English Transcript
Let’s imagine we’re driving down a road and our GPS says:
“Recalculating…”
What do we do? We first pay attention and then make necessary adjustments, right?
Well, the same thing happens on our life paths.
After years of research, I realized that purpose is not a destination, but a journey, and that every single one of us has an inner navigator guiding us back to our true essence.
I call it GPS, your Guide to your Higher Purpose (Guía de Propósito Superior in Spanish).
But before I was able to connect with it, I had to go through many ups and downs and reinvent myself several times.
Now I know there are three key elements that help us connect to our Guide:
1. Courage
2. Curiosity, and
3. Compassion.
Let me share my story and what I’ve discovered about each one.
Courage
I was born in Bogotá and had a beautiful childhood.
And as a teenager, I felt a clear calling: to turn the wheel north and move to the United States.
At 17, I decided to leave.
The day I left Colombia, I ran into Gabriel García Márquez at the airport, and while we were taking this photo, he told me, “Always fight for your dreams, my girl.”
And that phrase stayed with me. And that's exactly what I did.
I arrived with just a few dollars in my pocket but with immense bravery and determination.
As an immigrant, I did all sorts of jobs, all in pursuit of my dream.
And I made it. I graduated as valedictorian and received a full scholarship to college.
That same courage took me to complete a master’s degree at one of the best universities, work in New York’s financial district, and later accept a job at Google in California.
Little by little, I checked all the boxes of what I thought would make me happy:
Scholarship - check
Degree - check
Dream job - check
Husband, house, salary - check, check, check
But for some reason, I still wasn’t fully happy.
Then came an unexpected divorce.
And as my personal life wavered, I clung even harder to work…
Until I burned out.
I felt anxiety mixed with an unsettling emptiness.
Frustration for not feeling happy, despite everything I had achieved.
Then apathy, lack of motivation, depression...the desire to stop driving altogether.
Through those emotions, my GPS was sending me messages to adjust the route, but I ignored them.
And when we ignore the messages, the volume of the signals goes up.
Often, discomfort, a significant event, or a crisis pushes us to make decisions we otherwise wouldn’t make.
For some, it’s being fired.
For others, the birth of a grandchild.
For someone else, an illness.
Or the loss of a loved one.
In my case, it was reaching very high levels of anxiety.
One morning, I had to give a presentation at work.
But when they called my name, I froze.
I felt a lump in my throat.
Everything went blurry.
I had a panic attack in front of about 200 people.
In that absolute silence, I heard a message within me, loud and clear:
“This is not your path.”
That stage of courage, from my teenage years on, had helped me climb high
but I realized I had been living too much from the doing.
And I am not a human doing.
Often, this constant need to do, do, do comes from trying to meet external expectations... usually from these main sources:
Parents, Peers, Professors, and the Public.
And we forget the main “P”: the Personal one.
And we stray from our authentic path.
The word courage comes from the Latin cor, meaning heart.
It invites us to listen to our hearts.
Sometimes, the message is about taking action.
But other times, courage means stopping —
pulling the handbrake,
turning off the engine.
My GPS led me to do that.
When I reached my limit, I sought professional help and took a leave from work.
Then, I packed a suitcase and went to travel the world.
Alone.
More than covering distance, it was a journey inward. A pause to reconnect with myself.
Curiosity
That’s when I discovered the second element on the path of purpose: curiosity.
I traveled for six months across four continents.
I explored different cultures, philosophies, and ways of life.
I lived in a monastery in India.
Volunteered in Africa.
Did art therapy in Europe.
Reconnected with Latin American ancestral wisdom.
Since then, I haven’t stopped studying human flourishing.
And it all keeps leading me to the same place:
to connect with my inner wisdom —
with curiosity, with a beginner’s mind, known in Zen as shoshin —
a mind open with humility and wonder.
We tend to think purpose is a destination,
like a treasure at the end of the rainbow.
But seeing it as a single endpoint creates pressure —
either the rush to get there or the fear of getting lost and never arriving.
A study from the University of Pennsylvania found that 49% of participants felt anxiety about “the search for” their purpose.
But what if we stopped searching for it?
What if we stopped seeing purpose as something we must magically or arduously find and instead see it as the very path we’re already walking?
Purpose as a verb — a constant, evolving unfolding.
Purpose in plural — with many sources of meaning.
Purpose as something imperfect — not the pressure to find the answer, but the invitation to keep the question alive as we walk the path.
When someone asks me, “But Caro, how do I know what’s next on my purpose path?”
I say: “Opening up to curiosity is like turning on your GPS to let yourself be guided.”
Just as a navigator gives you one step at a time,
you’ll hear inside you a gentle ‘this way’
like crossing a river stone by stone,
moment by moment.
But unlike a car GPS, our inner guide usually doesn’t use words.
It speaks through what I like to call subtle signs:
Symbols, Signs, Sensations, Synchronicities, subtle shifts, or Serentipity.
I've felt them all.
When I finished my trip around the world, I returned to my job feeling much better.
But a year later, my GPS once again asked me to recalculate the route.
This time, I listened, using the practices I had learned on my journey.
And I decided to resign from Google.
With courage and curiosity, I chose myself.
I faced my fears, turned the wheel, and took a new road,
joining a nonprofit whose main program is called “Search Inside Yourself.”
How’s that for clarity?
That was exactly where I needed to go...
and once again, it led me to the third element of purpose: compassion.
Compassion
In my book, I describe compassion as empathy in action —
because there is no purpose without service.
The yin, the feminine, side of compassion helps us care, contain, nurture...
The yang, the masculine, side invites us to act, serve, give, and fight for that which moves us deeply.
And to ask ourselves:
What do I want my contribution to the world to be?
Life pushed me to face that question in an unexpected way.
One New Year's Eve I was rushed to the hospital.
I ended up in the Intensive Care Unit.
Surrounded by six doctors who said:
“You could die in a matter of days.”
It was the most impactful moment of my life.
It’s still hard to speak about it...
The events of that year erased my possibility of becoming a mother.
For many reasons, I also had to leave my job abruptly and move houses.
Imagine, suddenly, being left without a salary, without a home, without children, without a title, and without a clear direction.
It felt like jumping into the void without knowing what was on the other side.
But letting go of everything helped me peel away more layers to reach my true essence.
Facing the possibility of dying made me recalculate how I wanted to live.
In Stoic philosophy, there’s a concept called Memento Mori
to look our own mortality in the eye.
It reminds us that we have a finite number of heartbeats
and to choose how to use them,
with a deep sense of compassion.
Interestingly, compassion begins with compass.
Compassion is also our travel companion...
it orients us to serve, to contribute,
to transform our shadows into light
so that we can illuminate the path for others.
After I fully recovered, I decided to publish books and start a purpose and human flourishing academy.
That’s what I do today, and it fills me with joy.
Looking in the rearview mirror now, I can see how all the dots connected —
and how every event brought me right here.
I don’t know what’s next on the road,
or if I’ll need to reinvent myself again
but I’m open to listening to my GPS
and to being of service to the world.
And that’s my story, and how I came to realize that our Higher Purpose isn’t a destination, but a spiral-shaped journey back to our true, authentic, infinite, divine essence.
We all have an inner navigator guiding us there, all the time.
So next time you wonder what’s next on your path, remember:
Purpose begins with the courage to act or to pause,
the curiosity to know yourself and recognize your signs,
and the compassion to care for yourself and share your gifts with the world.
And rest assured, if you ever stray from your path, your GPS will lovingly say:
“Recalculating.”
Thank you.
