Establishing one’s purpose is the second component of building personal power. While you are calm, relaxed, alert, and present, you can ask yourself some questions to clarify your purpose.
- What does your ideal life look like? Consider your lifestyle, living environments, variety of activities and opportunities, your relationships, your finances, the things you most enjoy and aspirations.
- Is your life as simple as it could be and do you enjoy time-freedom to relax and do things you love to do? Busyness and distraction, particularly in this era of 24/ 7 technology is becoming a bit of an epidemic.
- If you could wave a magic wand and instantaneously change anything to make your life ideal, what would need to happen? Remember you can’t change others, although they might change if you do.
If you’re happy with the choices that you have been making and the directions in which you’re headed that’s all well and good. Perhaps some fine tuning is all that is called for. If you have some major life-dissatisfaction or you can see some good opportunities to pursue then what are you going to do about that?
Tips on Finding One’s Purpose
In order to give you a wider range of perspectives on finding your purpose, we include ten tips of Jack Canfield:
Jack Canfield’s 10 Tips
1. Explore the things you love to do and what comes easy to you
2. Ask yourself what qualities you enjoy expressing the most in the world
3. Create a life purpose statement
4. Follow your inner guidance – what is your heart telling you?
5. Be clear about your life purpose – keep on questioning
6. Conduct a passion test
7. Think about the times you’ve experienced the greatest joy in your life
8. Identify periods in life when you were most fulfilled
9. Align your goals with your life purpose and passions
10. Lean into your true life purpose bit by bit
Source: www.jackcanfield.com
Regarding Item 6, Canfield references The Passion Test developed by Chris and Janet Attwood. 15 separate answers are provided to the following question: When my life is ideal, I am …. (fill in the blank). The first word following “I am” should be based on a verb, for example, being, doing, having, enjoying, helping, creating, progressing and entertaining.
Below we provide tips from Brian Tracy on living a successful life – which is closely related to purpose – if we’re living on purpose we’re successful.
Brian Tracy’s Tips
1. Change your self-image and expectations
2. Create helpful habits
3. Focus on what is useful
4. Set clear written goals
5. Assess your progress with useful questions
6. Luck is predicted by taking chances and showing up
7. Focus on activities that bring results
8. Realize that you have to pay the price
9. Keep going
10. Make a decision when required
11. Take responsibility for your life
Setting expectations and habits – and “standards,” something that Tony Robbins stresses – are very much in alignment with one another. Living a purposeful life is very much about making wise choices and engaging in conducive habits that serve our purpose consistently, on a more or less daily basis.
The first item in the list above is particularly important as we need the self-belief to entertain our visions without doubting that we can achieve them and then settling for mediocrity. We all need some adventure and variety in our lives.
Not everybody has a single, clear outer purpose that both absorbs them and provides great fulfillment – life is an experiment after all and we all experience life differently. If you’re unclear on your purpose at this point, consider reading Peak Performance!! Personal Power – link provided below. This book has over 160 review and self-coaching questions to help you to gain more clarity on life-design, and be more at peace with yourself and the world.
In any event, a certain amount of focus and concentration is needed to achieve anything worthwhile. Experimentation may be called for – we don’t necessarily know what we like until we try it. What excites and drives you? It helps to know your life principles and values, covered in the next chapter of the book mentioned above.
Questions on Finding Your Purpose
With reference to your key life themes like health, love, work and play, you can ask:
1. What’s working in my life and what isn’t?
2. If money was no object what would I do?
3. What am I most proud of to date?
4. How would the 100-word synopsis of my eulogy read?
5. If I could wave a magic wand and things were perfect, what would my situation look like?
6. If I were to die next week, how satisfied would I be with my life up until now?
7. What heart-felt causes are really important to me?
8. What has provided me with the most joy to date?
9. Am I truly using my strengths?
10. Am I doing what I want, as well as helping others?
11. Am I spending time with the right people for mutual benefit? (May include mastermind group, coach, etc.)
12. Is what I’m doing now getting me to where I want to go?
13. What are two very different potential scripts for my life?
14. What life phase am I in now and what’s the next one?
15. Is there something more that I’d really love to do?
I have seen references to people wanting a significant change in life circumstances every two years, every four years and then of course, there’s that seven year itch! However long it’s been for you, living in that same old routine, anything beyond a couple of years is worth looking at, in terms of creating something new. In the words of that old Sam Cooke song “A change is gonna come.” We all need to learn and grow.
Just to help with some comparative data, my late Dad used to change jobs about once every 5 years; in my case, generally rather more often, albeit a different generation and a different line of work. Regards timescales for planning ahead, this may depend upon your life phase, your situation and how quickly things around you are changing, but 3 or 5 years often suits, being neither too short nor too long. Once you’ve sorted out your direction, it helps to live in the present and focus on commensurate small, manageable steps today, allowing tomorrow to take care of itself.
Excerpted from Peak Performance!! Personal Power available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RTB23F3 – Book 4 in the Peak Performance!! series.