Finding Your Life’s Purpose

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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t much care where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t mat­ter which way you go,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“— so long as I get some­where,” Alice added as an expla­na­tion.

Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland.….

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The first ele­ment that needs to be explored when design­ing an authen­tic lifestyle is to fig­ure out what your life’s pur­pose is, so that you don’t end up like Alice in the quote from Alice in Won­der­land above — sim­ply going somewhere!!

This is not an easy task!!

“If it’s not an easy task, then why bother try­ing to fig­ure out my life’s pur­pose?” you might ask, and that’s a good ques­tion. One answer to this good ques­tion is, that find­ing and fol­low­ing your life’s pur­pose pro­vides you with so many ben­e­fits. Peo­ple who have taken the time to explore their life’s pur­pose expe­ri­ence more joy, more energy, more ful­fill­ment and more suc­cesses in their life.

Life Coach Mar­cia Bench states emphat­i­cally that “You will expe­ri­ence suc­cess in your life to the extent that you are clear in your life’s pur­pose.” The clearer your life pur­pose is, the more suc­cess­ful your life will be. Not a bad outcome!!

What is a ‘Life’s Purpose’?

Your life’s pur­pose is the over­ar­ch­ing theme or goal for your life; it is what you feel you were meant to do. Find­ing your life’s pur­pose gives you a more plea­sur­able, more abun­dant, more ful­fill­ing life. Time seems to fly by with hours feel­ing like min­utes when you are wrapped up in activ­i­ties that are linked to your life’s purpose.

Activ­i­ties are joy­ful, ener­giz­ing, and tend to feel more like play than work. They are also com­pletely unique to you. That’s not to say that no-one else is doing the activ­i­ties that you are doing, it’s just that you bring your unique gift, your unique per­son­al­ity to these activ­i­ties when you do them.

It’s one thing to know all of this about one’s life pur­pose, but try­ing to find your own unique, per­sonal life’s pur­pose is some­thing com­pletely different.

After a few months of research and study, I found sev­eral tech­niques that explored how to find my life’s pur­pose — that qual­ity or pas­sion that I wanted to cen­ter my life around. That ‘thing’ that I wanted to build a career on, or spend time study­ing, or spend time doing. That ‘thing’ would make me feel like I was accom­plish­ing some­thing with my life and not just going some­where; anywhere!

OK, so I’m not the only per­son that is seek­ing to iden­tify their life’s pur­pose. Seems that there are a few other baby boomers, and indi­vid­u­als from other age groups, who are cur­rently search­ing to define their life’s purpose.

It turns out that there are numer­ous tech­niques that peo­ple use to explore and iden­tify their life’s pur­pose. Many tech­niques involve answer­ing ques­tions, like the one’s below.

10 Ques­tions That Can Help You Dis­cover Your Life’s Purpose:

1. What do you love to do, whether in your spare time or at work?
2. What parts of your present job or life activ­i­ties do you thor­oughly enjoy?
3. What do you nat­u­rally do well?
4. What are your ten great­est suc­cesses to date (in your eyes)?
5. Is there a cause about which you feel passionate?
6. What are the ten most impor­tant lessons you have learned in your life?
7. Are there some issues or per­ceived prob­lems that have occurred over and over again?
8. What do you day­dream about doing?
9. Imag­ine you are writ­ing your epi­taph? What things do you want to be remem­bered for at the end of your life?
10. What would you do if you know you could not fail? What would it take to achieve that?

Go through the answers to these ques­tions and look for any issues, activ­i­ties, ideas, etc, that occur in sev­eral of your answers. Look also for sim­i­lar types of activ­i­ties, etc. Can you com­bine iden­ti­fied activ­i­ties, etc., into one or two more gen­eral themes? These will point you in the direc­tion of your life’s purpose.

There is another tech­nique that I really enjoy using to iden­tify top­ics that I am inter­ested in that could also be tied to my life’s pur­pose, but that could be because I am more than just a lit­tle bit book obsessed:

• Try spend­ing some time wan­der­ing around a large book­store. What top­ics are attract­ing your atten­tion? His­tory? Archi­tec­ture? Travel? Look for a pat­tern in what book top­ics you are strongly attracted to.

• You can also look at the books you own. What top­ics have inter­ested you enough that you have actu­ally bought books about the topic — and spent time reading?

• And you can look at what mag­a­zines you sub­scribe to. What are the top­ics of the arti­cles that caught your atten­tion and that you enjoyed reading?

Once you have all of this infor­ma­tion col­lected, see what pat­terns you can iden­tify, what top­ics keep pop­ping up. These com­mon inter­ests and pat­terns will point towards your life’s pur­pose and will help you set life goals, help you design your lifestyle, and help you maneu­ver through major lifestyle transitions.

With your life’s pur­pose, a goal and a plan in place, you can begin build­ing your best authen­tic life. What’s this? You don’t have a goal or a plan in place? In that case, stay tuned. I will be post­ing some infor­ma­tion on how to cre­ate both a goal and plan over the next few weeks.

In the mean­time — what top­ics spark your inter­ests?? Can you find spe­cific patterns??

Next, I will be look­ing at the sec­ond ele­ment in design­ing an Authen­tic Life — Iden­ti­fy­ing Your Val­ues.

Back to The 8 Key Ele­ments That Makeup An Authen­tic Life.