Finding your life purpose can be a most difficult task.

You have to dig through so many layers of emotions. There are layers of experiences, failures and rejections that will make it difficult for you to work out what your life purpose is. It might take hard work exploring your subconscious and many attempts. But the payoff could be a wonderful change to your life.

Don’t anticipate that it will be easy to find your life purpose

It’s not easy work looking for your life purpose. It’s easy once you have found it because it will resonate with you. You will have the proverbial “aha” moment. But getting there requires a lot of patience and a willingness to dig into the archives of your mind to see what you discover.

Just because you haven’t worked out your life’s purpose up to now doesn’t mean that you have wasted your life or that you have been unsuccessful as a person. Everything is part of the palette of experiences that you want to acquire.

But, if you do find your life’s purpose you will find your mood lift, your energy increase, your well-being and health improve and in general you will enjoy life more. It doesn’t mean that you won’t have set-backs or problems anymore. It just means you will have more energy to resolve them with.

So how does one go about finding out what it takes to get on purpose?

It’s probably going to take quite a bit of effort to fight your way through all of the preconditioning you have taken onboard.  There are many reasons why you might find your purpose difficult to work out. Your parents might have taught you to be cautious and safe in your choices. Your teachers at school might not have recognized your true passion and directed you to something that wasn’t for you. You could even think that you yourself are not worth spending time on.

Whatever the blocks that you might be facing, take courage and start digging. The pay-off will be worth it. Find what will make you jump out of bed in the mornings, make you forget the time as you enjoy living with passion and captivate all who listen to you as you enthusiastically talk about your life’s purpose.

Where to start with this huge project?

Probably your first and most wise step to take would be to involve a good friend or a personal coach in this exercise. But do try and find a coach who doesn’t tell you what to do. After all, you’ve been told what to do all your life which is why you never found your life purpose in the first place.

Don’t make that mistake again.

All you want is somebody who will keep you focused on the main prize. Someone who will continue to ask whether this is truly what you would like to do. Is this what you can see yourself being passionate about? Could this be the direction you want to take? Would this choice make you happy? These are some of the questions that should be answered, especially if you think you might have stumbled upon your life’s purpose.

But how do you start?

Start by asking the plain and simple question: what would you like in life? Don’t worry if you get a list of things such as a sports car, a better job, more money, be happy, a life partner, a soul mate and much more getting onto that list first. Continue with the questions for as long as it takes.

Eventually some more serious stuff will surface. You will note that when you say something like, “I would like to create art that will make people happy when they look at it” that you could get a tingling down your spine. Or you might be able to relate to, “I would like to overcome my physical limitations so that I can inspire other people to overcome theirs”.

Think back on times in your life when you were really happy, where the days went by far too quickly, when you laughed all the time, when you smiled a lot and when nothing was a problem. What were you doing then? Could that be what is your life’s purpose?

It’s worth exploring.

You will wonder how to find it. It’s been passing you by for many many years. What will enable you to find it now? Some effort will be required, that’s for sure, but above all else you will need to stop being afraid.

One of the most common thoughts that will crop up as you try and find your own purpose is the statement that you can’t do it. You can’t leave your job, you can’t go back to school and study again, you can’t leave the life you are living right now.

That is a perfectly normal way to think. Your life is a series of instances where you have to weigh your options. You have to decide many times whether you should take the safe route or whether you should put yourself at risk.

As a young person you are more inclined to take a risk. Leaving home to go to college in another State seems exciting. It involves stepping out of your comfort zone as you have to leave your support system behind. It’s an adventure though when you are young.

It is not as easy to do as you grow older. Everything you surround yourself with is important in that it makes you feel secure and safe. You have the same friends, you take the same route to work, you spend your evenings at the pub down the road, you go on holiday to the same seaside resort.

Yet this very sameness lulls you into a false sense of security and seduces you into thinking that this is the ideal life. It therefore surprises you when you feel a sense of dissatisfaction within. Where did that come from you wonder? After all you are so lucky to have this wonderful life especially in comparison to how many people have to live.

This way of cocooning yourself is what makes it so difficult to work out what your life purpose is. You know instinctively that whatever it is, will require you to change if you want to follow your purpose. Things will not be the same again.

From a young age society has conditioned you to take the safe route. Go to school, do well so that you can go to college, get a safe degree so you can be an accountant, lawyer, doctor or teacher and find a stable job because this will take care of you for the rest of your life.

The thought of leaving this comfort zone behind and trying to establish what you really would like to do is very frightening.  Finding the courage to explore what your life purpose is could be is the first step towards finding your passion for life.

Finding your life purpose may not be easy but…

What does it mean to be “On Purpose”?

Let’s try some questions. If you answer no to any one, or possibly even all of these questions you might not be living according to your life purpose.

This one is an easy one. Do you wake up in the morning excited to start the day, every day, not just weekends or on your days off?

How about this one. Do you love your work and is it a career for you or a burden?

Do you often read a book or article online because it is interesting and will enrich your life and could possibly increase your knowledge for your work?

Here are a few that you might want to answer yes to and if you so might just realize you are not on purpose.

Do you often find yourself eating because it makes you feel good, and it helps you cope better with the day?

Are you constantly looking to make more money so that you can do something else, although you have no idea what you might want to do?

How do you answer to this one.  Are you and your credit card best buddies? Do you binge shop regularly and have a cupboard full of clothes which you have only worn once, if at all?

Do you long to go on a romantic cruise because it could let you meet up with the man or woman of your dreams?

You’re in a loving relationship but you like to look at good looking people because there’s no harm in having some fantasies?

When you go on vacation to another city, and especially if traveling outside your country, do you wish you could live there because you imagine things would be so much more exciting, or settled, or interesting, or lucrative?

You would love to buy a new car because you know it will make you feel great to be able to show off to other people that you’ve made it.

You live in the wrong suburb. If you could move to the one on the other side of the city it would be so much nicer. And the houses are much bigger.

So how did it go with all of these questions?

Remember none of the answers to the questions above show that you are doing anything wrong. That’s not the point of the exercise. It was just for you to reflect on whether there are things you might be doing on a daily basis that make you feel better about yourself because you are not doing what makes you happy.

In other words you are not living on purpose.

Do you have the courage to find your Personal Life Purpose?

Many self-help books encourage you to work out what your life purpose statement is. But if you are like most of the people who are trying to work out their life purpose, you will be stuck for words and ideas.

What blocks you from being able to work out what you really want to do?

Why does your life purpose escape you?

Where have all your dreams and passions gone?

These questions are very difficult to answer. You will find that digging deep into yourself to try and work out why you a missing the spark and how to rekindle it again is almost impossible.

What it requires to find your personal life purpose is to scratch your way through all of the layers of pre-conditioning you have acquired through many years to see what is going on inside of you.

Many people live their lives just making do, never finding that passion. With this comes a constant sense of dissatisfaction or discontent. You always feel as if you are missing out on something, that life is drifting past without having achieved anything.

That feeling stems from inside of you where your inner self keeps on saying that what you are doing is not what your life purpose is. Many people never find it and spend their life with a nagging feeling that they are missing something.

Most often people who have this sense of missing something spend their time trying to fill that void with other things. You have probably experienced this yourself. You spend your money on buying new clothes, cars or homes in the hope that it will make you feel good.

It does feel good to drive that new car or move into a lovely home, but the happy feeling is always short lived. It never lasts because it doesn’t address the underlying feelings of unease that you have.

You might find yourself drifting from one relationship to another, hoping to discover in the new partnership a feeling of completeness that you know is out there somewhere but that you are just not able to find.

If all those lovely new things don’t make you happy for long and your relationships are not fulfilling you perhaps it’s time to start thinking about what your life purpose statement is. Finding that and aligning yourself to this purpose could be what you have been looking for for so long.

You would not be the only one looking for this answer. In recent years the number of best-selling books that deal with self-help and personal growth issues have grown into an avalanche. The popularity of the “The Secret” video stunned even the people who produced it.

It seems that people are waking up to the fact that they are not following their life purpose and in fact have no idea what that could be. Many people end up thinking that the problem is that they are not good enough, that they need to improve themselves.

They think that if they work hard enough on the self-improvement angle then they will feel better about themselves and the lives they lead. Is that the answer? Surely not. 

The self-improvement work is just another misleading direction to take. Finding the life purpose and following it is a better way of finding that inner happiness and contentment.

How do you know if you are not “On Purpose”?

Just about everybody that you talk to would say that they want to be successful. But a surprising number of those people can’t really define what success is. They may have a vague notion that success equates with money, power, or fame but they don’t really define what levels of money, power or fame that they seek. The notion of success is vague and the path towards it is ill defined.

Clearly, success is a relative thing. It depends on a person’s value system, beliefs, and tolerance level. Some things that make one person completely happy and satisfied may be completely untenable for someone else. For this reason, the first most fundamental step in achieving success is to define what success really is. This is not a process that should be taken lightly, because it will have a profound and long-lasting impact on a person’s life and career.

Because of the long-term implications that success and the pursuit of it have over a person’s life, the optimum time to define success is early in one’s life and career. In other words, by knowing at a young age what you want to achieve and then clearly defining how you intend to achieve it, the process of becoming successful becomes much more systematic. To not define success early in one’s life and career is tantamount to not defining a destination after already setting out on a journey.

Of course it is never too late to define success. Even if you are approaching middle age or are already into it, it is still critically important for you to define what success means to you. In fact, defining success later in life benefits from the acquired wisdom and experience that the years have already yielded. Regardless of when the definition of success happens in a person’s life, it is a critical and valuable exercise.

The value lies in the overall process. By forcing yourself to sit down and clearly articulate what is important to you, and then understanding why, actually achieving it becomes much easier. When you have clearly defined goals in place as well as the compelling reasons why you want to achieve these goals, the likelihood of becoming successful is much greater than if your motivations are fuzzy and ill defined.

Clearly defining success is even more important if you are already unhappy with your life. For example, if you are looking for long-term financial security but are not certain how to achieve it, define what that security would mean to you. Once it’s defined you can implement a financial plan to achieve it.