2 questions to connect with Life Purpose
I was having a chat with someone last week and he asked me how he could find his life purpose. I asked him how he had been looking. He said he had been reading tones of books and blogs, and taking various workshops and seminars.
So I asked him, “Have you found it yet?” And the answer was no.
Many people choose to go for workshops or seminars thinking and believing that they will find their life purpose. Whilst they may help, the truth is we are already living it.
Life purpose isn’t outside of us. It is inside and within us.
Life purpose is simply doing what we love AND what we are good at, and we extend that as our services to help ourselves as well as others.
Why ourselves? It is because if what we do doesn’t fuel and motivate us in return, we will be depleted by merely giving all the time. That is why we need to love what we do.
Why others? We are social animals. When we are helping others, it gives us a sense of purpose. In order to be able to help others, we need to be good at what we do.
If we do what we love but we are not good at what we do, it is called self entertainment. If we are good at what we do but we don’t love what we do, it is called a job.
So ask yourself:
What do I love doing most?
What am I good at?
If you are not sure what exactly you are good at, then think about the sort of help or advice people approach you for. That may give you a clue.
Any links between them? Finding our life purpose isn’t as hard as we perceive. What is hard is taking the steps to live our purpose — how can we extend ourselves to be of service to ourselves and others?
One major barrier we face that puts life purpose so far away from many of us is that we get confused with the purpose of our mind and heart.
The purpose of our heart is to guide us intangibly. What we love or what our passion is comes from our heart. The heart doesn’t need a framework to function. It is about being present at this moment and be WHO we are. We will happily listen to our heart and do what we love given any moment.
The purpose of our mind is to guide us tangibly. It is here to help us to deal with practicality, to overcome challenges. It requires if not demands logic, rationale and reason in order to function. If the mind can’t figure it out, it will shut it out.
Since we have become so accustomed to using our mind, we have somehow forgotten how our heart works, and their primary purposes.
Not immediately knowing how to make a living from living our life purpose is one common show-stopper. Instead of using our mind’s purpose, i.e. to help us overcome the physical challenges and obstacles to live our life purpose, we allow our mind to stop us when we don’t have the logic, rationale, reason and the answer the mind requires.
Our mind is here to help us overcome challenges and obstacles, not to stop us from living our life.
Life purpose is never about making money.
Life purpose is never about logic, rationale or reason.
Finding our life purpose is only half of the challenge. The real challenge lies in our ability and willingness to re-learn to listen to our heart and let it lead the way even when we don’t have all the answers, and use our mind to overcome challenges and not let it stop us with any reasons if not excuses to do what we love.
