Take a Step into Possibility - Your Own

Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - December 2025

Audio File

“I keep what’s true in front of me; I won’t get lost that way.”  

– Richard Wagamese, Embers

This is #4 in a five-part series on walking your authentic path in life, a path that offers peace, meaning, well-being, connectedness, freedom. If you’ve been following from the start, you’ve gained objective, non-judgmental clarity in your thinking (Step 1), big; you’ve discovered your own truth under the illusion of the thinking of others (Step 2), big; you’ve created a “movie” in your mind of a life that expresses that truth (Step 3), big. (And if you’ve not been following, it’s not too late to go back to the beginning. Just make sure you allow each part to do its work.)

Step 4: Manifest:  Perhaps surprisingly, this phase of the journey is the first that calls for “doing” in a traditional sense. Our action-obsessed world leaves many reacting to the contemplative stance of early phases with, “I can’t stand this; nothing’s happening.” However, if you’ve allowed reflection, self-awareness and envisioning to open you to new perspectives, you’ll find these action steps easy and rewarding, especially compared to the “command-and-control” world you’re leaving behind. That’s because you’ll be drawing your energy from inside you – vision, clarity, inner truth, awareness … and not from outside you – force, willpower, goals or other people.  

Here’s a snapshot of Step 4: Take one intentional action step into your vision each day. That’s it! A few key points: 1) It doesn’t matter what action you take as long as it expresses some aspect of your vision/movie; 2) view your step as an experiment, not as a plan/project/promise … just “try it out;” 3) focus on your experience, not on its outcome; (4) stop and listen; your actions create felt experience (feedback) that tells you how you’re doing (way more powerful than a plan or goal … no matter what old thoughts may tell you.)  More detail in the exercise.

Here's why this works:  you’re basing this process (your whole life, eventually) on your own inner felt experience, energy already (and always) inside you. It’s “free” energy. You don’t have to gear up, stress or struggle; save those for stuff you don’t want to do. Here … clear, objective thinking (step 1), awareness of your unique “seed” (step 2) and “memory of the future” from envisioning a life you love (step 3) create a pull … that draws you into your truth … so you no longer have to push yourself. For most, it’s a completely new way of being. Trust it. Besides, if you see it as an experiment, it’s OK no matter how it goes; you’re here to experience, learn from experience, and step again tomorrow, based on what you learn. Each day (forever) is a conscious step into possibility – your own. There’s no “there” to aim for, yet the path will fulfill and sustain you for a lifetime, with new choices at every turn.

A repeat … if you’ve not absorbed the essence of previous steps, voices of old lessons will stop you at every choice. That is how you got to right here – you listen! You know the voices – if you’re not trying, you won’t get there; only hard work creates results; it’s about outcomes, not the journey; it “shouldn’t” be like this; the unknown is scary.

Your path is made by walking it, not by having it laid out ahead of time. No amount of goal setting, planning or predicting can make things certain. And if they were certain, you’d not be able to change the course of your life! Think about it, even 5 seconds: If you believe you’re in charge, would you have designed your life in exactly the way it has happened so far? The answers you need to fuel your dreams are within the experience of being yourself – stepping into your vision, trusting, creating the path as you go – and not in a plan, trying, struggle or goal. Your power is in the capacity to envision new possibility. The more you envision “what’s possible,” the more you create “what’s possible.” With practice, you’ll be able to envision the next moment while you’re in this moment. You will see yourself being yourself, but you’ll also be able to choose how you want to be in the next moment, then be it.

This month’s exercise, done regularly, pulls you to just such a place. No force needed. One day you realize, perhaps even as an aha moment that seemingly came out of nowhere (except it didn’t), that you’re living your dreams and feeling at home doing so. If you discover that the actions you’re taking exist as a “job,” go for it. If not, you will have built such energy that you probably couldn’t stop yourself from creating a job on your own … or better, just doing it anyway because your love and your life are the same. The world needs your uniqueness – trust that.

Exercise: Manifesting Your Potential. Take one intentional step – any step – into your vision each day. That’s it! It doesn’t matter what action you take, because any step that opens you to experiencing your vision creates energy inside you … energy that continues to draw you into “more.” And the fact that you take a step “as an experiment,” not as a plan or promise, relieves you of the struggle associated with having to make something happen. You do this exercise for the purpose of learning, growing and gaining experience of what it would be like to be the real you, every day. As you stop after each step (instead of your custom of forcing another step), you can look around, take stock, see what you learned and how you feel … and what you might consider for next steps.

Although the step you take today may seem unrelated to yesterday’s – except that both are “in your vision,” with practice you’ll find that (1) your past illusion about ‘what life is about’ dissolves, (2) new possibility greets you with each new step, and (3) you notice all this happening, so you learn from it! You create your ideal life by walking it. As you walk, you realize you don’t do tasks; you become your true self, a day at a time.

My Story:  My big life shift, from “getting things right” to “helping others get things right,” was scary for me. I went from high-tech corporate “safety” (though I was no safer there than anywhere in the outside world) to creating a life coaching practice. I was on my own. This world was unknown. Perhaps it was tough to believe I had something to offer. Perhaps I’d not know what to do in strange situations. I was right. I didn’t know what to do. But I did it anyway, one step at a time. And the feedback I got was that I did know what to do. I never knew ahead of time, but I always knew in time. This invalidated all my old lessons that I had to know upfront how it would turn out. How limiting. I built a coaching practice one client at a time. More accurately, I built it one conversation at a time. No, it was one thought at a time. Yet the potential and power have inspired me for 25 years now, and I feel “at home,” at home in the unknown. In fact, only the external world is unknown. By being in touch with my authentic self, living my truth, I’m no more in unknown territory than I am in my own living room.

Life Lessons from Nature: Gandhi is always one of my favorite examples of living one’s truth, of believing in self, of stepping into the unknown, of holding onto one’s principle despite circumstances, of allowing one’s gifts to unfold into the world, of listening to feedback … and by so doing, achieving results far beyond what any goal or agenda might ever offer. His life vision was that every human had the right to be treated with dignity. For him, to step into this vision knowing those he’d encounter didn’t care about dignity (except, perhaps, their own), and knowing he’d treat them with dignity no matter their behavior, took an amazing level of trust and commitment. The simple version of his life work is that he brought the British Empire to its knees with only a law degree, a loincloth, and huge commitment to a vision of possibility. (Change a few details, and this story could describe the Buddha, Jesus, Mother Teresa, Disney, M.L. King, and now … perhaps ... YOU.) Your life doesn’t have to match their stories. Yet you have a dream inside you. Even better, you have all the tools to discover and manifest your unique dream. And it’s a choice. It was a single choice for him, too, driven by awareness of a thought, that meant the difference between his changing the world and staying in the back of the train.

Book of the month: Something different for this month. Instead of taking in more, express more. Write your own story. You might write a bit about what you learned about yourself as you explored the way your thoughts had taken charge of your life. You might write a bit about listening for (and to) that one voice that is uniquely your own, and how it led you to discover your authentic path in life … and how growing awareness allowed you to envision a life you’d love, guided by energy already inside you … so that you’d be drawn into life instead of pushing yourself there. And lastly, you might write about the learnings gained by just noticing how your “take a step each day” experiment unfolded, just “allowing” it to expose possible next steps to you .. so you didn’t have to plan it all out ahead of time. Who knows … “reflecting on your reflections” here might evoke an even greater story, hiding out underneath the others.