Woman looking to one side at the words Do What You LoveAmanda Heal

Do What You Love Series Episode 3

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Welcome to episode 3 of the Do What You Love Podcast, this is part of a special 3-part series to help you discover your life purpose so you can have more fulfilment and joy in your life and career.
I’m your host Amanda Heal.
In the last episode of this special series, I talked about what life purpose is, and described what living outside of your life purpose would look like, in terms of work. If you’ve just stumbled across this podcast, you may want to pause this episode and go back and listen to the first 2 episodes, as they all fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
In this episode, I’m going to talk about what living out your life purpose looks like, how you can discover your life purpose if you don’t already know what that is, and how I can come along with you on the journey to discovering your life purpose.
So, what does it look like to live out your life purpose?
As I did in the previous episode, I’ll use work as the basis for talking about what this looks like. However, what I will be saying can just as easily apply to any area of life.
Let me use my own work as an illustration:
– When I’m working with clients, speaking, and producing social media content, I’m using my natural gifts and talents, and doing what just comes naturally to me;
– I’m no longer trying to live up to the expectations of my work colleagues, friends and family, and i’m no longer trying to be someone I know deep down that I’m not – I’m just being me;
– Everything that I do aligns with my personal values, and I know I’m exactly where I belong;
– I know that what I do makes a real difference in the lives of others, and and I regularly experience a deep sense of fulfilment and joy in what I do.
But I’m not saying every day is perfect, as it’s not. I still face mindset challenges, like whether I’m good enough to do this, and whether anyone will listen to or believe me. As a business owner I still have to do tasks that I don’t enjoy very much. But it’s all worth it, as it’s a means to an end, which is inspiring and encouraging others to discover and live out their life purpose, which is what I absolutely love to do!
You are probably asking by now “how do I discover this life purpose”?
Well, I believe that there are three steps that you need to take to discover your life purpose. They are:
Examine your present
Examine your past, and
Examine your passions or dreams
If you take the time to follow these steps, you’ll discover themes which run through these 3 aspects of your life. these themes will point towards your life purpose.
At the beginning of this episode, I referred to the process of discovering your life purpose as a journey. This is true. It is rarely something you discover overnight.
I was thinking about this the other day. I believe that discovering your life purpose is a bit like refining gold. Some gold is easy to find and can be extracted out of a riverbed, using a simple pan. Other gold must be dug out of the ground and, even then, it is hidden in the rock that is removed.
Some people discover their life purpose relatively easily, much like someone panning for gold in a river. It isn’t buried deeply, so it is easy to find, and easy to define.
Others must work hard and dig deeper to discover their life purpose, much like those who mine for gold underground. Their life purpose is buried beneath years of a life lived doing something else. It is buried under a lifetime of old habits and beliefs. Sometimes, not even a glimmer of it is in sight, because it has been forgotten.
Be aware that discovering and refining your life purpose will require deep thinking on your part and will take time. However, I promise that every minute you spend and every ounce of effort you put into this process will be worth much more than you ever expected.
Please, don’t be like me and waste years of your life wondering what to do because you lack the confidence to make a change. Start the process of discovering your life purpose today, and figuring out what changes you need to make to start living it out.
But don’t worry, you don’t have to discover your life purpose on your own. There are a number of resources that I’ve developed that will help you.
Firstly, I’ve created a workbook to help you examine your present, past and passions. The workbook contains questions to prompt your self-examination and reflection. You can download this workbook from the same page as you downloaded your podcast, the link to which was emailed to you when you completed the quiz.
I’ve also written a book called “You Don’t Need Sight, You Just Need Vision”. In this book, I tell my own story, and then guide you through the process of examining your present, past and passions, and also suggest ways that you can start to work out how you will live out your life purpose. This book is available on my website at https://purposevisionfuture.com/books.
But if you’re the sort of person who prefers a more hands on approach, there’s something for you too, which is my Discover Your Life Purpose coaching program. In this program, I work with you as you examine your present, past and passions, and we work on overcoming any fears or limiting beliefs that might come up. Once you have discovered your life purpose, you then have the option to work with me further to figure out how you will live it out. If this program interests you, just go to my website at https://purposevisionfuture.com, and click the Let’s talk link to book an appointment in my calendar.
Finally, if you like what you’ve heard in these 3 podcast episodes of my special series, please subscribe to my Do What You Love podcast, which is available in all the usual places.
Whether you are a lawyer, health care professional, teacher or work in any other profession, this podcast is for you. In this podcast, I share stories of overcoming disillusionment with work, bullying, redundancy, and career change, and will also interview experts on these, and other related topics to encourage and inspire you to take courageous steps to reach your FULL potential.
I hope you’ve found these 3 podcast episodes helpful and even thought provoking, and I look forward to talking with you here, or even in person, soon. Until next time, have a great day and do what you love!

Woman looking to one side at the words Do What You LoveAmanda Heal

Do What You Love series Episode 2

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Welcome to episode 2 of the Do What You Love Podcast, this is part of a special 3-part series to help you discover your life purpose so you can have more fulfilment and joy in your life and career.
I’m your host Amanda Heal.
In the last episode, I spoke about the problems that many of us face feeling like we work just to pay the bills, our lives are lacking meaning or significance, our jobs no longer bringing us the same joy and excitement that the used to, and being fed up with the stress, long work hours and poor work-life balance.
I spoke of how I had found the solution to these problems, which was discovering and living out my life purpose, and how I am happier now than I have ever been.
If you’ve stumbled across this podcast and haven’t done my quiz to discover whether you’re living out your life purpose, you might like to pause this podcast and go to my website at https://purposevisionfuture.com, fill in the form and do the quiz. This episode, and the next – episode 3, will then make a lot more sense.
In this episode, I’m going to be talking about what life purpose is, what it looks like to live outside your life purpose, and the problems this can cause longterm.
What is Purpose?
The Macquarie Dictionary defines purpose as: “the object for which anything exists or is done, made, used, etc.”
If you use an object for its intended purpose, the object usually works well. But, if you try to use the object for a purpose for which it is not designed, it will either not work at all, or will not work very well.
A toaster is specifically designed to toast bread, and other similar products. But, if you tried to make a cup of coffee using the toaster, it would not work at all. An extreme example, I know, but it makes the point.
And here’s another less extreme example. If you used a butter knife to spread suitably softened butter onto bread, it would work very well. But if you tried to use the butter knife to cut steak, it may go some way towards cutting the meat, but it wouldn’t work particularly well.
I believe the same applies to us as human beings. If we discover our life purpose, we discover the thing we are made to do.
Pastor, author and filmmaker, TD Jakes, describes this purpose as being much like an instinct. It comes naturally to us — something we are wired to do.
I passionately believe that we are each created for a specific purpose. If we can discover and live out our purpose, we will live almost by instinct, and will enjoy the life we were created to live, obtaining maximum happiness and fulfilment.
What does it look like to live outside your life purpose?
As most of us spend more time working than doing anything else, I’ll use work as the basis for talking about what living outside your life purpose looks like. However, what I will be saying can just as easily apply to any area of life.
In the quiz, I’ve covered a number of areas of work life – values, environment, gifts and talents, and mindset. Let’s take each one of these in turn.
Firstly, let’s look at values. We all have personal values. The most commonly thought of values are things like honesty, integrity, family and hard work, but if you look online you can find list as long as 400 possible personal values.
Most workplaces have values too. These are often outlined in vision and mission statements, but many exist as unspoken expectations. I remember being told during my first week at work as a lawyer that if I left work at 5pm, my contract wouldn’t be renewed.
If your work causes you to live outside your life purpose, it’s possible that the values of your workplace won’t align well with your personal values, and you may even feel forced to exchange your personal values for your work ones to fit in at work.
Next, let’s look at environment. Wen I talk about environment, I’m not talking about the weather. I’m talking about the physical environment that you work in – your office or cubicle, and also the less obvious things that affect this environment such as noise, stress, pressure, etc.
Some people thrive in open plan office environments with lots of interaction between colleagues, and some of us don’t. As I get older, I’m finding that I require a very quiet environment for concentration and creativity. There were times during my work life when I had to work in an open plan office, which I found extremely stressful.
If your work causes you to live outside your purpose, your work environment may not suit you well.
Now turning to gifts and talents. You may not think of yourself as gifted or talented, but we all have things that are naturally good at, and that’s what I’m talking about here. We often do these things almost instinctively without even thinking about it.
I’m naturally a problem solver. I didn’t realise this until my mother was telling me what a bad day she’d had at work, and I launched into sentences starting with “why didn’t you …” or “you should have …”. Finally she stopped me and said “I don’t want you to solve my problems, I just want you to listen to me so I can get them off my chest”. I’m also an encourager, and will find myself speaking words of encouragement to someone without a seconds thought.
If your work is causing you to live outside of your purpose, there’s a very good chance that you aren’t regularly using your natural gifts and talents.
Finally, onto mindset. If you’re living outside your purpose in your work, chances are your mindset isn’t going to be very good. You probably don’t like your job, and think negatively about it often. You might lack confidence in your work, and you might feel a distinct lack of fulfilment or excitement in your work. You may even feel like you don’t fit in well at work.
I remember when I first started working as a lawyer, I found my work to be exciting and interesting, and it remained that way throughout most of my career. But then, as I got older, I realised that my ideas of what was important to me were also changing. i began to feel like what I was doing was not making a real difference, and rapidly lost all feelings of fulfilment that my work had once given me. I also started to feel undervalued and unappreciated at work.
So what are the longterm effects of living outside of our life purpose?
Remember how I said earlier that our life purpose is almost like an instinct? TD Jakes suggests that if we can combine our instinct with our intellect, we will obtain happiness and fulfilment. However, as we are taught to rely on our knowledge rather than our instinct, it is possible for us to live out our lives relying almost entirely on knowledge, rather than instinct or purpose. This can lead to discouragement, disillusionment, and depression.
I can say from my personal experience of this that this is true. While I didn’t know what my life purpose was until well after I left the law, all I knew was that as my legal career was drawing closer to its end, I was becoming more and more restless and unhappy. My stress levels were increasing, my self-esteem was getting lower by the day, and I was beginning to hate my job. Looking back now, I see this was because my work as a lawyer was taking me further and further away from my life purpose, which is to inspire and encourage others.
Do you know what your life purpose is? If so, is your work drawing you away from your life purpose?
In the next episode of this podcast, I will talk about what it looks like to truly live out your life purpose, and how you can discover your life purpose, if you don’t already know what it is.
Until next time, have a great day and do what you love!

Woman looking to one side at the words Do What You LoveAmanda Heal

Do What You love Series Episode 1

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vWelcome to Episode 1 of the Do What You love Podcast – this is part of a special 3-part series to help you discover your life purpose so you can have more fulfilment and joy in your life and career.
I’m your host Amanda Heal.
Do you feel like you work just to pay the bills and your weekend is fill with chores?
Do you feel like your life is lacking meaning or significance?
Are you finding that your job no longer brings you the joy and excitement that it used to?
Perhaps you’re fed up with the stress, long work hours and poor work-life balance?
If any of these problems resonate with you, I know exactly how you feel because I was there too once. But then I discovered the solution, which is what I want to share with you in this podcast and this podcast series. The solution is to discover and live out your life purpose.
Have you ever asked yourself what your life purpose is?
I know I certainly didn’t.
In fact, I didn’t begin to wonder about my life purpose until my 27th birthday. I have no idea why. I pondered all through my lunch break, but didn’t come up with anything satisfactory. I asked my colleagues what they thought, and they didn’t come up with anything. I asked my family, and they didn’t come up with anything either, so I put the question in the too hard basket and forgot about it for almost 17 years until the day in late 2013, when I had to face the very real possibility of losing my job.
Drastic cuts had been made to the Public Service during that year and people would ask me if I was afraid of losing my job. “of course not” I’d laugh, “I’m a totally blind lawyer, and a union delegate. They wouldn’t dare!”
But then one day, out of the blue, it was announced that the agency I was working for was going to be downsized by 50%, and that 7 legal jobs would be cut.
While I’d been happy for most of my legal career, I had become restless and unhappy over the past few years. But I lacked the confidence to change jobs, and certainly wasn’t prepared to lose the job I had!
I was suddenly terrified, but managed to keep my emotions in check until I got home. And then I went to pieces. If I lost my job, how would I pay the mortgage? How would I live? being totally blind, it’s not as if I could get a job as a checkout chick or pizza delivery person until I found something better.
Now, I’m a woman of faith, and what I have to say over the next 30 seconds or so relates to that. I’m not asking you to believe what I’m going to say, I’m just telling you what happened to me.
I’ve never been someone who could pick scriptures out of the air, so when Jeremiah 29:11 popped into my head, as I sat crying that got my attention. For those not familiar with that verse, it speaks of God having plans for us for hope and a future. As i pondered this, I was even more surprised when an almost audible voice said in my head “I have a job for you”. I heard this voice twice more over the next few months.
In January 2014, my employer offered me a redundancy, and at about the same time, I was offered the opportunity to sell skincare through a network marketing company. I’d secretly always wanted to run my own business, so I took the redundancy and jumped into selling skincare with the enthusiasm of a woman desperately trying to run away from her past.
One thing that I learnt very quickly was, just because I love a product and am happy to spend considerable amounts of money on it, doesn’t mean that everyone else will, even if I think they should. I was losing more than I was making, but being the stubborn person I am, I pressed on, determined to succeed, if only to prove to my family and friends that I could run a successful business.
In July 2015, whilst at a skincare conference, I fell, and very seriously injured my knee. It’s amazing what 10 weeks spent sitting on a couch, soul searching will achieve.
I eventually admitted to myself that I wasn’t doing at all well in the skincare business, and it was time to make a change. I had done a lot of personal development training through the skincare company, and it was at the very time I had decided to stop selling that the person who trained me called and asked if I’d like to retrain as a John C Maxwell speaker, trainer and coach. I was sure that this would be easier than selling skincare, so I said yes.
When I finished my training, I decided to specialise in career coaching, but was unable to get more than a couple of clients. so I decided to enlist the services of a coach to help me figure out what was going wrong.
Nothing beats working with a good coach. A good coach will ask questions and may even make suggestions, but will never tell you what to do. Their only agenda is your success, and they will help you to discover what you need to do to get it.
After a number of coaching sessions, I began to realise that the reason why I wasn’t getting clients for career coaching was that career coaching wasn’t what I really wanted to do. But what did I want to do?
One afternoon, as I was lying on my bed pondering this, my thoughts were drawn back to my purpose, and how I didn’t know what it was. As I lay there, I started thinking about my speaking and coaching training, and how easy it had been.
Speaking and coaching had come naturally to me. I’d been public speaking in one form or another since I was a child, and I’ve never had the paralysing fear that people describe when they have to stand in front of a group and speak. One of the main components of coaching is listening, and what skill have I had to develop very well as a blind person? to listen.
Then I began to look further back into my past. I remembered all the opportunities I had had to speak publicly, and the hours I had spent listening to and encouraging friends, and how ever since I was a child, I had always wanted some sort of job that helped people.
And then it came to me. I wanted to be a speaker and coach, helping my clients discover their life purpose, so that they could figure out what they wanted to do with their whole lives. This was my purpose. This was what I had been building up to my whole life.
Now I’m living out my purpose, and am happier than I’ve ever been, but more on that later.
Now, if you’ve just stumbled across this podcast, you may not know about my quiz. Would you like to know whether you are living out your life purpose? I’ve created a quiz to help you do just that. Just go to my website https://purposevisionfuture.com, fill in the form, and you’ll get the link to do the quiz. Easy!
In the next episode of this special 3-part podcast series, I’m going to talk about what life purpose is, what it looks like to live outside of your life purpose, and what problems that can cause over the long term.
Until next time, have a great day and do what you love!

Will Your Next Raise really Be Worth The Cost?

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When I got my last promotion, I was thrilled! I had moved into a field I’d wanted to work in for years, and I was getting paid more.

But, as the years went by, I started to become restless. I was enjoying the lifestyle that my new income gave me, but I was no longer enjoying the work I was doing, as I felt that I was no longer making a real difference.

I thought that, perhaps if I applied for another promotion, the extra money would make me happier. I knew that I would have extra responsibility and would have to work extra hours, but perhaps it would be worth it.

Then, I was made redundant. My income halved overnight.

After some time, I started my own business as an inspirational speaker and life coach. I absolutely love what I do, as I’m making a real difference in the lives of others.

Before you apply for that next promotion, consider the following:

  • What are all the benefits you will receive if you get the promotion? e.g. money, perks, mental stimulation, doing something you love, challenge, learning something new, etc.
  • What will the promotion cost you? Consider the effect that any increase in hours, responsibility or pressure will have on your lifestyle, your family, and your health.
  • Weighing the benefits against the costs, will the promotion bring you long term joy and fulfilment?

The fulfilment I get from my work more than makes up for my drop in income. I’m so glad I didn’t get that second promotion as I get more joy and fulfilment out of what I do now than I ever would have got from the extra money.

If you are considering applying for a promotion, and would like help to work through any of the issues I’ve raised in this post, let’s chat. You can book a time in my calendar that suits you by clicking here.