Why am I here? What are my passions? What is my purpose? How can I make a difference? What gives my life meaning? What am I really good at? When am I going to stop talking in questions?

We all want answers. If you’re like me, you tend to do a lot of looking for them “out there.”

You tell yourself, maybe the answers are in a book, or a personality or aptitude test. Maybe there’s a guru out there who can guide me. If I find the right seminar to attend or course to take, I’m sure I can find the answers.

Hey, It’s great to research and learn from other people. I’ve gained a ton of knowledge from books, seminars, courses, videos, and more. But if you’re not careful, you’ll never stop looking for the answers in the next book or the next seminar or the next course.

You might also find a lot of those books and tests are wrong…for you.

Eventually you realize the answers aren’t “out there.”

The unique answers for you are inside you. You have to get quiet, turn inward, and truly listen.

Have you ever experienced a time when you just knew you should do something? A time when a small, quiet voice in your head told you, “Don’t take that job,” “Buy that house,” “Ask him if he needs help,” “Volunteer there,” “Pursue being a teacher,” “Marry her.” That’s the voice we’re looking for here. (We’re not looking for the voice that told you to put it all on red at the roulette wheel in Vegas. That’s a different voice that you might need to seek professional help for.)

This voice goes by many names. For me, it’s the Holy Spirit. For others, it’s their conscience, or their inner voice, or the universe, or a higher power. But we’ve all heard from it at some point in our lives. It’s really always there, waiting for us. We have to get quiet enough to hear it. The more you listen for it, the louder and stronger it becomes. The more we ignore it, the harder it is to hear. For most of us, it isn’t an audible voice at all. It’s a feeling or a thought that pops in our heads. But we tend to know it when we “hear” it.

There were times in my life I pushed it away so hard that I lost it. I thought I knew everything. I was in charge. I didn’t need any guidance. I couldn’t hear the voice if it was shouting at me because I didn’t want to hear it. Those are the times I made some of the dumbest decisions of my life. Have you ever been there? Have you ever heard it?

It’s not easy to get quiet enough to hear this voice. In the history of the world we’ve never had so many distractions. How many minutes a day do you sit quietly and think? For most of us, we rarely, if ever, do this. After working hard all day, we get busy doing “stuff.” We are bombarded by the TV, Internet, email, video games, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, DVDs, movies, sporting events, texting, smart phones with data plans, Angry Birds, Candy Crush …

My friend, Tim, limits his son’s video game time. When his son goes down to the basement to play his games, he sets a timer. When the alarm goes off on the timer, it’s time to turn off the game system. One day his son was playing his games while the rest of the family was upstairs. After a while the timer went off. The alarm was so loud that everyone in the house could hear it—everyone except the boy playing the video games. The alarm kept going, and going, and going. Tim said to his wife, “Let’s see how long it takes for him to turn it off.”

After five minutes Tim finally went downstairs and said, “Hey, Son, don’t you hear the alarm going off?” His truthful response was shocking.

“No, Dad, sorry, I didn’t hear it.” He was so zoned out with his video game he couldn’t hear the blaring alarm five feet away from him. (Of course, if they had called him up for dinner, he would have heard that.)

How many times have we ignored our inner voice when it’s trying to help us make the most important choices in our lives? How can we hear it if there is so much noise and junk around us covering it up?

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

–Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher, writer

If you can find a book, course, seminar, or method that helps you on this quest to hear what’s inside you, so much the better.

When’s the last time you did a life check by taking the time and silence to turn inward?

It’s powerful.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

–Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, psychiatrist, author of On Death and Dying

If you need some help getting started try my free gift, 5 Steps to Finding Your Passionate Purpose.

I would love to know what you found out. Let me know.

Let’s GO!