How to Follow Your Heart: Finding the Path to Your Best Self

Each day, we make choices. Many seem insignificant: what to eat, what to wear, where to shop. But consistently making choices that help us feel fulfilled can ultimately change the quality of our lives. Just choosing to do things that bring us joy. And choosing not to do things that don’t. Or deciding to do things that bring us closer to a personal goal. These types of choices, repeated over and over, can change everything. So how do you train and empower yourself to make the choices that allow you to follow your heart?

Do You Struggle to Follow Your Heart?

For many of us, our to-do list consists solely of things we should or need to do. Our personal preferences, cravings, and passions do not truly have a place where they fit in. We must ask ourselves, “what would I do tomorrow if it were all up to me?” We must begin to not only permit but encourage ourselves to choose to do thing no one else will benefit from simply because they are important to us. In short, we need to begin to listen to what our heart is telling us. And to follow our heart when it speaks.

How To Start to Follow Your Heart

It can start with a choice to indulge in a hobby a few times a week. Or a decision to cook healthy food, just for us. How about watching a movie of our own choosing? Or taking a walk in the rain? Or just doing something frivolous that makes us smile.

These are examples of small choices we can make that may help us to begin to tune into our heart when it speaks.

It may seem unrealistic, but learning to see opportunities to make choices like these is a key first step. Deciding to seize them can be the gateway to making better life choices, and ultimately, living a more fulfilled and happy life.

Think of these opportunities as initial baby steps.

Make these choices and take these chances. And then, slowly, we can watch our lives begin to expand and unfold into lives that are intentional. The lives we wish to live.

This is the start of learning to follow our hearts.

The beginning of learning that it’s okay to do something “just because”. The joy we feel when we do soon becomes its own reward. And it will help reinforce our new behaviors. And it’s essential that it does. Because it’s important to learn that when we follow our hearts, we find joy.

We Must Follow Our Heart About the Bigger Things, Too

As important as it is to indulge ourselves via small choices, it’s more essential to “give our hearts a vote” when we’re contemplating the bigger stuff. There’s slightly bigger stuff, and then there’s the major, mammoth stuff:

• Maybe it’s about making a commitment to something new we have started, or taking the leap to start doing something entirely new.
• Some of us may be contemplating a job or career change or retirement.
• Or may face an ethical dilemma at work or at home.
• Maybe some of us are considering relocating to a new area? Or buying a new home where we currently live?
• Or – here’s a big one – maybe some of us are trying to decide whether to enter or exit a relationship?
• Perhaps some of us face difficult decisions related to our finances or our health?
• Many of us may feel that we are struggling to set goals for our future or are finding it hard to commit to pursuing a dream.

We all face major decisions like these. We list pros and cons. When the choice is not obvious, many of us lay awake at night wondering what to do.

Making these types of choices, which demand our best work, so to speak, is much more challenging if we have not learned how to hear what our heart is saying.

It’s essential to tune into that voice, so that we begin to always hear it, loud and clear.

Others may let us know what they think we should do. And while it’s valuable to consider other’s points of view when we are at a crossroads, we can’t let those perspectives overshadow our own personal preferences.

Practice will help us to listen and acknowledge what we hear others are saying while still hearing our own hearts speaking, too.

Finding The Courage to Follow Your Heart

Sometimes, our hearts tell us to do something that others may not understand. It’s important to accept that we do not need to explain or justify. If our hearts tell us to do something, we do not need to convince anyone else that our choices are correct, right or “for the best”.

Our hearts should get the deciding vote, always.

Whether it is a choice we make at work, at home, in a relationship, regarding our children – it is simply essential that we know what our hearts are saying. That we allow ourselves to hear our hearts above all the chatter coming from other places.

Following Your Heart on the Job

Choices we make regarding about our work and career have a powerful impact on our lives. We were made with certain talents and gifts and proclivities. When we find the combination that makes our heart full, we must pursue them.

Because a full heart is a sign of a nourished soul.

This is a critical part of following our heart: to find and understand our purpose, to live it, nourish it, and rejoice in it; whether or not the value of our efforts is evident to others or even to ourselves – if we hear a calling, we must answer it, without question.

Why You Must Follow Your Heart in Relationships

Similarly, who we spend our time with, and the quality of those relationships impacts everything. It is difficult and unlikely to feel fulfilled and happy if we are surrounded by others who do not honor us as people. So, we must carefully choose who we befriend, who we limit contact with, who we love. Whether or not others understand. Following our heart, in this part of our lives, is perhaps most important of all.

Follow Your Heart Today

So let’s start small, making heartfelt choices daily. Soon, our hearts will be guiding our larger actions, too.

In time, life will become more fulfilling and happy – and our hearts will begin to feel at peace.

And while this is happening, we must always remember – we are all so worthy, we are so much more than enough.

Thank you as always for reading.

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Joan Senio is the founder of KindCompassCoach. Her career includes 20+ years as a private sector corporate executive and 15 years (and counting) as a consultant and coach. The common thread through her professional life has been a commitment to compassionate leadership, including leading and mentoring current and future leaders, and women from all walks of life. KindCompassCoach articles are backed by research and include facts and advice from a wide variety of experts. Joan is a member of the International Organization of Life Coaches, serves as a thought-leader for KuelLife.com and is a regular contributor to PsychReg and Sixty and Me.