How to Simplify Your Life with a Personal Compass with Dr. Amanda Tobe
When you hear people becoming the designers or leaders of their lives it sounds great in theory. But it’s often just that. A theory. How do you begin taking practical steps towards leading your life? I’m so excited to share the answer by welcoming back the amazing Dr. Amanda Tobe who is teaching us how to simplify our lives by creating our own personal compass. Five steps to creating an inner compass that keeps you aligned like a magnet to your truest desires. In this episode, we walk you through each of the five steps and share some of my insights and struggles.
2021 is the year of radical honesty. Where we’re stripping away the unnecessary. The inauthentic. There’s a collective cry to embrace sit in silence more and see where things flow. To anchor within first before taking any action.
That doesn’t require goals. roadmaps, and KPIs. It requires a pure inner connection and a willingness to listen. To be honest with ourselves. This is how you design a life that’s true to you. By allowing your soul to take the wheel and making your personality follow its lead.
This is why today’s episode is UBER powerful. Dr. Amanda Tobe is back on the show to teach us how to create our own personal compass. So that anytime we veer away from our truest desires we can get back on track in a snap.
Get your Personal Compass PDF here.
The Personal Compass By Dr. Amanda Tobe
To get started, download this PDF, make sure you have a pen and paper, and an open heart, don't use your head. You’ll want to allow yourself between an hour and an hour and a half.
So what is a personal compass? Everyone knows what a compass is - an instrument that is intended to provide us with guidance, to keep us heading in the right direction. That’s essentially what this exercise and tool are all about - it’s a tool to help us gain clarity about our direction, about how we want to design our lives through getting clear on how we want to feel.
The personal compass is so important because it really helps us to discover what we are about and helps us really understand our ideal selves. It helps us to simplify our lives. I mean, COVID-19 came out of the blue but has taught so many of us that we just can’t do it all. It’s important to find clarity in what you want to be focusing on.
The personal compass also helps with alignment and setting intentions “around your days and your weeks and your month and your year.” Think about how you want to refocus your time and energy. During a time of record-breaking levels of stress and anxiety, this tool with help you become more intentional about the way you want to feel and live your life.
The First Step | Get In The Zone
Step one is all about getting in the zone by taking five minutes and choosing a stillness exercise to center yourself. This exercise can be anything; meditation, yoga nidra, or grounding. The exercise Amanda and I used during our session was grounding; Amanda had me tap into my five senses and list off five things I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt.
It’s also beneficial to do a little bit of self-reflection by journaling to help yourself get warmed up. Some of the questions Amanda asked me were: “ What does it feel like when you're in flow? What does it feel like when you are out of flow? What does it feel like when you're in a state of wholeness?” Amanda said, “So we talked about a number of these different questions to kind of get you thinking about what's going well, and what's not.”
My feedback: I’ve done grounding exercises before, but this one felt like it took it to a whole new level. And recently, as I was walking around New York City, where there’s always so much going on, and I was feeling overwhelmed about work or something. So I did the grounding exercise again and it actually really placed me crystal clear in the present. And so I definitely felt very peaceful, very aligned, very clear. And it helped me to just remember that I'm here.
It can also be helpful to think about specific times in the last month and get clear on when things were going well for you and when they weren’t. Or when you didn’t feel as strong or as healthy. Having this check-in with yourself allows you to determine how you want to feel and what makes you feel that way.
The Second Step | Your List of Feelings
The second step to create your own personal compass is making a list of words that resonate the most with you. This is when you’ll need your pen and paper and the link to the list of words linked in this workbook. First, you want to look over all the words and write any down that you’re feeling a natural pull towards. Think both about the things in the present that you might want to change, and about the things you already do now that make you feel good.
Amanda says, “The other advice I would give in this step is not to just pick words, as you're thinking about your career. It's good to think about the broader kind of life wheel, and thinking about your relationships, your friendships, your health, financial, spiritual, kind of thinking of the full spectrum in doing this exercise is really key.” There isn’t any right number of words to write down, just select as many as you want, the ones you’re pulled to.
Next, you have to narrow down your lists of words to only five. You should search for overlapping themes among your words. For Amanda, she had words like “buzzing, luminous, ignited,” so there’s a theme of some kind of light in there, or radiant. Once you’re able to group those words together, it’s a little easier to pick one word from each group that reaches out to you the most.
Lastly, once you have your top five words, it’s time to pick your top single word. This is your core, center word that the other four words surround.
My feedback: When Amanda had me circle the words that I felt gravitated towards, she told me to just go for it. The ones that seemed super cool to me were words like fierce, adventurous, unhinged, etc. There were so many action-oriented words so it was really fun getting to pick which words I was drawn to. When I started I told myself to allow myself the freedom to just choose what felt right, without questioning or judging. If it felt right, I went with it. It’s a low-risk way to teach yourself to listen to your inner wisdom. And even narrowing it down was surprisingly easy, if you just let yourself go with what you’re drawn to the important ones kind of just pop up. I began with a list of 43, and then I underlined 13 words because five was too much for me. And then I was able to go back and circle the top five out of the 13.
The Third Step | Defining Your Feelings
Step three is about defining what those top feelings mean to you. Words can have completely different meanings to different people, so this is about what the words mean to you, no fancy words, we aren’t asking for a dictionary definition, just write it down and get it out. For Amanda, the word energized is: “about bringing light and positivity to my work. For me, it's also about mindfulness and being mindful of my energy. For me, it's also about empathetic parenting. So it's also about bringing that energy to my kids and being able to be aligned with their energy. So you can see how you can take the definition anywhere that you want.”
My feedback: I keep coming back to the word powerful. So for me, it means that I'm quietly confident, rooted, grounded, and I feel safe within no matter what I'm doing, and unmoved by what's outside of me. And I think that also relates to the work that I'm doing, just making sure that I feel aligned with my community. But for me, powerful is definitely an interesting definition, personally, and I see it as being centered in my work and my relationships in my life. And then adventurous; to me, that means leading with curiosity, instead of fear, trying new things, leaning into change, designing my life. I feel like I want those qualities in my work, in my life, and all aspects, even with health, like trying new things, or leaning into changes that maybe I need to make.
The Fourth Step | Bring Your Feelings to Life
Step four is all about how you’re going to bring these feelings into your life, Amanda refers to it as the “house step.” By now, you have the five feelings, including your center feeling, and you have your definitions for each of the feelings. For Amanda with the word energized, she asks herself how she can bring that word into her life. How can she feel energized each day?
She says, “But for me, it's about walking, it's about meditations daily. It's about creating daily, all sorts of daily intentions for myself. It is around what I call exercise snacks, I take these like two minute kind of breaks throughout the day and just do something high energy, whether it's running knees, or three high knees, or plank jacks or something like that something just to kind of get my energy levels up. And for me, it's also about check-ins throughout the day and asking myself, how am I doing? What do I need right now?”
My feedback: My core desired feeling ended up being radiant, so to feel radiant I want to keep active through Yoga Nidra two times a week, dancing once a week, and doing yoga twice a week. I’m going to listen to music every day, I feel like my history has been so deeply rooted in it just my whole life. And there's something that music does for me, and I haven't really given it the attention that I want to. And so I that definitely helps me feel like in a higher state. And I’m going to write every day, whenever I write I feel radiant and aligned like I’m on another level. I want to reach out to someone every day. And I want to eat healthier. I know I could have gotten more specific with these things, but that's initially what came to mind.
The Fifth Step | Integrate Your Personal Compass
The fifth step is about how you’re going to integrate your personal compass into your life now. Don’t finish the exercise and then tuck it away into a drawer, if it isn’t visible to you often, you won’t focus on putting any real intention behind it. Amanda uses her personal compass when she makes any decisions in her life, “whether it's decisions about where I want to go, for example, on the weekend, or different goals of mine that I want to say yes and no to making decisions about where do I focus my energy, as I've mentioned, in the new year, I'm putting some a lot of thought right now around where I want to place that energy, and in realizing I can't do it all.”
This year, she’s made the decision for herself that she isn’t going to create so many things because she doesn’t let anything really grow. So she’s going to focus on certain areas. You could also use your personal compass as positive affirmations, use the words you’ve chosen, for example, “I am an energy, I'm someone who is energized and going to feel more anchored and centered throughout my day and trying to be more creative.” You can also share your compass with family members or friends, this is also one of the best ways to hold yourself accountable. Or put it into your calendar and do quarterly reviews with yourself.
My feedback: There really is a lot of amazing ways that you can use these words. And I love that you said when you are making a decision to consult with those words and make sure that it's in line with that. And that is definitely something I can't wait to do in the new year. And while I’m trying to figure out what to strip away or what to focus on.
Affirmation
I am the designer of my life and focus on feeling good in every moment.
Resources
Get Your Personal Compass PDF.
The Seat Of The Soul* by Gary Zukav.
Danielle LaPorte, speaker, author, and entrepreneur.
Follow Amanda Tobe on Instagram.
