UZANNAH Scully had a great job in the corporate world. She’d spent ten years learning the ropes, working hard, impressing people, and getting promotion after promotion. Her future looked impossibly bright. And then—she quit.
“People looked at me like I had three heads,” Suzannah says. “I had achieved success, so why would I just throw that away?”
The answer was simple—curiosity.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Suzannah had lots of big questions—
about life, death, everything. “The people around me were all very logical, practical thinkers,” she says. “Meanwhile, I had this great curiosity, and no one could answer my questions.”
When she got older, Suzannah finally found some of the answers in a book—Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, PhD. Newton, a master hypnotherapist, regressed twenty-nine subjects in time so he could access their memories of past lives. His book is about how people in a super-conscious state can describe in detail the journeys their souls have taken between lives here on earth.
“When I read that book, it was like someone pulling back the curtain for me,” Suzannah says. “I remember reading it in bed and turning to my husband and saying, ‘This book explains the whole meaning of life!’ ”
Suzannah read more books about the afterlife and our soul journeys, and began looking at the world in a different way. With her new perspective, she focused on how we choose to spend our time here on earth.
At work, Suzannah was the colleague others came to see with their problems. “They’d come into my office and close the door and tell me their hopes and dreams,” she says. “I found that I really enjoyed talking to them and helping to steer them toward something more fulfilling.” Somewhere along the line, Suzannah realized she could do the same thing for herself.
So she quit her job and became a life coach.
“My life changed tremendously,” she says. “I woke up every day excited about what I was going to do. I was passionate about helping people make a major shift in their lives.”
One of her most crucial skills as a life coach, she has found, is the ability to stay open to signs and messages. “We are trained to tap into our intuition,” she explains. “As a life coach, I have to trust what I feel. So if something pops into my mind while I’m talking to someone about their lives, I’ve learned to follow that something, even if it feels kind of weird.”
An example: Suzannah was in the middle of a session with a client when an awful screeching noise distracted her. “There was this crazy bird squawking and squealing outside my office window,” she says.
“It was like this bird was just complaining, complaining, complaining about something. I tried to ignore it, but then I just stopped the session and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to pay attention to this bird—
it’s squawking like crazy.’ ”
Suddenly her client began to cry.
“She told me, ‘Today is the seventh anniversary of my father passing away,’ ” Suzannah recalls. “She said that her father would have used the same word—squawking—to describe how much she was complaining right now.”
That led to an important emotional breakthrough for the client.
“And if I hadn’t felt comfortable acknowledging the bird,” Suzannah
says, “the whole moment would have passed. Sometimes our bodies tell us things before our minds know it. So we have to stay open to signs and messages that are not obvious statements and words.
When one of my clients says something and I get the chills, I know we’re onto something really big. I just know. So I say, ‘Stop. What you just said there. Let’s talk about that.’ And then I’ll see the emotion on their faces.”
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A few years ago, Scott Dinsmore quit his Fortune 500 job, too.
Scott had read Suzannah’s inspirational blog online and called her for advice. They realized they shared an interest in the road less taken, and quickly became friends. Not much later, Scott and his wife set out on a year-long journey around the world, visiting twenty cities before reaching Tanzania, where they would climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
On the sixth day of the eight-day climb, Scott and his wife were just two thousand feet below the nineteen-thousand-foot peak when they heard a cry from overhead. Someone was yelling, “Look out!”
A boulder the size of an SUV was hurtling down the mountain.
Scott’s wife dove for cover, but before Scott could move, the boulder struck him. No other climber suffered so much as a nick that day.
But Scott was killed.
He was just thirty-three years old.
“It was shattering when I got the call,” Suzannah says. “I literally collapsed to the ground. It made no sense. How could someone so full of life, so in love with life, suddenly just not be here anymore?”
Scott’s blogs about his journey, as well as a TED Talk he gave that had millions of views, made him a star in the world of inspiration and achievement. “He lived more in his thirty-three years than most people do in a lifetime,” his father said. Two months after his passing, Scott’s friends staged an event at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts to celebrate his life.
“That day was so much like Scott,” says Suzannah. “Everyone got up and gave these incredibly inspiring speeches. It was a beautiful, joyous occasion celebrating Scott and his legacy.”
When it was over, Suzannah returned to her car and checked her cellphone, which she’d had on silent for the ceremony. She saw there was one missed call from a number she didn’t recognize, as well as one voicemail. She played back the message.
“Nobody talked or said anything,” she says. “It was just fifteen seconds of the most beautiful, peaceful, ethereal music I’d ever heard. And then it just ended and there was nothing.” Suzannah redialed the number, but a recording told her it had been disconnected.
In other words, the call seemed to come from nowhere.
“I knew immediately that it was a sign from Scott,” she says. “I just knew it without a doubt. We had this very special connection, and we bonded over the fact that we both took unexpected paths. The music on the message was so soothing, and it lasted for just a little while and then it was over. Nothing like that had ever happened to me.”
Since receiving that ghost call, Suzannah has occasionally seen missed calls from strange numbers on her phone, and when she’s redialed the numbers they are always disconnected. “It only happens when my phone is on silent, so I don’t hear the call and pick it up,”
she says. “I’ve never gotten another voicemail with music, but I do get a lot of missed calls from nonworking numbers. And I think, Okay, there’s Scott, saying hi.”
Suzannah, who hosts a popular podcast, invited me on as a guest not too long ago. During our interview, she put her cellphone on silent. After we were done, she checked it and saw four missed calls, all from the same disconnected number. “It didn’t even surprise me,”
she says. “Of course Scott tried to reach me while I was talking to a psychic medium.”
Today Suzannah always talks to her clients about the importance of staying open to nonverbal signs and messages. Signs, she believes,
will help you shift your life to a higher, more fulfilling path. Scott Dinsmore named the inspirational online movement he created Live Your Legend.
“That’s what we’re all trying to do,” says Suzannah. “We feel called to something bigger in our lives. We might not know exactly what that is, but we can feel it in our bones.”