Everybody wants and needs outside support and encouragement to make changes toward a fulfilled life. Fulfillment in this context, despite past associations with the term we might have learned regarding finally arriving somewhere, really means “being on my path in important ways, doing what I came to do.” When movement and change is occurring and flow is happening we are being fulfilled. When we are fulfilling ourselves, we have energy for life. Fulfillment may look like actualizing one’s goals, getting a strong head of steam and progress on creative projects, or making healing breakthroughs from past traumas and patterns that are affecting our present moments. It may look like finding one’s right mate, changing career, attracting greater abundance of (fill in the blank) or moving to another place on the planet to which we’re drawn.

This is hard work, some of the hardest work we’ll ever do. Often when we start to enact changes in our lives, we find ourselves faced with all manner of dissuasion from partners, friends, or family members. Outer resistance such as this reflects inner resistance to change and growth, judgments we’ve bought and internalized as “reality” that tell us we are not able to shift, it’s too hard, too much work, don’t have the time or talent, too much negativity in the space – the litany goes on. Instead of fulfillment of our Selves, we are “self-fulfilling” negative prophecies, and we turn out “right” rather than happy (fulfilled).

In the absence of 100% validating, positive inside and outside support (Word up! Nobody has this), we manifest or encounter psychic and/or physically manifested obstacles, reflecting in exact measure the relative strength of our inner barriers to fulfillment. Instead of moving forward, we can get discouraged, feel “set back”, slow down or stop when we meet these obstacles. The obstacles are inevitable; it’s important to see them as part of the fulfillment path. They already existed inside us before we started changing something. If they weren’t there we would already have manifested our lives in an exact match of our visions and heart’s desires.

How to deal? We need help. Help takes many forms – one is supportive friends, partners and family members who believe in us, encourage our healthy risks, receive or witness us when we vent, offer analysis and solutions when appropriate, and take responsibility for their own stirred emotional responses to what we are trying to do. If this kind of help isn’t organically forthcoming, we need to seek it and ask for it from our support network, or elsewhere. This in itself is a challenge for many people, especially but not limited to men who were raised with do-it-yourself conditioning. The above forms of help are only a brief list of examples; sometimes we need more or different kinds of help. Sometimes the scope of the help we need is a more integrated approach, something more formal and tangible to help us access and stay present on our fulfillment path.