What Is Our Source of Creation?

What is the source from which we are creating our lives? Is it fear, a need to prove ourselves, a desire to be accepted and recognized, or is it love, a source of expansion that comes from expressing who we truly are and sharing that with the world?

I have spent most of my life in the entrepreneurial world, surrounded by business owners and people who are constantly creating, building, growing and chasing the next dream, and over the years I have come to believe that for many of us, one of the main fuels behind that ambition has been fear. The fear of not being enough, the fear of rejection, the need to prove someone wrong, the need to show our parents, our friends, society and ultimately ourselves that we are worthy, that we are capable, that we can make it.

And the interesting thing is that fear can be an incredibly powerful fuel. It can make us work harder than everyone else, push through pain, overcome rejection, get back up after failure and continue moving forward when most people would have stopped. That need to prove ourselves can help us build companies, create wealth, achieve recognition and accomplish things we once believed were impossible. Fear can take us incredibly far, and perhaps that is why it can be so difficult to recognize that it is fear that has been driving us all along.

The problem is that fear never tells us that we have arrived.

There is always another milestone, another zero in the bank account, another company to build, another award, another person whose recognition we need, another level of success that we believe will finally make us feel worthy. We keep telling ourselves that when we get there we will finally be happy, we will finally relax, we will finally feel complete, and then one day, if we are fortunate enough to reach that place we once called success, something unexpected can happen.

We get there and there are no fireworks.

We expected joy, fulfillment and happiness, but instead we may feel emptier than ever before, because we suddenly realize that everything we spent years chasing did not give us what we unconsciously believed it would give us. We achieved what we thought we needed to achieve, we proved what we thought we needed to prove, and yet something inside of us is still asking for more.

I believe this can become one of the most important moments in the journey of an entrepreneur, because it creates an opportunity to stop, become present and ask ourselves some very uncomfortable questions. What has really been fueling me all these years? Why am I building this? Why do I constantly need more? Who am I still trying to prove something to? What am I afraid would happen if I stopped? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: Who would I be if I no longer needed anyone’s approval?

In my own life, answering these questions has required a long journey inward, going deep into my own story, understanding my wounds, recognizing the fears and beliefs that shaped the person I became, and slowly working on healing what needed to be healed. It has been a journey of many years, and I believe I will continue working on it until the day I die, because healing is not a destination we suddenly arrive at, but a process through which we continue discovering deeper layers of ourselves.

But as we start healing, something beautiful begins to happen. We slowly start letting go of the need for recognition, the need to prove ourselves and the need to become someone in order to feel worthy, and as those layers begin to fall away, we start reconnecting with who we truly are underneath everything we have built around ourselves. We reconnect with our authentic self, with our soul, with that unconditional LOVE that I believe exists inside every one of us.

And from that place, our source of creation begins to change.

It doesn’t mean that we stop being ambitious, that we stop building businesses, that we stop dreaming big or wanting to create extraordinary things. In fact, I believe the opposite can happen. We can dream bigger, create more and have an even greater impact, but the energy underneath that creation is completely different because we are no longer creating in order to prove that we are worthy, we are creating because we already know that we are worthy.

We stop creating to fill something that feels empty inside of us and start creating as an expression of what is already within us. Success stops being about proving and starts becoming about expressing, expanding, serving, contributing and sharing our gifts with the world.

And I believe this is also where purpose begins to reveal itself. Maybe our purpose is not something we need to desperately search for outside of ourselves, but something that naturally emerges as we remove the layers of fear, expectations and identities that we have accumulated throughout our lives and reconnect with who we truly are. As we reconnect with ourselves, we begin to hear something that perhaps was always there, but that we were too busy proving, achieving and running to hear.

Fear asks us: What do I need to achieve so that I can finally feel that I am enough?

Love asks us: Now that I know that I am enough, what am I here to create?

To me, that is one of the most profound shifts we can experience in our lives, moving from creating out of fear, scarcity and the need for external validation, to creating from LOVE, expansion and a deep connection with who we truly are.

LOVE is, to me, the greatest force of creation in the Universe. It is not something we need to find somewhere outside of ourselves, because it is already within us. We simply need to remove everything that prevents us from feeling it, reconnect with ourselves and allow that LOVE to become the source from which we live, lead and create.

So perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is …

Am I creating my life from FEAR, or am I creating my life from LOVE?