If you want to be fulfilled, happy, content, and experience inner peace and ultimate fulfillment, it’s critical that you learn how to find your passion and life purpose. Without a life purpose as the compass to guide you, your goals and action plans may not ultimately fulfill you.
How to Discover Your Life Purpose
After working with more than a million people all over the world, I have come to believe that each of us is born with a unique life purpose.
Identifying, acknowledging, and honoring this purpose is perhaps the most important action successful people take. They take the time to understand what they’re here to do – and then they pursue that with passion and enthusiasm.
For some of us, our purpose and passion in life is obvious and clear. We’re born with a set of talents and through persistent practice, we develop our talents into skills.
1. Explore the Things You Love To Do & What Comes Easy to You
We are all born with a deep and meaningful purpose that we have to discover. Your purpose is not something you need to make up; it’s already there. You have to uncover it in order to create the life you want. You may ask yourself, “What is my purpose in life?” You can begin to discover your passion or your purpose by exploring two things:
- What do you love to do?
- What comes easily to you?
Of course, it takes work to develop your talents- even the most gifted musician still has to practice-but it should feel natural, like rowing downstream rather than upstream. I love to teach, to write, to coach, to facilitate, to train, and to develop transformational seminars, workshops, and courses. I love to bring other leaders together for conferences and to co-create new approaches to our work.
These things come easy for me. Although I invested many years in learning how to master these skills, I loved every minute of it. In other words, work is required, but suffering is not. If you are struggling and suffering, you are probably not living on purpose.
2. Ask Yourself What Qualities You Enjoy Expressing the Most in the World
First, ask yourself, What are two qualities I most enjoy expressing in the world? Mine are love and joy.
Second, ask yourself, What are two ways I most enjoy expressing these qualities? Mine are inspiring and empowering people.
I inspire people with the moving stories that I tell in my seminars and that I write about in my books, and I empower them by teaching them powerful success strategies that they can apply in their own lives.
3. Create a Life Purpose Statement
Take a few moments and write a description of what the world would look like if it were operating perfectly according to you. In my perfect world, everybody is living their highest vision where they are doing, being, and having everything they want. Finally, combine all three into one statement, and you will have a clear idea of your purpose.
Mine is “Inspiring and empowering people to live their highest vision in a context of love and joy.”
4. Follow Your Inner Guidance (What Is Your Heart Telling You?)
What if I told you that you have your own guidance system within you that can help you get from where you are in life to where you want to go?
It’s called your inner GPS. Your inner GPS is similar to the GPS system you use in your car or on your phone. It tells you how to get from point A to point B.
When you get in your car and are heading to a specific destination, what is the first thing you input into your GPS? First, it finds your current location. Once it’s determined where you are, it gives you directions to where you are heading.
For the system to work, it simply needs to know your beginning location and your end destination. The navigation system figures out the rest by the use of an onboard computer that receives signals from multiple satellites and calculates your exact position. Then it plots a perfect course for you.
All you have to do from that point on is follow the instructions it gives you to reach your destination.
Decide Where You Want to Go
All you have to do is decide where you want to go by clarifying your vision, then lock in your destination through goal setting, affirmations, and visualization, and then start taking the actions that will move you in the right direction.
With every picture you visualize, you’re “inputting” the destination you want to get to.
Every time you express a preference for something, you are expressing an intention.
A table by the window, front row seats at a conference, first-class tickets, a room with an ocean view, or a loving relationship.
All these images and thoughts are sending requests to the universe.
If you stay out of its way—meaning you don’t interrupt the process with a stream of negative thoughts, doubts, and fears, your inner GPS will keep unfolding the next steps along your route as you continue to move forward.
5. Be Clear About Your Life Purpose
Once you are clear about what you want and keep your mind constantly focused on it, the how will keep showing up—sometimes just when you need it and not a moment earlier.
You were born with an inner guidance that tells you when you are on or off course by the amount of joy you are experiencing. The things that bring you the greatest joy are in alignment with your purpose and will get you to where you want to go.
When you present your goals to the universe with all its powerful technology, you will be surprised and dazzled by what it delivers. This is where the magic and miracles truly happen.
Take some time to think honestly and openly about where you currently are in your life and what you want to do with your life.
What is your financial status? How are your relationships going? How is your health? And so on…
Next, think about where you would like to be.
If your life were perfect right now, what would it look like? What kind of job would you have and where would you be living? By continually doing this exercise, you’ll send powerful triggers to your subconscious mind to help you get there.
6. Conduct a Passion Test
Our Passion test is a simple, yet elegant, process. You start by filling in the blank 15 times for the following statement: “When my life is ideal, I am ___.” The word(s) you choose to fill in the blank must be a verb.
When Janet took me through the process, my statements looked like this:
- My life is ideal when I’m being of service to massive numbers of people.
- My life is ideal when I’m helping people with their vision.
- My life is ideal when I’m speaking to large groups.
- My life is ideal when I’m being part of a spiritual leaders network.
- My life is ideal when I’m creating a core group of ongoing trainers who feel identified with my organization.
Once you’ve created 15 statements, you identify the top 5 choices. To do this, you compare statements #1 and #2 to identify which is most important. Take the winner of that comparison and decide whether it’s more or less important than statement #3.
Then take the winner of that comparison, and decide whether it’s more or less important than statement #4, and so on until you’ve identified the passion that is most meaningful to you.
Repeat the process with the remaining 14 statements to identify your second choice. Then repeat the process until you’ve pinpointed your top 5 passions in life.
Next, create markers for each of your top five passions, so that you can look at your life and easily tell whether you are living that passion.
Once you know what your passions are and how your life will look when you are living it, you can create action plans to turn your dreams into reality.
7. Think About The Times You’ve Experienced the Greatest Joy In Your Life
Another technique you can use to help you identify your purpose is to conduct a joy review. Simply set aside about 30 minutes and make a list of all the times you’ve felt the greatest joy in your life.
Then look for a pattern among all these times.
Since we know that joy is part of your internal guidance system telling you when you are on course, you can determine a lot about your life purpose from completing this joy review.
9. Align Your Goals With Your Life Purpose and Passions
We’re all gifted with a set of talents and interests that tell us what we’re supposed to be doing. Once you know what your life purpose is, organize all of your activities around it. Everything you do should be an expression of your purpose. If an activity or goal doesn’t fit that formula, don’t work on it.
Aligning with your purpose is most critical when setting professional goals. When it comes to personal goals, you have more flexibility.
If you want to learn how to paint or water ski, go ahead and do so. If your goal is to get fit and lose weight, move ahead with confidence. Nurturing yourself emotionally, physically and spiritually will make you more energized, resilient and motivated to live your purpose on the professional front.
However, don’t ignore the signs that your job or career is not right for you. If you dread Monday mornings and live for the weekends, it may be a sign that it’s time to follow your heart and pursue the work you long to do.
10. Lean Into Your True Life Purpose
Once you have gained more clarity about your purpose, you don’t need to completely overhaul your life completely all at once. Instead, just lean into it, bit by bit.
Start living your purpose a little more fully every day, and pay attention to the feedback you’re receiving from others and in terms of the results you are producing, and also to how you are feeling.