My friend Archana Parsai Gehlot shared this message today that looks at cracking our shell:
“When an egg is broken by outside force, life ends.
When broken by inside force, life begins.
Great things always begin from inside.“
When I read it for the first time, I smiled. But I also paused when I realized that in the first instance, when it is broken by outside force as nourishment of another, does it not give life?
But that’s not the point as life within the egg does come to an end.
When An Egg is Broken by Outside Force, Life Ends
Many of us are influenced by our external environment; society, friends, colleagues and strangers whose opinions can either harden or ease our life. When we were young we never thought of failing until someone pointed out to us that we did not succeed at achieving something. From that moment, any failures came with negative energy so we learned it was something to fear and avoid at all costs.
The narrative of cracking the external shell provides us non-stop information that creates fear and some of it is very real as there are as many traps and seductions as opportunities for us to choose from.
But imagine for a moment that we saw our mind as a production house creating stories, streaming videos and thrillers, what would we name them? And could we really see the dramas and comedies that our minds so brilliantly know how to create?
If this show was cancelled, what would we crack wide open?
Cracking Our Shell is an Inside Job
Change can happen when we integrate our clarity of purpose with our whole self, by being fully present to creating what we want in the world. Part of the process is putting our own signature on how we want to break patterns that no longer serve us.
In a noisy world where attention is a sought-after currency, standing out and being heard can be a real challenge, but it is also an opportunity to find out how powerful and effective we can be. Once we have clarity on how we want to show up and a willingness to experiment, then we can create with conviction.
In both life and work, there are codes of acceptance that we adopt. We may have been brought up to believe that we need certain codes to give us access to the doors of success. But by tuning into our inner self and following our intuition and heart—whether it’s noticing when we come alive or how we’re truly feeling—we can develop a stronger sense of who we are and where we need to head next.