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Building and owning your own business should be more about your passion and what you have to offer than about market trends—which are constantly evolving, so why shouldn’t you? You can write the most compelling business plan for that next trend-setting-income-generating concept, but unless your product or service is in alignment with your unique skills and talents, you may be headed for a dead-end. Don’t be afraid to pursue the ideas that you have been thinking about for years, but have sacrificed for the ones that seem to stand a better chance or are more realistic. Even if someone else has done it before, they haven’t done it your way.

Choosing a career opportunity should be less about whether your background fits the narrowly defined position description, and more about whether the role you play allows you to exhibit your distinct qualities and talents. With the advent of social networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook, self marketing is no longer limited to one or two pages of text that only represents what you have been given the opportunity to do—not what you are actually capable of doing. In corporate culture is it easy to lose ourselves. We assume our work persona and fade into the background. Blending in is boring. Standout for something. There is nothing more charismatic than seeing someone who is authentic, confident in their abilities, and yet not too proud to admit where they need improvement.

Give yourself permission to be truly who you are, and you will expend less energy trying to convince people that you are who they want you to be. Before long you will be attracting all kinds of healthy relationships and opportunities. Figure out what you want to do, connect with others who do it, and utilize your distinctive characteristics to your advantage. The challenge is knowing what you want before you start looking, and trusting that the position you want is out there waiting for you to fill it. Try not to let your internal skeptic convince you otherwise. Fear may win out over hope—but only if you let it. If the position or career you want does not exist where you are, look elsewhere, or figure out how to create it for yourself.

Only you know what educational path will bring you authentic success. Creative thinkers, who take risks and are not afraid to fail, end up extremely wealthy by doing exactly what they love to do. The rest of society (those who may have conformed to academic disciplines they dislike out of fear) talk about these individual success stories as though they are rare and unrealistic. It doesn’t have to be that black and white. You can follow your passion and still be financially responsible for yourself and your family. The key is deciding what your ideal lifestyle looks like, and planning incremental steps to get there. Don’t wait until retirement to live happily ever after. Start now.

Quite possibly the most challenging endeavor we have as humans is to behave authentically while simultaneously honoring, accepting and embracing the authenticity of others. It is a complicated dance that takes endless commitment and practice. Stepping on each others’ toes is inevitable; the trick is learning the best way to recover and regain harmony with yourself and the other person. Knowing yourself well first is paramount. The better you understand what your triggers are, the more you will be able to manage them. Authenticity is an evolutionary process. Maintaining a healthy curiosity about ourselves and the other person are equally important. Once we think we know a person in their entirety, we have failed them, and the relationship.

People often find themselves searching for their specific calling, or life purpose. It is true that we each have reasons for being, even if we are not sure what they are. It is sometimes necessary to fail at being inauthentic before succeeding authentically. Trusting your intuitive inner voice is the key. Learn how to listen for it and hear what it is telling you. We tend to keep our greatest gifts hidden for fear that they will be ridiculed or rejected. Give yourself permission to discover or rediscover your passion, and bring it to the foreground. The resulting excitement and energy will not only make your individual purpose more obvious, it will fuel you with joy and happiness.