Your purpose can put iron in your willpower, can cause you to accomplish feats that you wouldn’t have thought possible. Before you can use it you’ll have to find it and for that, just keep reading.
What is it?
I’ve been going on and on recently about incorporating your purpose into how you live your life. The reason for this is that when you live day-to-day or even week-to-week or month-to-month, you aren’t really being as effective as you can be.
When I talk of purpose, some of us will say that the purpose of life is to be happy. Well, yes and no. Happiness is attainable, but it is attained by acting in concert with your purpose. When you came here you had one or more specific reasons for doing so. As such, as you live your life you have certain deep needs to fill and abilities to use. By looking at those needs and abilities, you can attempt to fathom your purpose.
What is your purpose?
When you start exploring your purpose, it is very easy to simply wimp out and either not do it at all, or come up with something generic. Neither of those will serve you. Remember that what you fear about yourself quite often (usually in my experience) leads to something that you probably want, even if you don’t know it. I say this to remind you that it’s probably going to be a little tough getting the ball rolling, but after you get into it and work with it you will find your resistance fading away, until eventually, your curiosity – your need to know – propels you on.
There are two basic methods for determining your purpose: The high-level, intellectual method and the base-level, gut instinct, emotional method. Despite being rather cerebral myself, I chose to go with the emotional method because I figured that if I tried the intellectual method, I might get stuck in analysis and thus defeat myself. As such, I used the emotional method, and that is what I suggest. Let me first cover the intellectual method:
- Analyze your behaviors. Get someone to help you as the really important behaviors you are looking for you do by default. You don’t even think of them.
- Look at your strengths. What do you do that is effortless or incredibly proficient with minimal effort?
- When you daydream, what elements come into play? What role do you fill? Don’t look at specifics, look for themes.
- Take a look at yourself and draw these facts together. When you think you are on to something, check it againt all available data. See if it “rings true”. Think about living your life by deliberately keeping this result as your purpose.
- Bear in mind, that even though this is more intellectual than the next method, emotions do come into play. Pay attention to the input, but make it part of the analysis process.
The other method I got from Steve Pavlina, which seems to have been inspired by the work of Win Wenger, who did a lot of work on image streaming. This one requires that you disconnect or ignore your surface thoughts, and work directly with the inner mind. This is a difficult task, and this particular piece of info is not easy to come across. So, using this method, you can get past the “fluff” and get to the good stuff. The basic principle looks like brainstorming, but it uses only one person:
- Find some time alone with writing materials or a computer. It took me an hour, split over two days. Each person is unique.
- Say to yourself “My purpose in this life is…”
- Write the first thing that comes into your mind on the paper (or type it into the text editor)
- Repeat
- Repeat some more
Keep going over and over and over until you get it. Don’t stop until you’re forced to by outside circumstances, or you have gotten it. - You will face periods of resistance. Don’t fight resistance, as that only makes it worse. Acknowledge it and keep going.
- Pay attention to your emotions as you go. When you feel emotional about one of your entries, mark it.
- Eventually, the maked entries start to form themes. Use those themes to home in on your purpose.
- When you find it, you will be unable to continue. That’s how you know.
What to do with the output
Remember that words are an imprecise method of conveying meaning. The words that you have arrived at don’t convey the totality of what your purpose is. But it is a handy reminder. FYI: I went through well over a hundred entries before arriving at my purpose “to give others aid to awaken and accelerate their lives, to live in courage and harmony, and to shine my light upon the world.” Why do I tell you this? When you find your purpose, it is likely to be grand in scope. But, at the same time, you will be able to take action on that purpose immediately.
Once you have found your purpose, and start to live in line with it, you will find that doing so empowers you to do many things that you would not otherwise have believed possible. Try it out and let us know how it goes.
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