My Best Life Speech : Inspired (video)

I forgot to post this on my blog! Oh no!

Last month I spoke at the Best Life Summit in Durham, North Carolina – it took me a long time to come up with what I wanted to say, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out – even if I haven’t exactly watched myself give the speech…

 

Video Transcript :

Emcee:

And next up we have Katie Curtis. She’s from Michigan. She’s an undercover princess with an eye of a videographer, and right now she’s just finished a movie called The Pirate Pool movie, which the main character is a dog. If you don’t believe her you ask Allen or you can ask Sandy.

She owns her own company, Inspired Video Marketing, and she’s working on the 70th item on her 144 item bucket list, which I think is amazing. SHe’s also probably taking the coolest selfies here with her amazing camera. Today she’s going to talk about what it means to be inspired, keeping in mind that inspired means to receive spirit or breathe. So give it up for Katie Curtis.

Katie Curtis:

 

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me the three reasons I picked that song for my intro song. I smell wet ground. Why can’t I see? Ow, ow, where am I? What was that? Oh crap. I think I was an animal. Oh shoot. What do I do? Modern life may not be fraught with the same dangers inherent to being in a forest. The literal darkness, the threat of predators, but it still has a lot of those same themes when we get the clenching gut or the racing heart, and we still have to contend with that.

Now looking at the forest that way it’s not the only way to do it. I smell freshness. Oh, look at how blue the sky is. Are those mountains in the distance? Am I standing on the trees? I can go anywhere I want. I am free. I am above the trees. I am inspired.

Actually I’m really glad that Jen went first, and talked about the giraffe and the turtle because that kind of really fits, but we can live a life on the forest floor contending with the bugs, contending with the fears, or we can live high above it all, soaring with the birds and choosing our destinies.

Now it was two years ago when I was on a plane, yes, literally above everything when this visual came into my head. I’ve been writing in a journal for 15 years, and even with all those words it’s still really hard to encapsulate what living is like. What feeling and being a human is, and so I’m on the plane trying to right down. I’ve had some great experiences. I felt so on top of everything. People wanted to be around me. Everything made sense. I had this super clear vision of what my life was, and I loved it, and I wanted to encapsulate it, and the vision of over looking this entire forest and seeing for miles came into my head.

It resonated with me because there had been so many times where I have been that person in the middle of the forest unsure which way to go and scared and kind of self worth issues and all of the fears that come with the uncertainty, and I wanted to live an inspired life over the trees.

So I dug into it, and now as Armin has pointed out, inspired stems from inspirate, the Latin word that was first used in the 1300s meaning in, into, spirate, breathe, which quickly became a metaphorical being breathed into by a divine spirit.

If you know Wayne [Dyer 00:04:51] you know he talks of being in spirit. Being embodied, being in alignment with that, and that’s what I want. I think that’s what we all want. We might call it different things. We might say the greatness. Living our best life. Being the giraffe. It’s all the same thing. Living this life that we have in our best possible way.

I know you’re all looking at me, and maybe some of you are wondering, maybe you know the answer because you all have the answer in you, but if I were in the audience listening, I would be wondering what’s the secret? What is she going to say next that’s going to transform my life.

I’m so guilty of that. We go to the seminars. We read all of the books and listen to the podcasts, and we think what are they going to say? What’s that one thing? WHat’s going to change my life, and those are really good because those fly you parallel to living above the trees, and it’s an easy jump from whatever it is they said to spark something and get you onto that path and away from being on the ground, but it’s mistake to think that that’s the only way because as I said we all have the secret in us. We all in any moment have that ability to be above the trees.

So what is it? Actually, in two speeches today two of our speakers have said the exact same thing, which I like because we’re saying the same thing in different ways because again the words we can never truly encapsulate everything. We’re always looking at different parts of the elephant.

So what’s the secret? It’s not a process. It’s not a formula. It’s not something you find in a book. Instead what the secret is, and this might be hard because we do spend some of our lives trying to disguise the fact that we have this power because it’s hard to take responsibility sometimes because then we can’t fall on well I didn’t know, or well, maybe if the cards were aligned.

Once we take responsibility it’s difficult, but the secret is to listen, to listen to that little kernel of truth. That little you that’s inside. That’s always talking and has some really amazing things to say that sometimes we ignore because we start thinking and we stop feeling, but if we’re listening then it allows the block blocking that little connection to get out of the way, see the light, NAD we can allow that spirit to fill us and guide us.

So it’s the secret. It’s not a process. It’s not a formula. It’s a choice. It’s a choice to maybe put on that podcast because you know you’re feeling down, and you know listening Wayne Dyer or Gary V or somebody will just motivate you right back up. That’s a choice. It’s hard to quit your pity party sometimes. IT’s a choice to sit down and refocus on your goals because maybe the actions you’ve taken you’ve lost sight of them.

It’s a choice to follow your priorities and make sure your doing what’s most important to you in the long haul instead of what seems most important in the moment. It’s a choice to forgiver or to give or anything, but it is also a choice, and we have this power in any moment to simply shift. To go from thinking into being. To go from that forest floor to the top of the trees. All it is a thought.

A thought to step out of the way of your inner self. So, no, you don’t need to learn to climb the trees. You don’t need to learn to run really fast to escape the predators to leave the forest. There is no right way. You don’t even need to learn to fly. All you need to do to live your inspired life is simply decide that being on the trees is where you belong, and let go of everything that’s keeping you tethered to the ground.

Almost done. You don’t need 100 percent accuracy. It’s okay if sometimes you’re on the floor. This is what being human is, but when you’re making the choice to choose spirit over fear, and your making it over and over, and you’re setting habits into motion. When you’re getting that inertia and that movement that’s when you are increasing the goodness in yourself. You’re increasing the goodness in those around you. You’re impacting everyone and you’re changing the universe.

That’s something that I want to be a part of it, and I know because you are here you want to too. So here’s to our inspired lives.