Stephanie Harrison

When people say to you, oh, just live an authentic life or whatever, I always get kind of annoyed because thinking, what does that mean?

We're often doing so many things in order to please other people or to convey a certain impression.

Simply saying, what do I want right now?

How do we translate that into action?

What matters to me?

It feels really vague and really broad.

What would I like to spend the next 10 minutes doing?

That's all it really takes to get you back on your path.

And so this is an exercise where I encourage people to just turn inward and ask themselves, what do I need right now?

Or what do I want to do?

What does my true self want to do in this exact moment?

And then do it, even if it sounds weird, even if it's something that you wouldn't normally do, or maybe it gets in the way of how productive you are today.

Yeah, totally.

And like it's okay to make a cake, right?

Maybe you making the cake is the exact thing that you need to get yourself unstuck on a problem.

And simply doing that allows you to start moving in the direction of living an authentic and meaningful life.

Maybe making the cake is just something enjoyable for you that you can do for yourself or something you can share with your kid.

Because in fact, what you will be doing is with that action, you'll be tapping into something that's intrinsically important to you.

Not everything in life has to be optimized for our productivity.

And in fact, doing so ends up backfiring and really hurting us.