Like so many people today, I believed for most of my life - and definitely for most of my career - that my purpose and pretty much my entire self-worth was earned through my career, job title, salary, achievements and the recognition and praise I got from others.

It took getting and losing my literal dream job for me to finally question that long-held belief and to lead me into my own spiritual awakening.

I have always considered myself an overachiever (Leo Sun & South Node in the 10th house, if you're astrologically inclined), and up until the age of 29, I had happily and passionately leaped from one stone to the next on the proverbial path to a happy life, according to society's standards. I got great grades in high school and college, did as many extracurricular activities as I could squeeze into my schedule, captained my high school soccer teams, landed my first internship 3 days after graduating from college, and then moved from one steady corporate marketing job with benefits to the next - all within appropriate amounts of time for the best version of my resume, of course!

In 2016, I got my literal *dream job* with Coca-Cola, managing a team of photographers, videographers and content creators for the 2018 FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour by Coca-Cola. I was going to get to work for one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world, while promoting soccer (which I have played and LOVED/been obsessed with since I was 6 years old), traveling to 50+ countries on a private plane and developing social media and content strategies. Everyone agreed that you could not have written a more perfect job for me.

The job itself was completely amazing, and I savored every single moment of it, including the challenging ones. I was working on high-level marketing strategies, as opposed to doing more of the execution (and grunt-work, you might say) that I had mastered earlier in my career. I was giving presentations to important and super smart people - one of my favorite highlights was when I actually got to share part of a presentation and video my team had worked on with Alex Morgan herself! I coordinated and managed content shoots for our team everyday when we were traveling the globe - one day on a beach in Thailand, the next day against a snowy backdrop in Norway, then in a palm tree forest in Ivory Coast.

Now, I don't want this next part of the story to come off as one of those typical 'she had it all, but it all felt meaningless and empty' kind of tropes. Even though there were some big challenges I faced, it definitely didn't feel meaningless - working on that project was one of the most impactful and meaningful opportunities I've had in my life, and I appreciated every moment of it.

BUT...there's always a but. 😂 As the project was coming to an end, I faced a couple tough realizations.

One was that, as much as I didn't want to admit it for fear of seeming ungrateful, and as meaningful as that job had been for me personally, I realized that it still didn't feel as fulfilling as I thought it would. What I mean by that is while I felt like I got SO much out my job and the amazing experiences it offered me, I didn't really feel like I had made the positive impact on the world I had wanted to through my work. To be honest, at the end of the day, it felt like my main impact was just selling soda and marketing someone else's dream.

My second realization was even tougher. Even though I had done my absolute best and poured my every ounce of sweat, blood and tears into this dream job, a few of the people I worked with who I looked up to most and whose opinions of me I cared about most did not see the value in my work (or really in me as a person), and some of them even went to some pretty proactive lengths to tear me (and my character) down.

For someone with a really strong sense of self-worth, the whole situation probably would have blown over pretty easily - my friends and other coworkers kept telling me to basically just ignore the haters and keep doing my thing. But for me, as someone who had based the grand majority of my self-identity around being the overachiever, in being the BEST and in others validating how much of a good person and hard worker I was, the whole thing initiated quite a dramatic ego death. I began to question everything about myself and my worth - my creativity, my leadership, my purpose, my talents and skills…was I even a good person if these (few) people disliked me so much? And if others were believing their stories about my bad intentions and self-serving ways, were they all right and I was just blind to my own horribleness?

These questions, though, ended up leading me into my own journey of spiritual awakening. I dove head-first into any and every book, podcast, blog post and Instagram caption about healing, energy, self-love, self-worth and manifestation, and I eventually realized that I had been asking myself the wrong questions.

I shifted my internal questions from:

"How much worth do I have if others fail to see the value in who I am and what I do?"

"How can I PROVE to everyone around me that I am good enough?"

"How I can make them see and understand that I am worthy of their love, attention and praise?"

…to questions more like,

"If I truly know and love myself, do I really need every single person around me to validate my worth and my reason for being here?"

"What in my life am I doing solely because others have told me before that it's what a 'good person' should do?"

I know this is a bit of a long-winded story for a blog post, but I tell it to you because those realizations and questions ended up forming the foundation of my most major shifts in how I saw myself and my purpose in the world. And I think that so often, similar people who are desperately searching for their own life purpose or fulfilling career aren't actually looking for just a new shiny job description - they're looking for deep, internal shifts in how they see themselves and in what they believe about the world and what's possible.

Since starting my own spiritual journey, I've led myself to a lot of insights and discoveries about myself, via pretty much anything and everything mystical or metaphysical: Meditation, tarot and oracle cards, astrology, energy reading, reiki and energy healing, archetypal psychology, dream interpretation, shamanism, channeled writing…you get the idea.

If you know anything about Human Design (and I admittedly only know some basic things about my own design), my self-led journey of self-discovery and spiritual trial and error will make perfect sense to you, given my 1/3 profile. According to my Human Design, I'm meant to be an exhaustive researcher and truth seeker, often using my own successes and "failures" as valuable experiences and insights to share with others. This is definitely true for me, and my whole spiritual awakening/self-discovery process has formed the basis of how I want to help others and contribute to the world now as an intuitive and spiritual life coach.

A lot of what I've learned along the way, I share regularly on my instagram page and here on this blog. And if you're interested in working with me 1:1, you can check out the 'Work With Me' page to get an even better idea about my processes, what working with me is like and what packages I offer.

Thanks so much for reading about my own journey and how I got here! I would genuinely love to hear if anything from my story resonated with you or if you're facing similar experiences or themes in your own life. Comment below or shoot me a DM on Instagram to let me know! 😊💕✨

~ Chelsea ~