The better we know the streets of our internal landscape, the more confidently we can walk the external landscapes that we inhabit

Here’s something any of us can try. Think of a space in the external world that you inhabit. It might be the route you take to walk a child to school each day. Or it might be your journey to work, however you make that trip. Or perhaps it’s the layout of your office. You choose – then think of your space and visualize it in your mind’s eye. You know it intimately well, don’t you? You know every shortcut, every road name, every pedestrian crossing, every noticeboard, lift, staircase, water cooler, and coffee station…

This degree of knowledge and understanding of our external environment is built up over weeks, months, years. But there is another environment, significantly more important, to which we may not pay as much attention. This is the inner landscape that we can and should all walk, and with which we should be as intimately familiar as we are with our offices, factories, school runs, hometowns.

Because within the streets of our inner landscape, there is much to be found. We can find our understanding of our best self – the person we want to be and know we could be, if only things could somehow fall into a slightly different pattern.

Or we look for our values, which may already be familiar to us through constant revisiting. Perhaps they’re somewhat difficult to find without a focused search, after being hidden away somewhere, years ago. Maybe we can find our sense of purpose, the thing that gets us out of bed in the mornings. For sure we find our hopes, fears, dreams, and ambitions. If we have faith, we can find the place where we keep that faith safe. Perhaps we find, maybe in fledgling form, our understanding of our own authentic self.

If we explore carefully enough, we can find our emotional baggage, some of which we may find relates to damage caused by old events that have dimmed into a sepia tint – meaning that, maybe, that baggage can now be thrown away and labelled: “Not required on journey”.

Exploring our inner landscape should not be a guilty pleasure that we allow only ourselves occasionally. The better we know the streets of our internal landscape, the more confidently we can walk the external landscapes that we inhabit, and the more sure we are about who we are, what we hold dear, why we do what we do, where we are going, and why we want to get there.

The external world is often about doing things – at work, away from work – and we are often consumed by the act of doing. In stark contrast, the internal world is about being someone. It’s who we are, and perhaps it is discovering the gap between who we are being and who we want to be.

If we close ourselves off from this world, or if we are only casual visitors, walking just the main boulevard without conscious thought or emotional engagement, then we run the risk of being people – leaders, followers, parents, spouses, friends – who are busy doing rather than purposefully being.