An Excerpt from Unblock Your Purpose

After a decade in New York’s advertising industry, author Francesca Sipma embarked on a quest to find her higher purpose. Her transformative experiences in India, Peru, and Bali led her to the power of conscious breathwork. Now, she is dedicated to making the meditative practice of hypnobreathwork accessible to all. In her new book, Unblock Your Purpose, Sipma blends spirituality with business, science with emotion, and logic with intuition.

In this excerpt from Chapter Five, Sipma invites readers to expand their imaginations while acknowledging the potential for failure, emphasizing that such experiences are intrinsic to the enriching journey toward a more fulfilling career and the realization of one’s life purpose.

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On Uncertainty

One of the biggest blocks to pursuing a fulfilling career and purpose — and the flow states that come with it — is the desire for certainty. People want to plan and predict how their future is going to play out. They want to ensure security in their decisions. They feel the need to control future outcomes rather than allowing life’s possibilities to show them something greater.

Maybe you’ve been there: you get a burst of inspiration or a big idea, then become paralyzed by the execution stage. Why? Because you want to avoid your fears. Fear comes in myriad forms: fear of criticism, fear of judgment, fear of being seen, fear of vulnerability, fear of failure, even fear of success. You name it, we fear it. To mitigate or avoid our fears, we try to keep ourselves safe or small. We stay in comfortable situations where we can avoid feeling discomfort and pain. While playing it safe might offer temporary comfort, it often leads to a life of monotony, devoid of the rich experiences that come from embracing the unknown.

What if there was no failure, and every stumble — every misstep — was actually a stepping stone, refining us, teaching us, propelling us closer to our dreams? When viewed through this lens, the journey becomes an exhilarating exploration, free from the constraints of needing every answer up front. It’s a liberating perspective, transforming every challenge into a lesson, every setback into a setup for growth. It allows us to stay present, take one intuitive action at a time, and pursue what truly lights us up.

Operating from a realm of predictability confines us to a limited spectrum of possibilities. All you have to source from are things you have witnessed in the world. You are pulling from a finite number of jobs and career paths. This creates a narrow set of outcomes.

We would be better served by cultivating a foundation of adaptability and fluidity. This is done by learning to ground and center ourselves so that we can move through life’s obstacles and unknowns with grace. The people that I know who fear uncertainty are in the same miserable jobs as when I met them, complaining about the same sticking points, without a greater sense of fulfillment or meaning, often complacent but unwilling to jump into those waters and transition into something higher. They’re unwilling to go through a period of potential discomfort for something on the other side that they can’t quite grasp yet.

Opportunity lies in courting uncertainty. Therein lies the magic, the potential for boundless creation. Real confidence, true mastery, is birthed from self-trust. When we are in the flow, it’s often a testament to our unwavering trust in the moment. And how do we cultivate such trust? By heeding our intuition. And the key to tapping into this intuition? Hypnobreathwork.

Finding Group Flow

These powerful discoveries can extend beyond the individual. When you do breathwork in a team or collective setting, the entire group often feeds off the energy you’re generating together and reaches peak creativity. This shared journey can improve productivity, retention, and collaboration in a team or business setting. Breathwork isn’t just another wellness option for corporate and start-up teams; it should be the tool of choice for every leader and human resources department.

I took a notable advertising agency through a corporate flow-state hypnobreathwork to align on their new creative campaign. They had been spinning in circles for weeks. The team was divided on which concept to move forward with. I developed specific cues for them, helping them envision how they wanted the target audience to feel and to visualize the benefits of the path they’d choose, as well as the TV spot and digital assets they’d create and put out into the world. They all shot up and shocked each other when they landed on the same concept together as they did individually. The camaraderie, brainstorming, and enthusiasm were next level. The creative director ferociously wrote pages of ideas and was utterly dazed by the process.

In a session with three hundred Deloitte employees, participants went from tired, stressed, and overwhelmed to rejuvenated, inspired, and motivated in twenty-two minutes.

Even in a one-off sixty-minute virtual community creativity session that I hosted with people who had never done breathwork, there was a 90 percent success rate when it came to generating more clarity and insights.

The Action

There’s something truly magical about the clarity and inspiration that follow a breathwork session focused on career and purpose, whether you enter into it alone or with your colleagues or comrades. Channeling our passions to create the transformations we desire in the world serves as a potent catalyst for fostering confidence and aligning our lives with our true purpose.

In both business and personal realms, achieving a flow state represents a pinnacle of human experience, rendering other tools less significant in comparison. Through hypnobreathwork, this transformative state is accessible in just one session, a short investment of time with the potential for boundless returns. Making a commitment to regular sessions of breathwork can be your gateway to unlocking profound life changes, catalyzing business evolution, and releasing your unparalleled potential to make a meaningful impact in the world.

Excerpted from the book Unblock Your Purpose: Breathwork, Intuition, and Flow State. Copyright © 2024 by Francesca Sipma. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com