Category: Blogs

Fifty years ago, I began life in an incubator, fighting for each breath. Raised in a home where love seemed conditional, earned by being good, quiet, and responsible, I carried a belief that I had to perform and prove my worth. That belief took me across borders, through Corporate America, and into leadership roles.

But beneath all the striving, a deeper truth lived within me. My name, Clara Lucia, means clear light. And my purpose has always been to awaken humanity in the marketplace—to help people remember who they are, beyond the pressure to perform, prove, or please.

Why Purpose Matters—For Your Brain, Body, and Leadership

Science is now confirming what our hearts have always known: when you live with purpose, everything changes.

• For your brain: Purpose strengthens memory and resilience. Research shows it enhances brain structures like the hippocampus and white matter, which are essential for focus and stress recovery (Boylan et al., 2024).
• For your emotions: People with a strong sense of purpose bounce back from stress faster, showing stronger regulation of emotional responses (van Reekum et al., 2013).
• For your health: Living purposefully is linked to healthier immune function and even better gene expression, lowering inflammation and strengthening antiviral defenses (Fredrickson et al., 2013).
• For your life: Carol Ryff’s six-factor model of psychological well-being identifies purpose in life as one of the essential pillars of human flourishing (Ryff, 1989).

And this truth was powerfully lived out by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. In the concentration camps, he lost nearly everything—his parents, his wife, his career. Yet he observed that those who survived the unimaginable weren’t the strongest or even the healthiest, but those who held on to a sense of meaning. As he wrote:

“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how.’”

Frankl’s story reminds us that purpose is not a luxury—it is a lifeline. It is fuel for your mind, your body, your relationships, and your leadership.

Why the Pause Is Everything

If purpose is so powerful, why do so many of us drift away from it?

Because we live on autopilot. The hustle culture we live in convinces us that doing more will finally make us “enough.” But what we really need is not more doing—it’s a pause.

That’s why I teach the Power Pause. Neuroscience shows that intentional pauses literally rewire your brain—disrupting patterns of stress and building new pathways for clarity and calm.

3 Ways to Reconnect With Purpose Today

Take a Soul Inventory. Ask yourself: Where do I feel alive? Where do I feel like I’m disappearing? Where have I abandoned myself to achieve or please others? What’s the cost of staying vs. the risk of changing?

Write a Personal Vow. Neuroscience tells us repetition rewires the brain. Writing statements like “I vow to honor my truth and stop apologizing for who I am” strengthens pathways of self-worth.

Anchor Micro-Pauses. Before a meeting or after a hard conversation, pause. Breathe deeply and ask: Am I moving from pressure—or from purpose? These moments shift your brain and your leadership in real time.

My Invitation to You

Living on autopilot doesn’t just cost us energy—it costs us clarity, joy, and connection.

When you pause, when you realign with purpose, you not only reclaim your energy—you ignite your light. And that light doesn’t just change your life. It awakens humanity around you.

So today, I invite you: take a pause. Breathe. Reconnect with the purpose that has always been within you.

Next Step: If this resonates, I’d love to guide you deeper. Reach out to me at clara.carrier@startbreakingthrough for a time to connect. Start breaking through to reclaim your clarity and confidence.

I did not have ideal parents. No one does. I grew up with no awareness or education around the significance of my own emotions or my inner being. I also thought I had to earn love. So, I set my north on mothering, nourishing, and caring for others as means to find mattering, belonging, and purpose. My yearning to be loved became the fuel to sacrificing my own needs in service of others.

I became the rescuer, the one who was always available, understanding, forgiving, protecting, and putting others’ needs first – everywhere and always.

That is how I paved my way to becoming a self-sufficient, goal-driven, easy-going, perfectionist, self-critic, and compassionate woman.

In 2020, I began the life-long journey of soul searching through the Wright Foundation. Since then, I have been diving deeper and deeper into my inner being. Acknowledging, honoring, and expressing my emotions have become the path to finding a life and career filled with more joy and purpose. Being present in tune with my feelings has been an invitation to be fully engaged in my own discovery, growth, development, satisfaction, and transformation. May this be an invitation for you to start your own transformation today! Click here to get started. 

Similar to mine, your transformation, moving from chrysalis to butterfly, could mean:

• Moving away from feeling less than, inadequate, or not good enough to be on your own side, speaking up your truth, and using your masculine values to assert yourself by asking questions, seeking help, or challenging others.  
• Moving away from self-beat-up when making mistakes toward taking a step back, breathing, correcting, and being accountable. To learn, innovate, and create instead of punishing and shaming yourself and others. 
• Moving away from seeing yourself as the “must do it all, know it all, superwoman or superman” to seeing and treating yourself more as a human—a human who is beyond producing, performing, perfecting, pleasing, and protecting—a human who is a gift to the world. 
• Moving away from serving others out of self-sacrifice to serving from a place of abundance, self-compassion, self-love, and self-care. 

Cultivating a friendship with our emotions and taking responsibility for our own nourishment and self-care are the water and the sun that our souls need to thrive and serve others well.

My purpose is no longer to be loved. My purpose is to love myself, learn, and grow to become more and more human; more me. 

Purposeful growth and transformation invite struggle and pain into the journey. At times, dying is the only way to make space for the new creation – the new, authentic self. We can choose to die, over and over, to old patterns, blockers, myths, rules, and limiting beliefs about ourselves. Have you died to your old self yet?

Here is where we get to rewrite our new redemptive story. 

The story we get to write is not about the women or men we have been. It is not about those who defined us when growing up. The story we get to write is about the women and men that we are becoming.

For me, that story includes a woman who is on her own side, goes for her own well being and satisfaction, ventures into the unknown with confidence and a sense of play and discovery, and shines her own light and truth in service of making a difference. 

What is your purpose? Who are you becoming? What is the story you want to start writing about yourself today?

We all have influence. We are able to positively impact, inspire, and ignite others into action, into leadership, no matter what we do, where we work, or what type of personality we have. We have the power and the responsibility to use our gifts and talents, our purpose, to move others into action and leadership.

After all, we grow in our leadership through the leaders we are mentoring.

We must use our influence to create trust among others. We need to keep our eyes and ears open to identifying and mentoring others into leading. And we do this by reaching out, by getting to know others and their stories—their joy, their pain, their humanity.  

Creating a multiplying effect. Both in the marketplace as well as in the nonprofit sector, the train-the-trainer model is used to help create capacity, sustainability, and long-term change and impact. The secret to expanding and multiplying leadership and change is to give those around us the encouragement, empowerment, permission, and ownership to advance their purpose, to influence, to lead.

As catalysts for a purpose-driven leadership, our focus and efforts should be on trusting, equipping, and mobilizing others into identifying, understanding, activating their own purpose and desire to lead.

We can do this by:

• Being knowledgeable and committed to influencing those in our own life – family, friends, colleagues, coworkers, etc.
• Using our gifts and talents in tangible ways, while allowing and acknowledging others in doing so as well.
• Living out our gifts and talents (outside of our comfort zone) into the world.
• Recognizing our weaknesses and investing time and resources in our own development, growth, and learning.
• Saying “yes” more to others and becoming a “permission giver.” 

Giving permission is the most effective way of leading. Saying “yes” and let others do, in other words delegating, seems easier than what it really is. Giving permission, letting go, and passing over the authority to those around us is not losing our own vision, or capacity to influence and lead. 

Saying “yes” and giving permission to those around us has to do with developing, growing, and mentoring others while activating, growing, and strengthening our own purpose and leadership—at work, with our families, our communities, and the world at large. 

According to Dave Ferguson, the author of the “Five Essential Practices to Hero Making,” there are six levels for saying “yes” and giving permission:

• Level 1: Watch what I do, and then let’s talk about it.
• Level 2: Let’s together figure out a plan for what you should do.
• Level 3: Propose a plan for what I should do, and let’s talk about it.
• Level 4: Let me know your plan for what you should do, but wait for my feedback.
• Level 5: You should handle it completely, and then let me know what you did.
• Level 6: You should handle it completely, and there is no need to report back to me. 

Putting theory into practice. Ready for this challenge? Follow the above guidelines. Give someone you work with, volunteer, or serve with an assignment and the level of permission you are giving. Then ask them to repeat it back to you, including the level of permission received. Encourage them to go do it. Wait and see what happens. Run with this new approach several times. Repeat. Reflect. I’d love for you to share what you experience.

Become a permission giver, say “yes” more often and see how this new approach helps you grow and transforms you into a hero maker—someone that believes and invests in raising up and empowering the new generation of leaders.