner golden values, as our entrepreneur did when his professional life began to fall apart. Once you start doing all the things you already do through the golden lens of Soul, you reestablish a sense of integrity and dignity in terms of responding to what you can’t control. That is, you become more grounded.

You begin to build an expanded platform to stand upon, one that is more fortified than the one you have been standing on until now. This platform rests upon all of your past successes, but enables the more soulful future you are ready to live into now.

Let me reiterate this point: Nobody is asking you to completely turn from the wonderful life you have built thus far. You can build upon your triumphs of the past, and surpass them in ways you may not have yet dreamed of, with an intentional focus on soulful living.

This book is the opening of a conversation and an invitation to develop your Soul Sense. It is an exploration of inspiration and potential.

SOUL IS STORY:
THE CHARACTER IS YOU

Soulful living and leadership does not require learning a new terminology—vision, purpose, strategy, value creation, outcomes, and so on—all the well-known concepts still have meaning. You will just mine deeper into them so that moving forward you can more consciously bring Soul to all the chapters of your life story.

People take many routes to attain soulful living and leadership. Sometimes all we need is a nudge; other times it takes a significant upheaval and a permanent departure from the world as we once knew it. The young entrepreneur who knew he would soon have to start from scratch came to his crossroad—his reckoning—and made a choice to stay true to himself and evolve. Many of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world have done this multiple times.

Most of us are familiar with Steve Jobs’s life story: He told part of it in the commencement speech he gave to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University. The speech touches upon the value of staying your course, of taking risks, of dusting yourself off when your heart and livelihood are suddenly tossed out the window, and of chasing wholeheartedly what you are most curious about.

Jobs—who had been diagnosed in 2004 with pancreatic cancer—spoke to his audience about how to live before dying. He said you have to trust in something. He said it was “impossible to connect the dots looking forward” but easier to connect them “looking backwards ten years later.” He was a man who understood human potential, work, love, and soul, and how if you connected these things—you could ignite the world. He had Soul Sense.

We all have a story. When we try to make sense of this story—or when we try to connect the dots—we often turn inward. We naturally begin to soul search—it is an ancient, perennial, and powerful process.

When I connect the dots of my life, the reason I do the work I do today rings clear as a bell. My story reflects an experience that is common to many: At some point in our lives, we have all “rubbed up” against conflicting community ideologies, social structures, and family dynamics that catalyze our growth.

I grew up the child of an upper-middle-class family, with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Our house, in the suburbs of Chicago, was set smack dab in the middle of the Jewish side and the Catholic side of the neighborhood. If I were writing a memoir, nobody would believe me, but it’s true: We lived right between dozens of Jewish families and dozens of Catholic families, and we attended a Methodist church.

In my neighborhood, the Jewish kids went to the public school. The few Protestant kids, like me, went there also. The Catholics, of course, went to Catholic school. The path to both schools ran right up the center between the two main streets. I recall instances when the Catholic kids would ride their bikes by and try to splash me with mud because they thought I was Jewish, and then at school not being part of the in-group, because I was not.

At age six or seven, I was at school daily, feeling like an outcast.

Of course, I had friends, but when some of my Jewish friends had me over, their grandparents refused to acknowledge my presence. Granted, some o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Disclaimer
• Contents
• Foreword
• SOUL SENSE
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Connecting the Dots, Weaving the Threads
• Chapter 2: Soul Call, Soul Fire, Soul Care: An Overview
• Chapter 3: Soul Call
• Chapter 4: Soul Fire
• Chapter 5: Soul Care
• Closing Thoughts
• Acknowledgments
• About Adrienne Duffy
• Soul Sense: Taking Action