Stuck, unsure of what direction your life is taking and what you should be doing to get a better quality of life, there are times when we need an answer. So, where do we turn? What do we do when we don’t know who or what to be?
There are plenty of resources to help guide us along the way; however, one that always seems to make a comeback is the concept of finding your life purpose and enjoying a meaningful life.
It’s one of those things, like having a purpose, that is often simplified and oversimplified. So let’s talk about purpose for a moment and the relationship between life purpose, life paths, and happy life.
There are many different kinds of purposes in life. They each have their unique place and role to play in our lives. Most of us won’t realize our life purpose until we have already lived a good portion of it with meaningful connections and challenging times.
We need to experience the world, learn about ourselves, go through psychological questionnaires, face an incomplete life, challenge our life story, and understand who we are in our daily life before we can even start thinking about finding our purpose in a stronger sense.
The big misconception about purpose is that it exists only for a select few people, those who are particularly special or gifted or, in other words, “destined” for great things.
The purpose is for everyone. You have a purpose, and so do those you know. You have the same purpose as your friends and family. There is no question that we all need a sense of purpose to help us feel a part of something larger than ourselves.
What if it’s not for me…
The other mistake people make, which gets everyone into trouble, is that each purpose they come up with will lead them to their exact destiny full of sense of meaning, like the number seven in a dice game. How many times have you been told, “well, this is just a stepping stone to your true passion”?
What would be the sense of being passionate about something if we didn’t even know what we were passionate about? Passion leads you to purpose. Purpose does not lead you to desire.
If anything, finding our purpose is the ultimate stepping stone. It’s just a matter of seeing how it all works out. Of course, sometimes, the purpose is different than what you thought you were meant to do. All of the stepping stones may end up leading in different directions, and that is entirely okay.
The point is not creating the perfect plan but knowing how it all comes together. We can choose a purposeful living, face acts of kindness with its positive effect, move forward with chronic health conditions, face mental health challenges, and all this could be in associations with life purpose discovery.
Maybe I am not lucky enough to find it…
Many people put themselves into a box when trying to figure out all of life’s purpose because they think there are only so many options available or way too many options, and they can’t possibly work them all out. People often become discouraged when they look at a blank sheet of paper and can’t come up with anything.
They begin to think that there are no options available to them and have no purpose, so they give up. Most people don’t realize that you usually have hundreds or even thousands of possibilities for how your ideas could be translated into a purpose.
If this were all a matter of luck, it would be impossible to have anything meaningful in life because we would never know what our lives would bring us.
You don’t know your life mission or purpose; help someone else!
You know you have a purposeful life when you start feeling a general direction you want to go, a strong sense, like how the stars point or feel like the center of attention when you’re around certain people. That’s when your true calling starts to become clear, and this purpose comes alive within you.
Sometimes it is not easy to recognize our meaning in life because we are unsure where or what we are expecting to find. It’s like being lost in the woods and not knowing what direction to take. We start walking in one direction, turn around, and keep turning until we find ourselves right back where we started.
That’s how it is with strong life purpose statements. Sometimes you will walk into a situation, and you don’t even know why you are there or what you are looking for, but it just all makes sense when you find it.
