Discovering Your Life’s Purpose: Kim Peirano Of Courage to Transform On How to Align Your Goals with Your True Self
An interview with Dr. Bharat Sangani
Say no. One thing that most people struggle with is saying no and setting boundaries. We have to say no to make room for things we can say yes to. Once we have clarity about who we are and our goals, we have to start saying no to things, people, and events that don’t align with them. It’s in saying no or setting a boundary that we open ourselves up to to what is right for us.
Finding and living in alignment with your true purpose can be a transformative journey. Yet, many struggle with identifying their life’s purpose and aligning their goals with it. In this series, we aim to explore how individuals discover their purpose and create a life that reflects their authentic selves, leading to greater fulfillment and success. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Kim Peirano, DACM, LAc, CHt of Courage to Transform.
Kim Peirano, DACM, LAc, CHt, is a Transformational Coach and Hypnotherapist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works with clients in person and online who are navigating major life changes, grief, loss, chronic pain and illness, and those recovering from spiritual and religious trauma or cultic and relationship abuse. Her commitment is to help foster her clients’ growth through a trauma-informed lens and individually guided sessions that encourage authenticity and transformation in a safe container.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I’ve done many different things in my life; when I say a lot, I mean a lot, a lot… I have been a television producer, a DJ, a nightlife events producer, a permanent makeup artist, an acupuncturist, a bartender, a jeweler, an artist, a burlesque performer, a coach, and a hypnotherapist. I’m pretty sure I’m probably missing many. I have followed my gut and am not afraid to change directions at different points in my life. I’ve also experienced a lot of hardship and trauma in my life, and that has undoubtedly shaped and formed the path that I have taken. The pandemic was a factor that significantly shifted where my focus was in my practice with helping people. I had to close my in-person acupuncture clinic and focus more on my coaching and hypnosis practice instead. This was something I enjoyed doing but had been slow to grow.
A few years into the pandemic, I had the realization that the spiritual school that I had been attending for eight years was a cult. In leaving this group, I ultimately found more clarity and understanding about who I was and what I wanted to be doing. I have always strived to maintain an open mind and be curious about things; as I move forward, I continuously check myself and notice what might be driving me to make certain decisions. At times, in my past, the motivators for certain activities or careers were not the most aligned intentions. Still, over time, my personal growth and commitment to my integrity and authenticity have led me to be able to help more and more people and shed light on things that are hard to talk about and face. I think my very multifaceted experience lends a specific, unique ability to do this work, to help people make sense of the unsensible and the things that are hard to understand and don’t match up. I have been there and back dozens of times, and bringing that all together in one cohesive way is something I might consider a superpower.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person that you are grateful for, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
There are so many people that I could thank and talk about how they have helped me and supported me along the way. My mom is a significant factor; she’s always believed in me and has been there as somebody to fall back on. My partner is amazing and supportive and able to hold such a safe space for me to explore within. I have had coaches, therapists, and other mentors and peers who have helped me unravel, learn, and heal from what I’ve been through.
But I want to give a special shout-out to everyone who has harmed me. The cult leader and all of his inner circle, the friends who have betrayed me, the boyfriends who were abusive and toxic, and even the alternative wellness field and the acupuncture schools that misled and took me down a very unfruitful road. All of these instances of harm, heartbreak, trauma, and despair have been motivating factors in my life. I have used every single one to pivot, turn around, and use those experiences as fuel to move forward. I am not happy that any of those things happened, but some of the most profound shifts in my life have occurred because of those transitions that I had to make.
There’s an idea called the slingshot theory. It gives us an excellent visual for how when we get pulled back into darkness and into hard times, the further back we go, the further forward that little pebble travels when we eventually release it. I like to think that a lot of these difficulties in my life have done just that for me where I have gone into the depths of absolute rock bottom and found my way out again on the other side, in a way better position than I would have ever been had I stayed where I was.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
From reading some of my story already, you can guess that resilience is one of those factors that has contributed to my success. Resilience is about being able to pick up and keep going and to manage yourself along the way. It’s not this pure reaction to hardship; instead, it is using that hardship as fuel and learning from it to move forward. That’s how I look at resilience.
The next factor is curiosity and a willingness to learn. With these things, you’ll grow. Curiosity and a willingness to learn help us get out of our comfort zone and learn how to do new things or look at things in a different light. This helps us grow and change, move forward, and adapt.
And finally, a sense of humor. I have a very dark sense of humor, and I can find that little bit of joy even in the worst situations, which is a blessing and a curse. A sense of humor will get you a long way, especially when things get challenging and you’re having a hard time. Sometimes we have to just laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
Ok, fantastic. Let’s now turn to the crux of our interview. Was there a defining moment or experience in your life when you felt a clear sense of your purpose? How did it influence the goals you set from that point forward?
Life purpose is such an interesting and often confusing idea, and it puts a ton of pressure on us to figure it out. I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea of ‘life purpose’ in the most common sense, but I do think that we all have certain intentions or themes that we work with in our lives that are unique to us. I spent 8 years in a new-age spiritual cult, and it was in leaving that group that I came more in contact with what I think of as my core intention for being here and what I’m bringing into the world — integrity, and self-trust.
Ironically, one of the reasons I initially joined that group was to have more of this quality, and being in the group eroded it. But like a slingshot, I lost touch with my ability to trust myself and my intuition through being a part of the cult, and in making the brave decision to leave, I suddenly came more in touch with that ability than I ever was before. It took a lot of self-trust and integrity to choose to leave, walk away, and never look back. I lost my spiritual belief system, teachers, and friends in that separation, but it was totally worth it because I finally had my integrity back.
Moving forward, I committed to never losing that sense of self-trust and integrity again and to help others do the same.
What practical steps can someone take to begin uncovering their life’s purpose if they feel lost or unsure about their direction?
It’s important to remember that you don’t need to know your life’s purpose. When we start to define it in this way, it can become something that will limit us because our understanding of our life’s purpose today will be very different from our life’s purpose in 5 years or even 5 months. When we are talking about life’s purpose, we’re actually after a direction in life, understanding our values and who we are at our core. It’s this deep, personal understanding of who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to create and bring into the world. When we’re disconnected from that, we feel incredibly lost and confused, or we’re just throwing all the things in the kitchen into the soup, and it’s not working out.
So if you want to understand more about what your life’s purpose is, you have to start by understanding yourself. It’s not what you do in the world; it’s who you are in the world, and that’s your life’s purpose. One of the first things we can do is to start journaling to start understanding ourselves better. Alternatively, we might use methods like astrology and personality tests to get more in touch with our inner workings. We don’t have to take a personality test or read your human design as the absolute truth of who you are, but they can give us some insights to help us think more creatively about who we are. Doing some journaling and explorations into different types of methods of getting to know yourself is going to be the first practical step we need to do to start understanding who we are, what we represent, what we value in the world, and what we want to bring into it.
How do you differentiate between external pressures — like societal expectations — and the inner calling that aligns with your true self?
I could talk about this question for hours on end because it’s so complex. There are so many external pressures that we face today, one of the main ones being capitalism. Capitalism does not support our personal growth and integrity as human beings; it supports commerce, making money, and the ultra-wealthy. We have to make money to survive in this world, which is an unfortunate truth and reality. The cost of capitalism is that we don’t have the time or freedom, and we can’t often spend time understanding ourselves and getting to know ourselves. It makes it very difficult to figure out what we want to do in the world, and often the things that resonate with our life’s purpose need are not monetizable. Creating art, being a caregiver for seniors, being a clown, and just enjoying making people laugh are not particularly financially solvent jobs.
Being a musician is a very hard path to take, yet it likely is the path for many people to connect with their higher self and their life’s purpose, but they can only fully immerse themselves in their music if it makes them money. We have to spend our time working a job that we don’t like, that doesn’t align with our life’s purpose, so we can spend what little free time we have being the person we want to be. I imagine this resonates with many, and we struggle with this juxtaposition between surviving in this late-stage capitalist world and having the ability to live your life’s purpose. But since our purpose is not what we do; it’s who we are while we do life, we can reframe how we live our life’s purpose, not through work or commerce, but who we are no matter what we’re doing. We can bring that quality into whatever it is we’re doing, so if you have to work a job at the post office but you feel like your life’s purpose is to be humorous, you can bring that quality into your work at the post office. If you’re a doctor, and your life’s purpose is to enjoy nature, that might feel hard to do because you spend all of this time in the hospital. Still, there are ways that we can bring nature into it, maybe by communicating with friends at work about what we do in our spare time, or the places we’ve gone, or using that as a decoration. Maybe it’s simply remembering how we feel in that space of nature and tapping into that frequency while we are on the job at the hospital.
Can you share an example of a time when you adjusted or abandoned a goal because it no longer aligned with your deeper sense of purpose? What did you learn from that experience?
Honestly, abandoning a goal or project is one of my favorite things. When I quit or leave something behind, it’s honoring my integrity, where I realize that something is no longer working and letting it go. My tendency in the past was to hold on to things and try to keep forcing them to work, even when they did not. Holding on too long is a way to spin your wheels and develop more frustration, anger, and feelings of defeat when the best thing to do is just let it go. Anything that is bringing you more stress than ease or progress is something that we should probably be abandoning. This isn’t to say that sometimes we won’t have a hard time, and it will be tough. Progress is often difficult, so we have to learn how to weigh the balance.
One of the things I’m working on letting go of right now is closing my acupuncture practice. I have been an acupuncturist since 2010, and it’s the thing I’ve done for the longest time in my life. I know that it’s time to let it go. The acupuncture industry is dwindling, and it has a lot of ups and downs. Meanwhile, the alternative wellness world is booming, but it’s booming through misinformation and unethical providers. I’ve come to the place where I’ve realized that it’s not supporting me in the way that I need it to. I’ve gotten used to struggling with inconsistencies, and I also used to enjoy working with my patients, the work we do together, and the medicine itself. In that time, I knew the struggle and tension I felt was something I needed to work with; it wasn’t time to throw in the towel. Over the recent few years, I’ve seen the industry change, the influx of practitioners who aren’t ethical and harming patients, and it’s become a field that I no longer enjoy being a part of. My work has shifted to helping people differently, and often helping people who other alternative medicine practitioners have harmed.
What advice would you give to people trying to pursue their purpose while managing the demands of day-to-day life, such as work, family, and other responsibilities?
Your purpose is not what you do; it’s who you are. We need to let go of the belief that our purpose might be being a movie star, a company director, a mom, or whatever it is that we do; that version of purpose is limited and dependent upon external circumstances often out of our control. The purpose is who you are; we can bring who we are into everything we do. Ultimately, what we want to be doing is bringing that quality of who we are into everything we do. We can bring that purpose into life, into work, into our family, into the gym, into cooking dinner, into driving down the freeway. Everything you do, you can still live your life purposefully in those activities because it’s who you are, not what you’re doing.
Your life purpose are the qualities and values that you represent as a human being. For me, it’s authenticity, integrity, and curiosity; for someone else, it might be joy, peace, and harmony; for someone else strength, courage, and drive. We can bring those qualities into everything we do, even if they seem opposed. We don’t often think of being a caregiver in a nursing home as courageous, but they are being courageous every day by facing people in these vulnerable moments. We can bring that sense of purpose, the values, and qualities that are inherently us and who we are, into every single thing we do.
What are “5 Ways to Align Your Goals With Your True Self”?
- Get clear on your core goals. If you wrote down a list of 10 goals for yourself, those would point toward your core goals. Your core goals are what achieving that list of goals means to you; it’s how they change your life. If you want to make a million dollars this year — what does that mean to you? How does it change your life? To me, that would mean financial stability, freedom, and more freedom to pursue my passions. Financial stability, freedom, and room to pursue my passions are the core goals underneath the surface goals of making a million dollars. When you know your core goals, you automatically start aligning them with your true self. By clarifying our core goals, we can now measure the things we do in our lives against them. Is going on a lavish vacation aligned with your core goal of financial stability? Maybe yes, maybe not. But it clarifies what we truly want in life and how to align our lives to match those inner desires.
- Ask your friends and family. If you want to know more about who you are at your core, it might help to ask those closest to you. Ask them what they think are your best qualities, what makes you unique, or what they think you should be doing as a job. This exercise might give you some unique insights you couldn’t see before. Again, by getting more clarity around who you are, we can then start to rearrange our lives to match that inner sense of self.
- Take a personality test or get an astrology reading. Yes, this one is a little off the beaten path, but do it with curiosity and for fun if you have to. Sometimes it can be useful to use external tools to help guide us to know ourselves better. We don’t have to take the reading or test result as the end-all-be-all truth of who we are, but if you’re feeling particularly disconnected from your inner desires, this might spark some creativity or out-of-the-box thinking. Use it as an exercise of curiosity, not absolute truths.
- Say no. One thing that most people struggle with is saying no and setting boundaries. We have to say no to make room for things we can say yes to. Once we have clarity about who we are and our goals, we have to start saying no to things, people, and events that don’t align with them. It’s in saying no or setting a boundary that we open ourselves up to to what is right for us.
- Grieve the past and the potential of what could have been. Another thing that holds us back in aligning our lives to our true selves and our core goals is holding onto the past or the way we thought it would be. It’s a process of grieving to let go of what once was or what we thought things could be. But in doing so, we let go of the old and make room for the new. This process is so uncomfortable because we often know we need to let go of something long before we see what’s coming in its place. It takes courage and trust to let go and grieve. But we must let go of the past, let go of the dreams or ideas of how we thought things would be in order to make room for how things are, and all the good things that are available to us that might not look the way we thought they would.
What advice would you give to people trying to pursue their purpose while managing the demands of day-to-day life, such as work, family, and other responsibilities?
We touched on this above a few times. I think the main takeaway is to remember that life purpose isn’t what you do, it isn’t your job, it isn’t your role in a family — it’s who you are. And we can be that person, that aligned version of our higher self, in anything and everything we do. Whether it’s taking out the trash or performing surgery, we can still be and radiate those qualities of who we are. Of course, some jobs and roles in life might be more aligned with our sense of purpose than others, but we don’t need the external world to change for us to live our purpose. You can live it right now, no matter what you’re doing or where you are.
Is this always easy? No.
Are there some situations in the world that make it undoubtedly difficult to live your purpose? Absolutely.
We don’t exist in a siloed vacuum, and external change can impact internal change positively and negatively. Living your purpose isn’t an all-or-nothing process; you don’t have to get it right all the time. You don’t need to be perfect. We just need to try taking it one day or one minute at a time, knowing that some days will be better than others and some days we might fall very short of where we want to be. We’re human, we’re fallible, we’re imperfect. But in simply setting the intention for ourselves to grow into our purpose, to live the life we want to live a little bit more every day, we’re making progress.
How can our readers further follow your work?
You can find me online at www.couragetotransform.com. I offer a free Discovery Call to see if we might be a good fit to work together. You can also find me on Instagram @couragetotransform on Tiktok @couragetotransform and Facebook — Courage to Transform Coaching
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About The Interviewer: Dr. Bharat Sangani is a cardiologist and entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience, practicing in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Dallas, Texas. Board-certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiology, he specializes in diagnosing, treating, and preventing cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and hypertension. In 1999, Dr. Sangani founded Encore Enterprises, a national real estate investment firm. Under his leadership, the company has executed transactions exceeding $2 billion, with a portfolio spanning residential, retail, hotel, and office developments. Known for his emphasis on integrity and fairness, Dr. Sangani has built Encore into a major player in the commercial real estate sector. Blending his medical and business expertise, Dr. Sangani created the Life is a Business mentorship program. The initiative offers guidance on achieving balance in health, wealth, and relationships, helping participants align personal and professional goals. Now based in Dallas, Texas, Dr. Sangani continues to practice cardiology while leading Encore Enterprises and mentoring others. His career reflects a unique blend of medical expertise, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to helping others thrive.
Discovering Your Life’s Purpose: Kim Peirano Of Courage to Transform On How to Align Your Goals… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.