If you are feeling stuck in a rut, feeling unfulfilled, are jealous of other’s successes, or are simply frustrated that you are not further along to where you think you should be then read on.
I wrote a little while back about humans needing a purpose:
What I didn’t realise until recently is that not everyone knows that until you have worked out Your Purpose, your ultimate goal will remain unachievable or to put it another way – you won’t understand what your ultimate goal is until you have worked out your purpose.
I recently reviewed my delegate forms from various talks and workshops I have given in the past 12 months. They spanned many industries and ranged from the lowest echelons to the highest. One of the specific questions I asked on these forms was ‘what is your purpose in life?’.
Common denominators were answers such as ‘making lots of money/profit’, ‘not having to work’, ‘having a big house/a flash car’ to ‘being famous’ and variants along similar lines as these.
This is not having a Purpose. At best these are materialistic, myopic goals which are completely different to purpose.
If they are accomplished that just leaves a void as to what is next. It is part of the human DNA to have something to strive for so once we have got to one of our short-term goals we’ll automatically be looking for the next.
In any case without purpose these short-term goals will more than likely remain unfulfilled unless these people accidentally stumble across their purpose without realising that is what they have found. But you don’t want to hope that you might stumble across a purpose. You want to have it now, change things for the better and achieve your ultimate goal.
Why Bother with Your Purpose?
Because once you have worked out your purpose the path towards your ultimate goal becomes much clearer and easier to achieve. It does require a bit of work to accomplish at the beginning but once you have it things start to fall into place and move you along inextricably towards your big shiny goal.
10 years after the train crash I had recovered enough to take stock and wonder what I was going to do with the rest of my life. In a way, I was lucky in that the crash had ripped away most of my previous life and effectively dumped it in the dustbin. This left me with a blank sheet of paper on which to start planning and I took advantage of this position. However, you don’t have to trash your entire life to work out your purpose. All it takes is the will and desire to want to change things, honesty and a little bit of time.
And the great news is that it not only works for our professional lives, it also works on a personal level as the two are linked. It also works if you are a business rather than an individual if you look at your company as an entity in its own right.
How do You find out What Your Purpose is?
This is where the hard work begins but I promise you that it is worth it.
Purpose starts from within ourselves. Who are we, what are we, what do we want in terms of things such as contentment, love, harmony, and what we avoid because it might be difficult. Once you have defined Your Purpose this gives you the starting point to make the changes you need to obtain your ultimate goal.
The only thing you need to devote to finding Your Purpose is time and some soul searching. This is not a quick fix process. The thinking, reviewing and deciding does require you to dig deep within yourself and you can’t just dash through that in an afternoon or, if you do, the end result will simply not work.
What I am going to do is break things down in the next few articles to give you the tools. I’ll detail how my thought processes went, what actions to take, the position you need to get to and you’ll be able to use it to begin to create your own new and exciting future.