A lot of us did not initially choose our North Star. We inherited it.

What This Episode Is Really About

After the Rise Up Live keynote, people kept coming up to Jess with questions about the BEAT Method. But what stopped her cold was something else: when she asked people what they were building toward, most of them could not answer. Not because they lacked ambition. Because they were looking at the North Star incorrectly.

A North Star is not a destination. It is the filter that helps you decide everything else. Your identity. Your behaviors. Your environments. Your yeses and your nos. And the reason most people cannot name their North Star is because they have been looking in the wrong place: at the label that was handed to them along with the role they accepted.

This episode introduces the distinction between a labeled North Star and a lived one. And uses the concept of codependency, drawn from Melody Beattie via Jen Hatmaker's Awake, to name why it is so hard to let go of a North Star that was never actually yours.

In This Episode

• Why the people at Rise Up Live could not name what they were building toward, and what that revealed
• Why a North Star is a filter, not a destination
• The concept of inherited North Stars: handed to you with the label, accepted as the next logical step
• How codependency applies to North Stars: optimizing, controlling, self-repressing in service of something that was never yours
• Labeled North Stars: exhausting because they are held together by will, not alignment
• Lived North Stars: energizing, patient, willing to take the unconventional path because you are following something real
• The Forrest and Jess story: breaking the inherited relationship script, playing the long game, the Dracula movie and the mid-afternoon proposal conversation
• How stopping trying to make a relationship fit the inherited mold allowed her to ask the real question: is this my person?
• The challenge: go back to the BEAT Method with a new question, not just who told you who you were, but what North Star did that person give you?
• Is that North Star actually mine?

The Big Idea

The difference between a labeled North Star and a lived one: a labeled North Star requires constant optimization to feel like you are progressing. A lived North Star creates alignment, not just velocity. When you are moving toward it, you feel like you are revealing something that was already true about you, not performing something you were told you were supposed to be.

Memorable Lines from This Episode

"A lot of us didn't initially choose our primary North Star. We likely inherited it."

"A labeled North Star is what someone told you to want."

"A lived North Star is what you actually want when you stop performing for somebody else."

"Labeled North Stars require constant optimization. Lived North Stars create alignment."

"When you operate from a labeled North Star, you are executing for the person the label says you should be."

"Break your codependency on somebody else's North Star."

Resources

Book: Awake by Jen Hatmaker — https://amzn.to/4eXmUFB

Book: Codependent No More by Melody Beattie — https://amzn.to/4twg1i7

BEAT Method Guide: beat.bigideasmadesimple.com

Your One Thing This Week

Go back through the BEAT framework with a new question. Not just who told you who you were, but: what North Star did that person give you? And is that North Star actually mine? If the answer is no, stop owning it, stop caretaking it, stop optimizing for it. Sit with the space that opens up. That is where the real work lives.

Connect with Jess

If this one helped you see something you needed to see, come find me at BigIdeasMadeSimple.com. That is where the newsletter lives, where everything I am building is taking shape, and where you can connect directly. One idea in your inbox every week, nothing else. And if you know someone who is chasing a North Star they never actually chose, send them this one. The right idea at the right time changes everything.

Follow Jess: @thejesswebber on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook

Key Themes

• Labeled vs. lived North Stars
• Codependency on inherited goals and identities
• The North Star as a filter, not a destination
• Identity alignment vs. identity performance
• Breaking the relationship script: a case study in rejecting an inherited framework
• The BEAT Method applied to North Star clarity
• You do not need to burn it down: you need to break the codependency

Welcome back to Big Ideas Made Simple.

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I'm Jess Weber, if you listened to last week's episode, episode 13, you know that I walked

you through one of my signature frameworks called the beat method and how it applies

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specifically to what we've been talking about this whole podcast series.

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So when you have the ability to go through it, you learn how to break, examine, audit, and

tune.

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And here's what happened with that.

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I actually delivered that keynote a week ago or so at an incredible event called Rise Up

Live.

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And I was privileged enough to have a booth where it allowed me to connect with attendees

all around the keynote.

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So before I gave it and the rest of the event time.

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And here's what was so interesting is people come up to me, they'd ask me who I am, what I

do, why am I there at the event?

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Because every person that spoke on stage is also partnered with the founder of the group

and all of the speakers were truly vendors to the community, which is a really cool

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concept for an event.

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And so I stood out to a lot of people because they had never met me before or heard about

me inside the community before.

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And it was an incredible thing to ask them, who are you?

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What do you do?

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Why are you at the event?

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How many times have you been here?

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Questions like that.

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And once we started getting talking, I had many come up to me after my beat method

keynote.

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and say, my goodness, that was incredible, that was engaging.

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And that's not what I got stuck on.

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I I appreciated the feedback.

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I appreciated the fact that it meant something to somebody because that aligns with who I

am at my core.

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But what I noticed was a lot of people were struggling with their North Star.

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So I say, you know, I appreciate feedback, but I also knew why I was there.

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My North Star is to connect people with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to

live their most impactful life.

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And when I would ask people, what are you building towards?

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What are you working towards?

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What are you creating wealth for?

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Why are you doing something?

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Why are you even here?

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They couldn't always answer it.

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And it totally blew my mind.

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But yet it showed me that all of the work that I had been doing on helping people slow

down and audit their behavior so that they could be more intentional honestly doesn't work

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if you don't have that directional anchor.

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So the work that I've been describing in previous episodes or in that keynote wasn't

failing.

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something else was.

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And I believe that that's what I need to talk about with you today.

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So this episode literally grew out of my experience at Rise Up Live.

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And where, like I said, multiple people came up to me to talk about everything, but they

couldn't answer what they were building or working towards.

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And so I don't blame any one of those humans for

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missing the mark or not having that.

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What I realized is that your North Star, when I asked that question, they saw it as a

destination and it's not.

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To me it's the filter that helps you decide everything else.

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It helps define your identity.

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It helps define your behaviors.

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It helps you choose environments.

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And the reason that people can't name their North Star is because they were looking at it

incorrectly and they were probably looking in the wrong place.

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So it made me sit and really think about how do you know what your North Star is?

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Because I can rattle mine off clearly in any situation and I know it in my gut.

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And I think I know it in my gut because I have a grounded identity in who I am that wasn't

a label given to me by somebody else.

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And so as I started reflecting on this, because know, plane time, especially when your

flight is delayed and you don't get home till 4 a.m., gives you a lot of thinking room.

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And so I was going through these thoughts around identity and around

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desires and impact and motivations for a future.

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And it made me think about something that I had heard when I was listening to Jen

Hatmaker's book, Awake, that came out fairly recently.

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And I did listen to the audiobook because I love the way that Jen speaks and shares things

and emotes.

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And so,

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I want to paraphrase what I heard there because it's important, but she was also quoting

another author, Melody Beatty.

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And in it, she was sharing about codependency.

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And the line that kind of stuck with me was that a codependent person is someone who has

let another person's behavior affect them or impact them.

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And then from that, they become obsessed or desire to control that person's behavior

because the behavior impacted them.

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And here's the thing that actually matters here.

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The heart of codependency isn't actually living in the other person.

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It's inside you.

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It lives in the ways that you've let other people's behaviors affect you and the ways that

you try to impact them.

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So controlling, caretaking, obsessing, self-worth, disguised as hustle, self-repression,

any of that.

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shows up in some ways potentially as codependency.

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And what Beatty said that Jen was quoting was, it doesn't matter whose fault it is, once

you've got it, you've got it.

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And the codependency that you develop becomes your problem.

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And so here's why it was coming up in my head when I was thinking about all things North

Star.

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A lot of us didn't initially choose our primary North Star.

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We likely inherited it.

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So that North Star, like I was alluding to, came attached to a label or the container that

the label's attached to.

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And they literally handed you a North Star and said, hey, here's the thing that's going to

motivate you.

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And so what does that look like in the context of who you are?

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If you're an entrepreneur, your North Star may have been scale.

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If you're a high achiever, your North Star may have been optimization or performance.

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You're a provider, then your North Star is performance.

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you're an ambitious person in any field and your North Star might be accumulation.

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It could be money, it could be status, it could be credentials, it could be opportunities.

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It doesn't matter what the category is, but if you look at that list, you'll notice that

those North Stars might not be yours.

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they're the ones that came attached to the label that you were handed and you might have

accepted them because it seemed like the natural next step.

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Or they were subtly given to you so slowly and quietly that you stopped realizing that you

had a choice to reject them.

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So.

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You become essentially codependent on this other person's North Star and so you start to

optimize for it.

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You control everything in your life to serve it.

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You build your self-worth into the foundation and decide that you're only worthy if you're

moving toward that thing.

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You start self-repressing anything that doesn't serve it.

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and you're caretaking the heck out of it, making sure it's protected and moving forward at

all times.

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And the reason that hurt so much was because again, once you become codependent on that

North Star, you're stuck, you've got it.

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It doesn't matter who gave it to you in the first place.

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And so then you just keep running towards it harder, faster, more efficiently optimized,

executed, performed somewhere along the way.

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You never realized that it isn't even yours.

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And I know that because I think that's exactly what I was describing in previous episodes

when I was living in somebody else's container or wearing somebody else's label and

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identity and owning that I was told do this to earn the right to that, to do this, to earn

the right to do that, et cetera, et cetera, which was literally

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somebody dangling a different North Star as a carrot in front of my head.

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And I think it's so funny because when you start to recognize that pattern, you can really

start to analyze where you've come from and then make more conscious efforts to where

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you're going.

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And I laugh because unknowingly,

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I have been a person who rejected those dangled carrots in many different places in my

life.

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And one of the funniest and yet perfect examples here is the story of my husband and I and

how we got together.

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So my husband's name is Forrest and I love telling this story.

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I use it at the beginning of my keynote and other places, but we got married without truly

dating.

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And I say that because if you look at it through the lens of the traditional relationship

North Star, you know, I totally screwed up and didn't follow the mold.

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So the script that I was handed was, you know, being a woman, you go to school, you get a

job, you find somebody, you date them, you get to know them, you fall in love, you get

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engaged, all that.

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There's a natural progression and a timeline.

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And it's intentionally laid out for you to move you towards that north star.

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And Forrest and I did it completely backwards.

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So I met him twice, actually.

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That's a whole nother story for another day.

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But I met him and I was instantly interested in him.

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And this was more than just, he's cute or, he's smarter, he's funny, or, he has a nice job

or whatever it is.

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It was truly this weird gut instinct of there is something different about this human and

I want to know more.

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And so we actually, while we were introduced in person first, we really started

communicating via text message when I stole his phone number from a friend who got set up

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with him, but she felt like they weren't compatible and that he was too nerdy, which was

right up my alley.

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And so we started talking and I kept saying, hey, we should go to dinner, we should go to

lunch, we should hang out, we should see a movie, something.

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And he would always tell me no, no, no, because he knew that I was interested in more.

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And he was like, I am not.

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And so I played the long game with this man, you know, I developed the friendship with him

and it took him about five years, partially because I did move out of state for a while,

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but five years to finally be like, oh, okay, she's not leaving.

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I haven't been able to get rid of her.

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Let me go spend time with her.

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And then we started hanging out and then we started hanging out every weekend and the

whole time he's always very adamant.

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We are not dating.

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This is platonic.

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This is a friendship.

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This will never be anything more.

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You should date other people.

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And the whole time I was adamant, hey, this is different.

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I've dated before.

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I'm not interested in anybody else.

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When you're ready, let me know.

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So parallel realities going towards what you would technically call a different North

star, but

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We both were very clear on where we were and what we wanted.

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and for 10 years or so that was exactly how it was until one afternoon when we were

sitting on the couch watching I want to say it was Dracula dead and loving it it's about

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three o'clock in the afternoon he pauses the movie midway through and he goes so I think

I'm ready and I look at my watch I'm like ready for what?

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like we had lunch it's not dinner time what are you talking about?

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and he goes I'm ready to get married

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And you know, there's half my brain that is like in freak out, girly, squealy, excited

panic mode of like, my gosh, is it me?

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But then there's the rational part of me that goes, I can't assume this is me because we

are not dating right now.

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And so, you know, the two speedy haves combating with each other lead me to ask the next

question, okay?

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To whom?

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And Forrest goes, well, you know, to you.

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And I was like, okay.

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Again, two halves of the brain spinning opposite directions, excited, but going, what the

heck?

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And I say, great.

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When are you thinking?

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Because this is January of 2018.

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And he goes, oh, I'm thinking this year, you know, like the fall would be nice.

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And I'm like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

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So is this your proposal to me?

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And he looks at me he goes, no, but I figured I should tell you that I was planning on

this before we were at that juncture because we haven't been dating.

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And I laugh and I'm like, okay.

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And then I think for a second and I look at him and I go, you're proposing on May 12th,

aren't you?

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he looks at me like I'm crazy, no no what are you talking about no, and I said honey I

know you I've known you for 10 plus years.

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I said we've had Phantom of the Opera tickets for months already and it's coming to town

on May 12th, and I said my bet is that you're planning on doing it Phantom of the Opera,

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and I love that idea.

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But here's the thing, May to the fall is not a long time to plan a wedding.

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know, dresses take months, venues are hard to come by, October, which is what he was

starting to talk about, is the height of wedding season.

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I said, if you want to get married this fall, you're going to have to let me plan the

wedding in advance knowing my answer.

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And he's like, okay.

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So that's exactly what happened.

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He told me that we were getting married in January, wedding was planned by March, official

engagement at Phantom of the Opera and engagement photos outside in front of the posters

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in May and married in October.

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We've been together ever since.

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And so.

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I share all that and I laugh about it now because again, if I had been operating under

somebody else's definition of a relationship, a healthy relationship or a marriage, that

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path

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is completely reckless.

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I mean, by all intents and purposes, I was not doing it right.

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Like I was taking a shortcut or missing something or not giving myself the chance to know

him romantically the way that I knew him in the context of a friendship.

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But when I stopped trying to make a relationship fit the inherited script or mold,

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When I let go of somebody else's timeline or expectations for my right way to do this, it

shifted inside of me.

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Instead of asking, are we doing this in the right order?

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I could just sit there and say, is this my person?

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And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the answer was yes.

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And so the order of operations to me, especially as a math teacher, didn't matter.

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I didn't care.

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Well, I say all of this, I say it because it wasn't that I was giving up on standards or

the desired outcome and I wasn't being impulsive.

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mean, heck, 11 years for a marriage is not impulsive.

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But I realize now, if I look at that through what I'm talking about in this episode, I

stopped being codependent on the script for my relationship.

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And that allowed me to see the reality in front of me.

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This person is my person.

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The long game, the intentionality of showing up without an expectation is what matters.

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And so I became best friends with my person.

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And he knew right or die that I was there for him because I wasn't there for all the

reasons that somebody would have potentially said I needed to date him.

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And so when you're not obsessing or dependent on somebody else's steps, you show up

differently.

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You're more patient.

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You listen better.

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You build something that's real.

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And that's the difference between taking somebody else's definition of a North Star and

living with your own.

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So I share all of that because again, I know how hard it is to

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shift gears when somebody points something out to you.

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Too often we hear something, it's a podcast, a book, a keynote, whatever, and they make

really good points, but then, and we can kind of see ourselves in it, but at the same

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time, we don't want to admit to it, we don't want to own it because it feels like we

failed.

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And so I want to challenge you, go back to episode 13, go through that beat framework, the

break, examine, audit, tune.

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and use it in the context of getting out of your own way.

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Use it to figure out your own labels, your own identity, and use it to start figuring out

what North Star you want.

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And anytime I say North Star language, I truly mean this as just what is something that

you want to leave the world?

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with that is more than a dollar sign.

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So I want to leave the world with connections to the knowledge tools and resources that

were needed to create a bigger impact.

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And that's what I do in my day job, right?

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I also legacy wise, I can't stand some of the language around just build wealth, right?

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Or build generational wealth.

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And yeah, money matters.

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Money makes things different for people.

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But at the same time, I want to create a financial stability and legacy to serve the

Children's Heart Foundation with research money for grants, because that changed my life

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and my son's life.

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So it's things like that that, I mean, I know not everybody has traumatic medical things.

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I know not everybody has an innate desire to teach the way I do.

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But I do believe that everybody has something in them somewhere that when you strip away

the identities and labels and North stars that were handed to you, you can find how you

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want to show up in the world.

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What is the thing that you want to leave as a legacy that is yours?

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And remember, it doesn't have to be financial.

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It doesn't have to be a building at a university or a wing of a hospital.

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But how do you want to leave the world a little bit better than how you found it?

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And use that as a great place to start.

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And so if you can go through the beat and really look at it and say, okay, I'm no longer

running towards the wrong thing.

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I'm going to do the work, find my identity, start to name a North Star and...

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and know that it is not about wealth or accumulation or optimization, then you have the

opportunity to leverage that beat method to really move you forward towards something that

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fills you up inside, rather than makes you feel like you're stuck on the treadmill chasing

the carrot.

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And so until you examine what you're running towards and what you're running on, then

you're probably still stuck in something borrowed.

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or given to you.

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So again, here's the difference between a labeled North Star and a lived one.

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A labeled North Star is what someone told you to want.

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You should want this because of this, because of that.

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It's the next logical step.

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It's what is expected of you.

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And a lived North Star is what you actually want when you stop performing for somebody

else.

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Remember, the difference is so simple.

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Labeled North Stars require constant optimization to feel like you're progressing.

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You're always refining the approach.

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You're trying to get more efficient.

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And you're looking for the next level, the next milestone, the next productivity hack, the

next thing to prove that you are still on track.

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Because if you stop optimizing,

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You actually have to feel and think about whether or not you even want to be there.

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And a lived North Star creates this incredible feeling of alignment, not just velocity.

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So when you're moving towards it, you feel like you are revealing something that was

already true about you, not performing.

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something that you were told you were supposed to be.

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So the label North Star makes you obsessed with the steps.

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checking the boxes, doing it right, following the timeline, literally being productive in

a certain way that almost equates to performance.

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And that live North Star makes you patient.

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It makes you willing to take that unconventional path, makes you willing to skip the

script because you're following something real instead of a sequence.

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So the label North Star is exhausting.

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because it's not really yours.

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And you're holding it together through the sheer force of will and discipline.

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And your live North Star is energizing.

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It's when, when, when things are hard, you're still excited to, to call it out because

you're building something that actually matters to you.

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So I know I told you last week, my mom was supposed to head into surgery.

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Turns out they didn't do that.

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But she then got out of the hospital.

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fell and now is back in the hospital with a whole new set of things.

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I had to put some things on hold to make sure that I could show up for her.

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But even when I'm sitting in a hospital room, in the ER, dealing with an ambulance or

laying in bed at night, thinking through things, I don't fret over the timeline because I

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know at the core of who I am, I am headed towards the thing that lights me up inside.

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And I've created a life that allows me to serve and be there for her as needed rather than

being stressed about missing work and PTO and doing all of the things that were told and

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given to me and defined for me in other roles.

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So to me, part of my North Star is building a life for my family, right?

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And I just want to really push you and challenge you to think.

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When you operate from that label North Star, you are executing for the person the label

says you should be.

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You are truly building somebody else's vision disguised as your own.

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But when you operate from a lived North Star, you are executing for the actual person that

you truly are.

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And that is a fundamentally different thing.

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So I know what it feels like, like I said, because I spent years as a productivity expert,

as an efficient operations manager, all the organized systems person, coordinator of

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chaos.

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I don't care what label it was.

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I was the person who had it all together.

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and could teach you how to do it too.

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And that person had a North Star about optimization, about scale, about systems, about

brands.

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And it worked so well because so many other people were impressed.

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And it was about being the person that everybody else depended on.

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And I was very good at performing for that North Star.

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I could chase it all day.

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could build towards it.

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I could execute it.

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But I was unhappy because it was never actually mine.

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And so I, underneath all that performance, the one who generates ideas wildly fast and

sees around corners and wants to teach frameworks that change the way people think, not

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just how they organize their desk, the person who was sitting in the back of the room

while I was out building somebody else's vision, that person

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was sitting in the back of the room while I was out building another person's vision.

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Once I named that and examined it, I broke my codependency on productivity as a label for

myself and the North Star that came right with it.

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So once I asked myself what I actually wanted, not what made sense for the person I was

supposed to be, but what actually mattered to me, everything shifted.

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Big ideas made simple became the thing I actually wanted to build.

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Not big ideas made perfect, not big ideas optimized, just the ideas that matter made

simple, taught by the actual true version of myself instead of a performance.

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So let's go back to that codependency pattern here because I do think it's important to

make sure you see that clearly.

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You inherited an or star because it came with a label and because you are probably a

smart, capable, driven person, you developed a whole system to protect it.

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You obsess over, I doing it right?

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Am I going at the right pace?

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Am I hitting my milestones?

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Just like my five-year-old gets a...

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milestones every six months from his early childhood center and his doctor, you're

probably doing the same thing on somebody else's North Star.

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You're trying to control the outcomes, the timeline, how it is perceived by other people.

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And when you don't feel like you're in control, you feel like a failure.

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And then you question the validity of everything you have done and who you even are.

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So you curate it, you care take it, you make sure that that label is always your priority.

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You organize your life around that labeled North Star and you say yes to the things that

serve it even when it doesn't serve you at your core.

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You protect everything you're building towards from distractions and yet underneath it,

you struggle with your self-worth.

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because your worth is attached to whether or not you're succeeding at that North Star.

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And so if you're moving towards it, you feel okay.

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But if you're not, if you start to question things, then you start to feel like

something's wrong with you.

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And you probably are self-repressing.

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Any part of you that doesn't serve that label North Star, you hide it, minimize it, push

it down.

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You become very good at performing that version of you that serves the goal.

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And the brutal thing is, even when you break the identity, even when you do the beat work,

if you don't break your codependency on somebody else's North Star, you're just gonna

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rebuild a slightly different version of the exact same pattern.

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Because codependency isn't about the North Star, it's about your relationship to having

something external define you.

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So.

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Lots of rambling, lots of storytelling here.

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What does this all boil down to?

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How do you find your North Star?

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And I'm talking about the lived one, the one that you own that is 100 % yours.

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So here's what I've noticed.

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It usually lives right underneath what you thought you wanted.

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So it's the thing that feels true about you when nobody else is watching.

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Or it's the thing that you do when you're not performing for someone else.

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It's the thing that drives you and keeps you going even if nobody knows about it.

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It's in what you choose when the label isn't telling you what to choose.

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It's the thing that makes you patient instead of obsessive.

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You are willing to take the long road if you know it's the real one.

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So it's not about how big or impressive it looks or whether it fits into the category

people expect it to fit into.

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For me, it was never about productivity.

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It was clarity.

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It was reducing friction and helping people see themselves in their situations so clearly

that they could actually make the right choices for themselves.

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All of the productivity stuff was just a container that I had been put into because it was

what made sense at the time.

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For you, it might be a completely different thing.

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It might be something that you haven't even given yourself permission to want yet because

it doesn't match the label that you've been using for so long.

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But again, here is what I know.

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When you are operating from a lived North Star, you can actually do the beat framework

fully.

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You can break the inherited identity because you've already started to glimpse the real

one underneath.

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You can examine what you built with honest eyes because you know what you're comparing it

to.

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You can audit the gap between where you are and where you actually want to be.

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And you can tune everything, your business, your roles, your relationships, your life,

towards something that actually feels like yours.

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So if you listened to last week and you got stuck at the tuning phase, this is probably

why.

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You need to ask yourself a different question before you move forward.

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It's not just,

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Who told me I was this person?

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That was the episode 13 question.

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But this episode 14 question is what North Star did that person give me?

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And is that North Star actually mine?

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Because if your answer is no, you need to realize that you've been running towards

something that you never actually chose.

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You don't need more optimization.

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You don't need a better strategy.

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You don't need to execute harder.

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You need to break the codependency with somebody else's

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nor star.

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And how that looks is you sitting with some uncomfortable questions.

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Questions like, what would I want if I wasn't supposed to want anything?

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What would matter to me if no one else knew about it?

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What would I build if I didn't have to prove anything to anybody else?

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Those questions are scary because the answers might not fit the life you already built.

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They might require you to make different choices.

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They might require you to disappoint people who are counting on you to keep being the

version that they've gotten used to.

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But there is also the most important question you can ask, because your real true North

Star is the filter that makes beat work.

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It's the thing that tells you what matters when you're doing the examination.

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It's the thing that shows you the gap that exists when you're auditing.

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It's the thing that guides your decisions when you're tuning.

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So without it, you're just rearranging the furniture in somebody else's house.

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So truly, here's the thing that I need you to think about when you finish this episode.

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Finding your actual North Star isn't about burning down everything you've built.

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It is not about quitting your job tomorrow or blowing up your relationships or deciding

that everything you've ever done is wrong.

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It's about looking at everything that you've built and asking, does this fit the person I

want to show up as today?

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Sometimes that answer might be yes, and if it is, keep going.

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Sometimes it's yes with a minor adjustment, and so the threads right there.

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You just got to tweak things slightly.

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And then sometimes the answer is no, and you do have to let go.

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And that's the hardest one, but it is the best thing you can do for yourself.

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It is the most honest and true decision you can make today.

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I kept teaching about systems and organization because those parts of me are real.

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They're true.

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I'm still the person who wakes up at 3 a.m.

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with a framework in my head or sees patterns the second that I hear from someone.

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I still love building things that work really well.

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But the second that I stopped performing in the productivity expert version of myself, and

I stopped caretaking the systems for systems sake, and I started actually asking what I

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wanted to build, what kind of conversations I wanted to have, what kind of training I

wanted to do, what kind of keynotes I wanted to deliver, and even who I actually wanted to

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serve, I found a different answer.

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And that was, I want to help people think more clearly about who they are and what matters

to them.

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I want to build frameworks that change people's perspectives around themselves and how

they show up in the world.

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I want to be the person asking the question beneath the question, not the person who has

all the answers.

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That right there, that's my North Star.

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And everything looks different when you build towards that instead of being the most

organized person in the room with a tiny little trophy.

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So again, here's what I'm asking you to do after you finish.

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Take whatever you're building right now, business, brand, role, relationship, a version of

yourself that you're working really hard to become and ask yourself, what North Star am I

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running towards?

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Not the one that makes sense.

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Not the one that you're supposed to want.

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Not the one that came with the label.

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But what is the actual North Star?

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And then ask the harder question.

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Is that North Star mine?

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Did I choose it?

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Or did it come attached with an identity I inherited?

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Am I running towards it because it matters to me?

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Or am I running towards it because I've become codependent on the idea of running towards

something?

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If your answer is that North Star is actually mine, I chose it, it matters to me and I'm

aligned with it, then you're in a great place.

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You can take everything you learned in episode 13 and keep moving forward with the beat

method.

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But if the answer is, shoot, that North Star is not mine, then I want you to stop owning

it, caretaking it, obsessing over it.

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When you can say, don't want to own this thing and I have no idea what I actually do, then

that's the space that you get to work in and play in.

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That's the space you need to sit with.

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It's not a comfortable one.

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Breaking codependency to something or someone that has structured your entire adult life

or existence or decision-making framework is heavy work, but it's also one of the most

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liberating things you can do.

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Because once you know what your actual North Star is, everything else becomes possible.

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Your beat framework works.

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Your execution becomes clear.

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Your energy stops being drained by maintaining something that was never actually yours.

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And you get to start moving towards something that feels like your life instead of

somebody else's, that you've been performing, really convincingly.

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Don't rush this.

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Because your North Star is the foundation for everything else.

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And you deserve to be building towards something that is actually yours.

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Now, thanks for being here.

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I know this one was probably a little more heady or heavy, but I felt like it was the

thing that needed to be said today.

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And if you're ready to go through the beat method again, I'll...

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offer you the guide that I gave away at this keynote.

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So if you head over to beat.bigideasmadesimple.com, you'll find it.

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And everything else is over at my regular website, bigideasmadesimple.com.

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If this episode helped you see something you needed to see, I would really appreciate you

following me on socials, dropping me a line, and telling me what you're building towards

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next.

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because I am on a mission to serve and help change lives.

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That's what this episode was about.

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And if you know somebody who needs it, share it with them.

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Thank you so much for being here.

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Talk to you soon.