Many years ago, in Thailand there was a temple that was called The Temple of The Golden Buddha.
At this temple was a huge golden statue of the Buddha.
Word came to this village where the monastery was that an army from a neighbouring country was about to invade.
So, they came up with brilliant scheme to cover the golden Buddha with mud and concrete so that it looked like a stone and thus the army would see no value in it.
And sure enough the army rolled through and as they went past the monastery they saw this big stone Buddha and they had no reason to plunder it.
Years went by with the army occupying the city. They resided there so long that once they’d finally left, no one in the village knew that the Buddha was golden.
Then one day a monk was sitting meditating at the Buddha statue on his knees and as he got up, a piece of the concrete happened to crack off and he saw something shining.
He looked closer and realized that it was gold underneath there and so he ran to his fellow monks and said, “The Buddha is golden! The Buddha is golden!” and they all came out and realized that he was telling the truth and they all started hammering away and eventually they unearthed the golden Buddha.
The metaphor of this story is that we are all golden by nature.
That we all have something special inside of us just waiting to be discovered.
And it’s not necessarily found in another job, a new company or another country.
It’s always been there and it’s way closer than we think.
What happens over the course of our life however is that we pile layer upon layer of clay over our own Golden Buddha. The heaviest layer of clay is of our own doing – it’s our own limited thinking and our unconscious conditioning.
The other layers of clay get added on from external influences (parents, schools and teachers, bosses and co-workers, society, the media, the church, government and corporations).
Eventually we are so laden with clay that we forget that the Golden Buddha is there all the time.
The secret to finding our Golden Buddha, our higher purpose, lies not in the future, but in our past. All we need to do is start chipping away at the clay and rediscovering those things we were passionate about as we grew up.
We reconnect with why we first went into our profession or that job we really, really loved.
We recall the times when we were in flow and time stood still. We chip away at our clay with a therapist or a trusted advisor.
We get curious and we do something, anything. Action always precedes clarity. Action reveals the Golden Buddha.
Now, it’s your turn to discover the real you and to be the person you were meant to be, by being your very own boss.