I couldn’t help but notice the glow. Corinne sat before me, describing a persistent notion that kept whispering to her of a book that wanted to be written…by her. She was quick to point out all the reasons why it wasn’t a good idea and why she wasn’t the one to write the book even if the idea was brilliant. She had tossed it into the conversation casually – almost as an afterthought – and was getting ready to toss it back out again. But I had observed the telltale tingle and encouraged her to follow it, and so the book idea began to gain a little momentum. And then a little more. The tingle beckoned and teased and coaxed her into thinking that maybe, just maybe, this book really was a good idea – and she was just the person to write it.

Like many of my clients, Corinne has made the dazzling, courageous commitment to – finally – create work she loves. Or more to the point, to create a life she loves. She is in the process of leaving a chaotic and relentlessly demanding corporate job to look for one that might actually leave a little room in her schedule for eating and sleeping. And not just that – this time, she will be carving space into her life for the sole purpose of giving birth to her dreams. The thing is, though, her dreams aren’t really all that clear…but the voice that contemptuously dismisses her intention to follow her dreams as pure folly is coming through loud and clear, and so is the high-pitched screech of panic that follows on its heels. She really, really wants to figure this dream thing out quickly – as soon as possible! – and she needs it to make sense so she can explain it calmly and logically to – well, herself, for starters.

The thing is, though, that figuring things our calmly and logically is generally what led us to the land of Work Without Soul in the first place (or perhaps an even more hostile desination: Work That Crushes Our Soul). It all made sense on paper – we carefully plotted the right combination of schooling, skill and experience to get that perfect job – but we’re not living our lives on paper. We’re living them here and now, and we’re longing to make a difference, to live with passion, to really matter. And for that, we need our souls.

The most reliable path I’ve found to soul work is the path of longing, yet our longing is often buried under years and layers of fears and disappointments and frustrations and tight budgets and the near-constant demand to be practical. Our longing seems to have gone AWOL, and we haven’t a clue where to find it. Except that we do – the tingle, or any of its lovely cousins: sparkle, pleasure, excitement, curiosity, wonder, inspiration…energy. We need only follow the energy.

Simple, but not always easy. The biggest challenge most of us face in following the energy – the tingle – is that it doesn’t lay things out for us in neat, five-year plans. It calls us over here, plays hide-and-seek for a while, circles a few times around some crazy ideas, skips lightly over there, then takes us by the hand to help us over some puddles on our way to God knows where. We have no idea where we’ll end up, but we’re having some fun anyway. Slowly we realize that getting there and being there are one and the same – the very experience of living from this joyful place is the destination we seek, so we can surrender to the journey. We begin to trust that the tingle is the voice of our longing - and our longing is the voice of our soul. Following the energy – the tingle – becomes our soul work.

And this tingle has a very particular feel. It is engaging, enriching, enlivening – and we feel it in the here and now rather than imagining it in some future state or remembering it from long ago. It doesn’t always make sense to our logical minds. And so a very real task on this journey is to cultivate an expanded awareness of the nuances of our impulses, to distinguish our soul’s longings – our tingle – from the various imposters that flock into our psyches: things we used to want, or things we think we should want, or things we tell ourselves we want because they shore up our image in the eyes of others. And then, as we discern the tingle, our next task is to follow it. To trust it. To allow it to lead us step by step into the lives we came here to live.

Which brings us back to Corinne. Corinne has made and sold jewelry and other objects of beauty over the years, and she assumed the dream she was following had something to do with that kind of art. And it may, indeed. Yet there it was – the tingle around writing a book. What might happen if she explores that tingle? Who can say? All I know is, it is our willingness to surrender to our longings that opens new worlds of wonder and possibility for us – something a five-year plan can rarely do. So why not explore a few tingles of your own? As my beloved coach Tama Kieves is fond of saying, “You can’t plan an inspired life!”