Discover your SPECIFIC Life Purpose (Part 1/2)
Achieve clarity and insight to RE-BALANCE your life on your terms
Find your purpose and follow your passions are common pieces of advice for people on quest to find more fulfillment in their lives. This advice rolls off the tongue so easily and frequently that it can be received as cliche even though it is sound advice. However the process is not as simple as it sounds. If it were, most of us would not find ourselves lost or stuck in a rut. So why is finding our purpose such a challenge?
One of the reasons it’s so hard is that purpose doesn’t necessarily have a clear cut definition. It gets conflated with career choice, how you make a living, identity, interests, and who knows what else. Just browsing online for a definition and I found numerous definitions. Similar and different at the same time. So how are you supposed to find it when you really don’t know what you are looking for? Let’s start with some simpler definitions.
Life purpose means having set goals and direction for one’s life. And purpose is simply defined as the reason for which something exists.
If those definitions aren’t satisfactory, then let’s look at it another way. What are we trying to accomplish by uncovering our purpose? Why are we seeking purpose in the first place? The answer is we typically know within ourselves that we have something to offer the world and that life should feel more rewarding. We also don’t want to toil through life needlessly. We want to know that how we invest our time, energy, and effort is indeed worthwhile and not a waste. The reason we seek purpose is we want assurances of meaning, fulfillment, and overall life satisfaction. But the quest to secure those assurances is not always straightforward, which can leave us frustrated.
Why is it so frustrating?
The short answer is our clarity is blocked. Often blocked, in my view, by three things:
a lack of money
a lack of experience/exposure
a lack of confidence
Let’s unpack these three blockers…
First a lack of money. You’re probably wondering what does money or a lack of it have to do with it? The answer is almost everything!! Have ever noticed the people that say purpose isn’t about money actually have money? It’s annoying and seems hypocritical because they actually have money.
While I understand why it’s annoying, it’s not really hypocritical. Those with money tend to pursue their purpose with clarity because their process of discovery is not in conflict with the need to financially provide for themselves. Their lower level needs of security are met and they can focus on the higher level need for purpose and self actualization. Have you heard of the hierarchy of needs?
When our base level needs are unmet we cannot ascertain anything of a higher order because we are in survival mode. If you are struggling to meet your basic needs, then your primary focus is to establish that security. Until that security is established you don’t even have the bandwidth to consider anything else. That’s why some concerns of happiness and fulfillment are easily dismissed by people whose heads are barely above water and by people you have been scarred or traumatized by severe poverty and financial hardship. And it’s also why people who are struggling financially think they will be happy once they have money.
The next question you might have is what about people with good paying jobs and aren’t struggling financially but still don’t have clarity of purpose? My response to that is having a good paying job doesn’t necessarily bring financial security. Folks can still be financially underwater even with a good paying job. The struggle due to a lack of money, even after achieving a level of job security, can produce a grind or an autopilot approach to life that takes up a lot of bandwidth and can block clarity. The reason the pandemic resulted in the Great Resignation is that some emotional, mental, and even physical bandwidth became available to produce clarity. People became more reflective, more imaginative, more creative, and more honest with themselves.
So how much security do you need to achieve clarity? You don’t have to be wealthy, You can be living paycheck to paycheck. The metric is to what extent your basic needs consume you. You just need to be secure enough that your thought processes are not distracted by your basic needs. As a career coach, one of the common questions we ask is if money were no object, then what would you like to do, how would you spend your time??
If you are readily dismissing ideas because they won’t pay the bills, then money is an object and you can’t truly entertain other ideas long enough to answer that question.
Secondly a lack of experience/exposure. You simply don’t know what you don’t know. A lack of experience and exposure blocks clarity because you simply do not have enough information to draw any conclusions. That data that you have is not sufficient. It’s like you’ve been given a multiple choice question and the answer is none of the above.
This is often the case for younger people with little life experience. Usually after having more life and work experience, especially with some level of independence, the data starts to emerge more and more. Even if it’s uncovering what you don’t like or don’t want to do. Once you have more data, then it becomes easier to draw some conclusions.
Lastly, a lack of confidence. This one is interesting because this isn’t so much about a lack of clarity as much as it is about denial or lack of acceptance. Many people have a passion. They know what they love. They know what has truly sparked their interest but they may have foreclosed on it thinking it’s unattainable because someone told them it was unattainable or that it was a stupid idea or that it won’t pay the bills. They could also think they won’t measure up. Or life happened and they felt like they had to pivot. Or it can only be a hobby, not a full-time pursuit.
All of it amounts to a lack of confidence that certain paths are indeed viable options. As a career coach, I usually start to probe along these lines when clients come across as indifferent to other options. It’s like they have an unquenchable thirst that can only be satisfied by the one thing they are afraid to talk about, due to a lack of confidence or faith that the pursuit can be successful for them. So if you find yourself ambivalent and indifferent on your quest, then it’s possible that you might actually already know but you’ve closed yourself off to the idea of it for one reason or another. If you open yourself up to simply discussing it in a safe space, you might be surprised at what you experience.
This concludes part one of this purpose series. Read part two where we get into discovering your SPECIFIC purpose using my 3C Formula.
Onward to discovering your purpose and Harmonious Balance my friends,
Johanna
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