Do you know what your life purpose is?
Are you wondering why you should care?
Life purpose may not be a term you're attracted
to (too spiritual, too cliched, or too whatever), but I believe
that knowing your life purpose is a basic and central key to finding career
happiness.
A way of defining life purpose is the core theme or message
of your life. What’s the common thread that can’t help but weave its way
through the different areas of your life? What is the quality that you believe
you are here to develop? What is your calling or mission in life? We’re talking
way beyond career skills and more about an overarching theme to your entire life.
When you choose work that relates to your life purpose, your
chances for sustained and lasting fulfillment are much higher than if you have
no idea what your life purpose is, or if you know that your work has absolutely
no relation to your life purpose, or if your work is in opposition to your life purpose.
This is a huge topic. You will not uncover your life purpose
by the time you finish reading this blog post. But here are a few questions to
get you started discovering what it might be, based on an exercise from Marcia Bench, a leading expert in the career coaching field:
- What do you love to do?
- What are your natural talents?
- What causes do you feel passionate about?
- What have been your 5 greatest successes (career related or not?)
- What do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life?
If you want a more complete exercise for discovering your
life purpose, please email me and I’ll send you one.
Also there are many wonderful books and programs that help you realize and articulate your
life purpose, including Laura
Berman Fortgang’s book, Now What? 90 Days to a New Life Direction and a unique program offered by the Academy for Coach Training called Living Your Vision.
Ideally after you’ve spent some time on this you’ll be able
to state your life purpose in 1-2 sentences. Whether you’ll be announcing
your life purpose at your next staff meeting or cocktail party is up to you…
Next time I’ll write about what keeps us from delving into
discovering our life purpose, because I’m sure you just thought of a few reasons!
Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com
Great post!
I like your defining purpose as "core theme or message of your life." It reminds me of something Michael Neill related on one of his shows: Ask what message your life is sending today, and--if that's not the message you want to send--how you need to change your behavior. (I believe the idea came from Ghandi, who when pressed about "his message for the people," replied, "My life is my message!").
I also think your five questions are great. I must admit I struggle every time I come across the "End of your life" question (which is often--I am a big FranklinCovey fan, and its in a lot of their materials).
Posted by: Max Leibman | May 21, 2006 at 05:23 PM
Heather,
Good post. Another thing to consider when searching for your life purpose is to take note of challenges that come up repeatedly as a theme in your life. For example, some people fight unhealthy eating habits or put up an emotional wall and don't let others in for fear of being hurt. If you face a challenge that appears again and again over several years or even decades, I think it is worth considering that part of your life purpose may be to overcome that challenge.
Posted by: Laura | July 08, 2006 at 11:58 AM