A few thousand years ago, Lao Tsu, author of the Tao Te Ching, created the symbols that were interpreted as:

Simply notice the natural order of things,
Work with it rather than against it,
For to try to change what is only sets up resistance.

Today, we simply say “Go with the flow”.

When it comes to designing your lifestyle, once you have figured out your life’s purpose you can begin developing your authentic lifestyle, your true path. One that is based on ‘what is’ — your unique life’s purpose — and that offers you little resistance.

There are any number of books aimed specifically at helping you overcome resistance in your life — Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles is one that I highly recommend — and I encourage you to read any that catch your eye. In fact, if you know of a book that has been useful in helping you discover and follow your life’s purpose, then please send me an email with the title and author’s name — I would love to read it

In the meantime, here is a simple little exercise that can help give you a glimpse into your authentic life:

Begin by answering the 10 questions that were given in my earlier post, Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Go ahead. Answer the questions. I’ll wait .….….….….….….…..

.….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….….→→→→→

Good. Now that you have answered those questions, without pausing to think about it, answer the following question with the first thing that comes into your mind — don’t think about it, don’t edit it, and don’t censor it:

If you knew you could not fail, and money was of no concern,
what would you be doing right now!!

The Grand Place, Brussels Belgium. source: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

For me: I would be standing in the middle of the Grand Place in Brussels Belgium. I would have just finished eating a Leonidas chocolate (I can still taste the chocolate, mmmmmm) and would be taking some amazing photographs that were going to accompany a travel article I was writing for the Conde Nast Traveler Magazine.

Where would you be right now, and what would you be doing?

‘Till next time
Anne

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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.

Source: florindasdesigns-flickr

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??

In my next post, I will be looking at the second element in designing an Authentic Life — Identifying Your Values.

There are a few times in one’s life when you have the opportunity (either voluntary or not) to sit back and re-examine your life. To look at where you have been, where you are now, and where you want your life to take you over the next decade or two.

Major lifestyle transitions, like deciding in your twenties to leave the lifestyle of being an employee behind in order to take on the more flexible lifestyle of a creative nomad, is one such time. But not everyone decides to make this type of transition.

Mid-life, however, is generally a time for people to begin re-examining their life. To explore whether they are doing what they are doing because they want to — because it brings them great joy, satisfaction and fulfillment. Or if they are doing what they are doing because it’s what they have always done. Unfortunately, the recent global economic tumbling act has put many people at mid-life into a position where they have no choice but to reevaluate their lives and reorient their careers.

Based on a Photo by Felipe Venancio, flickr, Creative Commons

So, where do you begin this evaluation? And how do you know you are getting reasonable information? After all, at least what you have always done is familiar and comfortable, even if it’s not exciting.

Marcia Bench, a Career and Retirement Coach, has developed an Authentic Retirement Model that is really more like an Authentic Lifestyle Model because it really does help you work through difficult life transition decisions.

The Authentic Lifestyle Model consists of exploring eight key elements of one’s life that will help you transition successfully into an Authentic New Lifestyle.

These eight key elements include:

1. your life purpose
2. your values
3. your motivators
4. your talents and skills
5. your life and work experience
6. your desired activities
7. your lifestyle and environment, and
8. your financial factors.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will explore each of these key elements and how they impact your life transition decisions. Coaching questions aimed at drawing answers from both your logic and your intuition will be provided for each of these key elements.

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Everyone is born with natural talents but no-one is born with the skills needed to take advantage of these natural talents.

Natural talents tend to be associated with activities that are so easy for us to do that we do them without really having to think about them or make much of an effort. Natural talents include such attributes as: artistic, creative, entrepreneurial, detail oriented, mathematical, imaginative, innovative, mechanically minded,  practical, literary, persuasive, articulate, etc.

Natural talents on their own don’t really count for much. They are merely unfulfilled potential without the development of skills.

By developing a ‘skills portfolio’ you can identify patterns that can help you discover your natural talents, as well as help you identify skills that you would like to develop in order to fulfill specific personal goals.

What Are Skills?

I’m glad you asked that question. Skills are learned and practiced abilities. They are influenced by our natural talents. Skills are much easier to develop in areas we have a natural talent for. However, even without a natural talent, skills can still be developed for activities and topics that a person has an interest in.

As an example, if a person has  a natural entrepreneurial talent , they still need to develop specific entrepreneurial skills, such as developing a viable business plan, finding clients, marketing, etc., for the natural entrepreneurial talent to be of any value.

On the other hand, if an individual has a personal interest in becoming an entrepreneur but they don’t have a natural entrepreneurial talent, they can still become an entrepreneur by learning and developing entrepreneurial skills. The process of becoming an entrepreneur will take longer and be more challenging for a person who does not possess a natural entrepreneurial talent, but it is still doable.

5 Basic Skills Groups

For anyone interested in undergoing a major transition in their life, it is a good idea to begin by identify our current skills set, including those associated with our natural talents. Knowing our current skills set can help us identify activities we want to include in, for example:

• a new lifestyle we are trying to design (including a nomadic one); or
• a new career we are trying to break into; or
• a new enterprise we are trying to develop.

The catch here (and there is generally a catch with this type of activity) is that identifying skills, particularly those associated with a natural talent, is not an easy task.

In her book, The New Zealand Guide to Transferable Skills, Christine Dekker identifies and defines 5 basic skills groups that are very useful at helping people identify what skills they have developed.

These skills groups are:

1. Physical/Practical
   1. Working with things and the physical environment; using your hands and body skillfully.
   2. Examples of physical/practical skills include: assembling, building, fitting, fixing, installing, maintaining, repairing, restoring, ordering, using.
2. Creative/Artistic
   1. Working in a visual medium or with words or sound to express ideas/emotions; using imagination; being innovative.
   2. This group can be divided into: words and ideas; visual; performing.
   3. Examples of creative/artistic skills include: (words and ideas) writing, symbolising, interpreting, modifying, expressing, scripting (visual) color coordinating, decorating, fashioning, styling, forming, drawing, (performing) acting, composing, entertaining, modeling, role-playing, staging.
3. Communication/Interpersonal
   1. Working with people; any interaction or information exchange between people; using language; understanding.
   2. This group can be divided into: ‘key’ communication skills; teaching; relationship-building; facilitating/leading; problem-solving; marketing.
   3. Examples of communication/interpersonal skills include: (‘key’ communication skills) answering, briefing, articulating, writing, reporting, describing, enquiring, conversing; (teaching) advising, coaching, disseminating, explaining, training, instructing; (relationship-building) affirming, appreciating, nurturing, team-building, guiding, empowering, listening, supporting; (facilitating/leading) brainstorming, chairing, directing, motivating, stimulating; (problem-solving) arbitrating, conciliating, mediating, negotiating, reconciling, resolving; (marketing) advertising, representing, selling, convincing.
4. Organization/Management
   1. Bringing resources/people together; making something work together as a whole; using initiative and vision; having an overall picture or goal.
   2. This group can be divided into: to do with time; to do with resources; to do with people and tasks.
   3. Examples of organization/management skills include: (to do with time) forecasting, planning, predicting, scheduling; (to do with resources) allocating, budgeting, grouping, purchasing, sorting; (to do with people and tasks) administrating, coordinating, delegating, monitoring, networking, recruiting, reviewing, supervising.
5. Information Processing
   1. Working with facts, figures, concepts; using thinking/computing skills.
   2. This group can be divided into:‘key’ thinking skills; language and ideas; facts and figures.
   3. Examples of information processing skills include: (‘key’ thinking skills) comprehending, thinking, studying, perceiving, reading, judging, listening, identifying; (language and ideas) appraising, preparing, conceptualising, defining, reporting, editing, summarising, theorising, revising; (facts and figures) analysing, auditing, assessing, compiling, estimating, evaluating, recording, quoting, processing, mapping, measuring.

How do you know if you have identified a skill?

Skills can be so many different things. In the book mentioned above, the author listed over 300 unique skills. Each skill is identified as an action verb, and in the lists presented in the book each skill generally ended with an –ing.

To begin identifying your skills, try completing the following sentence:

I am good at _________________________.

Now that I have Identified a List of Skills, What do I do Next?

Use the skills you have identified in the 5 basic skills groups to develop a skills portfolio by identifying:

1. which skills you are best at;
2. which skills you enjoy using the most; and
3. which skills you would like to improve.

Now, using your skills portfolio, try answering the following questions:

1. Can you identify any patterns emerging from your skills portfolio? Any activities that you enjoy doing, have strong skills in, and can be used to enhance your lifestyle?
2. Are there a group of skills that you have identified that can be associated with a specific natural talent? Are there other skills that you can develop that will help you enhance this natural talent?
3. Are there skills that you can use that will help you identify activities you would like to try, new activities that you can use to help you design a new authentic lifestyle with?
4. Are there skills that you can build on in order to develop an enterprise with? One that you have already developed skills in so you know that you would enjoy doing, and feel confident you could turn into a successful money-making enterprise?
5. Have you identified any new skills that you would like to develop? Or old skills that you absolutely want to have nothing more to do with?

Tip: If you are having difficulties identifying your skills, ask friends, family members, co-workers, etc., if they can identify some of your skills for you, to get you started. We tend to devalue or overlook skills that are associated with natural talents because we find them so easy and effortless to do, whereas people who know us would easily be able to identify these skills for us.

TTFN

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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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 are 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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I love that quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, I have probably lived that quote far too many times in my life. Movement became the benchmark through which I gauged progress in my life — as long as I was moving forward, I was getting somewhere and making progress, or at least that is what I used to think.

Then I started learning about life purpose and how to find my life 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 Gen Y’ers that are currently searching to define their life’s purpose.

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:

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

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?

There is another technique that I really enjoy using to identify topics that I am interested in, but that could be because I am more than just a little bit book obsessed. Try spending some time wandering around a large book store. What topics are attracting your attention? History? Architecture? Travel? Look for a pattern in what book topics attract your attention.

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 them?

And you can look at what magazines you subscribe to. What are the topics of the articles that caught your attention and 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, or help you maneuver through a major life transition.

With your life’s purpose, a goal and a plan in hand, you can begin building your best life. Or at least that is what I plan on doing

TTFN

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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This article was originally published on my other blog Ageless Explorer, on July 17th, 2009, under the title Would You Tell Me Please, Which Way I Ought To Go From Here