In today’s episode I’m talking about fulfilment - where I used to seek it and what I’ve learnt recently from changing my perspective. It’s a shorter episode than normal as I’m recovering from a cold and no one needs to hear my nasally voice for that long 😉
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Transcript
Introduction:
In this episode I’m talking about what it means to feel fulfilled in life and why it’s important we expand our vision of what this looks like, something I’ve very much learning right now!
Episode:
Hello you, how are you doing? I’m good, however if I sound a little nasally, it’s because I’m shaking off the remnants of a cold so apologies for that. That’s also why I’m going to keep this episode short and sweet, I am in energy conserving mode at the moment. This episode is actually the penultimate one of the season, there will be one more in a couple of weeks and that will be the end of series five - still so surreal that I’ve done five series.
Today though, I wanted to talk about fulfilment. This is a word that has been floating about in my head a lot lately, and I think it’s because I’ve changed how I see it. But fulfilment, in itself, is something I have always considered.
Even at school I remember thinking about fulfilment when selecting the subjects I would study for GCSEs. I remember back then we were advised to pick a humanities subject, like geography or history and a tech subject, like food tech, design tech, textiles,etc. alongside a language and other core subjects. And most people did that, but I remember thinking no - that won’t make me happy. I loved languages and arts then, so I chose to study Spanish, German, Music and Drama. I remember teachers not being thrilled about it, but ultimately it was a choice I was able to make, and it was the right one.
Since then, every choice has been about doing what I thought would make me happy, from the subjects I studied in college and university, to the jobs I went after. And while it sometimes took a while to realise what it was that would really make me happy, I found my way. But here’s the thing… fulfilment to me has always been about the work I do. Of course, personal life elements seeped in, but in my mind it was largely about doing a job that made me feel fulfilled.
And that is still true, but, I feel like recently I’ve realised how integral other things in my life are to completing my personal fulfilment pie. Work is a big slice, so is where I live, my relationships, travel and the other big slice I’ve discovered is volunteering.
I’ve been volunteering for Beat, an eating disorder charity, for nearly two years now and it’s added a big old slice to that fulfilment pie. A lot of my drive comes from my personal experience of going through an eating disorder, coming out the other side and building myself up from scratch. It’s made me passionate about helping others and through my volunteer work with Beat, I’m doing that in such a tangible way.
It’s also taken pressure off of other things to fulfil me, if that makes sense? And that’s been a key lesson, it is an awful lot to expect one thing, one job, one person, one anything to fulfil you. So by expanding my vision of fulfilment, realising I can get it from multiple places has been eye opening and pretty amazing.
It’s also led to some pretty big decisions about my business, Blue Jay of Happiness, and I will be sharing more about that online soon, and will be going into a lot more detail in next week’s episode.
But I’m going to leave it there for now, and hope that this idea helps you perhaps widen your vision of what fulfilment means to you and where it comes from. Do let me know if this resonated with you, you can reach me over on Instagram or TikTok at @katbluejay. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with the season finale, but until then, take care.
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