How Do I Make a Difference?

It must be a sign of the times, and a wonderful one at that. Everywhere I seem to look these days up pops these magical words: making a difference. More specifically the question, how do I make a difference?

Looking around, it is clear that individually and collectively we are experiencing a yearning for a more meaningful, purposeful life. Rick Warren’s book sold over 30 million copies worldwide since 2007, with the driving question of the book: What on earth am I here for? Eckart Tolle’s book, has sold an estimated 5 million copies.

I too want to live a life that makes a difference, and for me, on a planetary level. However coming to this place has not been easy, not what I expected, and not obvious. For years I wrestled with the question of how that difference was to be made. What is the right way? What am I meant to be doing? What can I do to make a bigger difference? These questions poured through me without filling me for what felt like ages. Frustrating it was, disappointing at times, doubt filling, and disconcerting. Where was the clarity? The surety of knowing that this was my path? That this was how I was to make a difference?

The answers came in hard-to-interpret glimpses, but never was there this Aha! moment where the doorway to a brilliant future of meaningful living bathed in ease and joy beckoned.

In the film The Secret Neil Donald Walsh says something like, there is no great blackboard in the sky on which your purpose is written. In other words, it’s up to you to define it, and to live it.

But even knowing that did not erase the yearning—the inner ache to know what it was that I was meant to do with my time so that I would feel like I was making a difference.

I know a number of people who are so afflicted by that yearning that their time is spent in an exhausting search for the magical meaningful doorway. Leaping from one job to another, one cause to another, one big idea to another, one country to another, one relationship to another…until they sit down, spent, frustrated, disappointed. Until they muster up the energy to have another go, thinking that this time, yes this time will be different.

So if I could share my years-of-difference-yearning learning with you it would be this: making a difference in the world is primarily a function of what you be and not what you do. We are all on a life journey with one central purpose: to consistently upgrade our way of being, to elevate our consciousness, to become a living expression of our highest sense of self. The rest, including the purposeful doing that your heart longs for will follow, will flow from that very activity.

If I could put it another way: become what you need to be in order to do what it is you wish to do.

When you focus on how you show up in each moment, when you intentionally shift yourself to a higher state of self, becoming more conscious, more aware, more connected, more grateful, more giving, more empowering, more loving, more open, more accepting…instantaneously, in that very moment of breath, you are making a difference in this world. A difference greater than your eyes and ears will ever tell you.

The magic starts from here. Once you begin to live your new way of being—this way that makes a difference simply because you chose to shift your self— opportunities for even greater, purposeful service will emerge; opportunities which allow you to merge your being and doing into a seamless oneness. You will have become the kind of person that opportunities seek out—and those opportunities will be in perfect alignment with your deepest beliefs around who you are.

So if you want to know more about your way of being in this world—where you are at with it, sorta speak—simply take a good look at what you are attracting and not attracting into your life, both outer and inner forms, from people and situations to thoughts and emotions. These things are not separate, they are all beautifully perfectly an expression of your Being.

And choosing how you show up in each moment is the biggest difference you can possibly make.