What matters most?

This week’s work in my online course Catching the Whispers is called “What Matters Most”, and participants are busy with tasks that explore this question so as to make the best choices for their poetic lives. Quite separately, or so I thought, I was preparing to share with you Tara Mohr’s work as one of my Inspirations, and in particular the visualization exercise that lets your Inner Mentor speak to you. You can find it here.

Then I remembered that one of the key questions asked of our wise older selves looking back to the present via that visualization was,  “What mattered most?”

In this post, I want to tell you about the surprising answer I received to this question. And how it helped to shift the course of my life.

Va, an original monoprint by Lynne Cameron. Available from https://www.lynnecameron.com/shop

I signed up for the course Playing Big around 2011, when it was quite new. At that time, I was working full time in academia and coming to the end of the research project on empathy in post-conflict situations. The ‘playing big’ I wanted support with was shouting to the rooftops about the new model of empathy I had developed, so as to make a difference out in the world beyond academic journals. Almost immediately I came up against my paralyzing fear of being criticized that held me back in speaking up for my work. The course offered tools to deal with this and really helped with finding ways to talk widely about my research project.

But what had the biggest impact for me was the visualization that had us encounter our ‘Inner Mentor’ – our wise older selves from 20 years into the future, aka the voice of our intuition. I was skeptical – coming from a social science and maths background, I tended to scoff at fluffy things like visualisations, and they’d never worked when I’d tried. This one did work – I saw very clearly a house in the mountains and the wise older woman coming out of it to meet me and answer my questions. Inside the house was a long table covered in sheets of paper with drawings on. When I asked that question, my older self replied that what mattered most was that I had done my art. I was not expecting that!

… Nothing about research impact or models of empathy. Nothing about being a thought-leader or writing more books. No - what mattered most, I heard, was doing the art, picking up my pencil and drawing on bits of paper.

This surprising answer helped me take seriously what I actually already knew – that doing my art really mattered for me and that if I continued pushing this poetic aspect of my life into second place behind my academic work, I would look back and regret it.

I love this vital question “What matters most?” It seems to have threaded its way through my life over recent years and pointed me in the best direction, sometimes turning around my expectations and plans. “What matters most?” has us scrutinize our life choices in terms of our values. I love it so much that it was a natural and inevitable part of my own course.

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Tara Mohr’s Playing Big Program will be starting its next run soon. I’m happy to recommend it for any woman who, as she puts it, wants to be more loyal to her dreams than to her fears. Details here: https://playingbig.taramohr.com/.

Over on the Inspirations page, I tell you how to access the Inner Mentor visualisation if you want to give it a try. You can also read about the book by James Hollis with the title “What Matters Most”…