I was able to spend some time with one of my mentors from New York this last week. He is a real pro in the music industry. He is a little rough around the edges, but one of the most spiritual people I have ever met.

He is the master of analogies. He can always explain his spiritual thought through a story or analogy. I previously wrote a few posts on Finding your Fit, and I was talking to him about this. He gave me an analogy from the music industry. He said that when a president of a label is serious about signing an artist, they do not ask them to come with their band or anything. They ask them to come with their instrument and voice or just voice. They also ask them to sing an original song. The president just wants to hear the artist and who they really are. They can build everything else around who the artist is.

He challenged me to do the same with my life. Who am I when I am stripped down? What are the things that burn in my heart? What am I truly passionate about? Forget my job, where I’m at, who I am friends with, or bills. If all those things were stripped away, what would be left of bare bones Aubrey?

By the end of my time with him, I had written out a personal mission statement. It consists of the things that make me tick. That make me want to wake up in the morning.

Then he hit me with this statement, “This statement should govern your life. Anything that does not line up with it is a distraction, and you have to get rid of it.”

Wow.

I will admit that this clarity has been a process of about the last 6 months of questioning everything about me. Even the things that I feel like God wants me to do. I will always be tweaking and changing, but I will always be able to look at what makes me tick and align my life accordingly.