Are you driven by a reason for being?
Do you have a vision for how you want to live your life?
This is your purpose. A blueprint for your life that is enduring and underpins your actions and activities.
Many people can find the concept of defining their purpose daunting. And in fact, that is valid, there is a significant amount of work involved for most people to get a handle on their purpose. It can take time to emerge after a period, or multiple periods, of self-reflection.
Your purpose is where you find meaning and joy in your life. It is found in those activities where you are totally present, those mindful activities that are completely absorbing and that you are compelled to repeat. It taps into your gifts and abilities and often enables you to share them with the world around you. It also gives meaning to the most mundane of tasks, so long as that task aligns with and contributes to the bigger picture once you’ve defined it; purpose can be highly motivating in that respect.
Where do I start in defining my purpose?
A great deal of self-reflection is involved in establishing your purpose. It begins with asking yourself a series of questions.
Who am I?
What is it that you like about yourself? What do you not like? What are you good at? Understanding where your strengths lie is a great foundation for discovering your purpose. What you find easy and natural brings less friction and encourages a flow state where you are wholly present.
What do I care about?
Reflecting on the issues that are important to you, the causes you like to get behind, the values you hold, provides some insight into how and where you might naturally have a positive impact on others, where you might employ your strengths for the greater good.
What are my priorities?
This could be framed as thinking about how you might live your life if you only had a short amount of time left, assuming you would still need to work and do your usual day to day. The finite amount of time brings to the fore the things that are most important to you in your day to day.
Who do I admire?
Considering someone in your life, or a public figure, that you look up to, whose values you align with, whose actions and behaviours resonate with you, helps you to define the direction you would like your own life to take. Do you want to emulate this? If so, what would that look like?
What am I grateful for?
Understanding what you are grateful for can help define your purpose as you may feel you want to pay forward the opportunities you have had in your own life. Gratitude is a productive way to boost your emotional wellbeing, which in turn is motivating, encouraging you to carry out the goals that feed into your purpose and vision for life.
When am I most in a state of flow?
Your flow state is achieved when you are mindfully absorbed in a task at the exclusion of wandering thought. It is an almost meditative state usually brought about by a task that you enjoy and are skilled at. Flow state gives your brain a break from stress by focusing it solely on a singular task, reenergising you. In this state your ego falls away. You are operating in a higher level of consciousness.
Answers to these questions, and others, can provide indications of the activities and causes that capture your full attention. It starts to build a picture of your capabilities and passions, revealing themes that direct you to your purpose. It can take time, with several sessions reflecting on and refining your answers. Patience is important.
Whilst we can actively go through this process to try and define our purpose, often questions regarding your life purpose come up naturally when you are at a crossroads in your life or when you are going through or have come through something traumatic or life changing. It is an organic reassessment of how you are living your life, a check-in of sorts to ensure you are squeezing as much joy and meaning out of life as you can.
Your purpose can evolve over time, it is not static, although usually the general direction remains the same. It is a vision for your life, it does not have an end point, rather it is a way of being where your actions all feed into the one overarching goal.
When you understand your purpose, it can assist greatly in decision making. It enables you to detach from the ups and downs in your life that are not related to your purpose and focus instead on the things that really matter to you and where you will drive results.
When you turn in and focus on your inner world, the things that bring you joy, that inspire you, that you are good at, you will evoke change in your outer world. In Chapter 10 of Stone Heart Light Heart – The Intelligence of Self Mastery I focus on Power. Power brought about by aligning your actions and decisions with your life’s purpose, by becoming the master of your own life, by writing and defining your future.
