We always hear that it is important to be sure about our career or products. How are we sure? It’s not just about reason or checking off boxes. Nor is it about feelings of passionate excitement as they are not great benchmarks for certainty over time. You know this yourself as how many times have you been over the moon with excitement about something you know will be what needs to be done for the rest of your life? And then it somehow dissipates in 3 or 4 weeks and you are back to wondering.

I am going to talk about something outside most of your experience in the hope it shows you how difficult the idea of feeling certainty can be and point you to the right kind of practice.

In the world of internal arts there are two pieces; the external (the physical body) and the internal (both physical and emotional). The internal feelings of energy movement are extremely subtle. They take practice and diligence to learn to differentiate them from intellectual descriptions of them. Without some discipline and instruction you tend to fantasize the things you are feeling. With practice, though, gradually you become aware of the different energies that are represented in the I Ching and can put them into your fighting arts. It is an incremental practice that is impossible to hurry. The more you practice the faster it comes. This isn’t a dissertation on how to do this; it is an example of the subtlety that exists and is analogous to the subtlety about knowing.

In knowing you go through the practice of desire that opens you in an incremental fashion to who you are and who you want to be. At the center of this you struggle with the question of “desired outcome” over and over again. You test yourself with visualization, you feedback your desired outcome to who you are and see if it resonates. When it doesn’t completely you make more precise the pieces of your desired outcome until you feel a calm, strong central pillar of certainty. When you get here your 2 minute elevator speech becomes obvious. When people ask you questions about your goal, purpose, direction the answers flow out with little energy. You know yourself and your life at this point. More importantly you’ve proven to yourself that you have a method for always discovering who you are at any point.

So for fun and yourself write down your 2 minute elevator speech about who you are. Don’t talk about your job or the number of children you have or all those things. Talk to me (of course this is only for you!) about your inner self; your dreams of changing the world and the way you want to feel.