How do You Intelligently Define Your Purpose in Life
I have suggested two different processes for locating your purpose. Ideally you can use both of them, since each one will help you understand the different aspects of your purpose. Warning – this is going to be a lot of work for you, but the end result will be worth it because you’ll eventually reach a point of powerful clarity. Then it will be far easier to make lasting decisions and take strong action, and you’ll find that your life just seems to work effortlessly once you know and are living in line with your purpose. Here is the first one.
Process 1: Emotional Intelligence
The first process is to learn from your emotional intelligence. Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about. Emotionally you will feel that it is resonates with you.
How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes.
Here’s what to do:
1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type .
2. Write at the top this question, “What is my true purpose in life?”
3. Write any answers that pop into your head. They don’t have to be a complete sentences. Short phrases are fine.
4. Repeat step 3 until you write that answer that makes you cry. This is the key to your purpose.
That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a coach or an architect or an athlete. For some people this exercise will make perfect sense, it will just click. To others it will seem too simple or too stupid. Usually it takes at least 10 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter that keeps trying to interrupt your finding your answers to your question. Many answers will come from your mind and your memories, not all true.
But when the true answer does finally arrive, it will feel like it’s from a hidden space in your life.
For those of us who are entrenched in regular low-awareness living, it may take a longer to get all the superficial answers out, it may take more than an hour or two. But if you stick with it, after 100 or 200 or maybe even 300 answers, you’ll be struck by the answer (or set of answers) that causes you to surge with emotion, the answer that breaks your numbness and stirs you deep within. If you’ve never done this, it may very well sound silly to you. You may feel a little embarrassed. So what – even if it is a little silly, go somewhere alone and do it anyway.
As you go move through this process, some of your answers will be very similar. You may even find yourself coming up with similar or duplicate answers. At other times you might move on new tangents and generate another handful of answers on another theme. That’s great. Just list whatever answers pop into your head while you keep writing.
At some point during the process (after a few pages), you may want to quit and you just can’t see any clear results emerging. You may feel tempted to get up and do something else – but it’s only a distraction. That’s normal to want to feel it’s done. But don’t, because when you push past this resistance, and simply keep writing, this resistance will pass and melt into another stream of fresh answers.
Sometimes you will discover a few answers that seem to give you a mini-surge of emotion, but they don’t quite make you cry — they’re close but not there yet. Simply highlight these answers, (and possibly circle back to them later and generate new permutations). Each reflects a piece of your purpose, but by themselves they’re not complete. When you start getting these kinds of almost answers, you can know you’re getting warm.
Just keep going.
It’s very important that you do this alone and without any interruptions. It doesn’t matter if your first answers start from, “I don’t have a purpose,” or “Life is meaningless,” just keep going, and you’ll still get there.
When I did this exercise, it took me about 20 minutes, and I reached my final and true answer at step 186. Partial pieces of the answer (mini-surges) appeared early on at answers 50 and 61. Whilst the main elements converged around the 150 mark and was refined through steps 175-186.
I felt those tempting feelings to stop (wanting to get up and do something else, expecting the process to fail, feeling very impatient and even irritated) around steps 90 to 110. After taking some short one minute breaks where I closed my eyes and rested from bombarding my brain with the question. I tried to relax, clear my mind, and to focus once again on the answers I wanted — this was really helpful as the answers I received after this bio-break had more clarity and I had more mental energy.
Here’s my final answer – to live fully alive and present, to live courageously, to focus on sharing love and compassion, to awaken the heart of love and passion in others, and to leave a bread crumb trail of hope and benefit for others.
When you find your own unique answer to the question of why you’re here, you will feel it resonate with you deeply. The words will seem to have a special energy to you, and you will experience that energy whenever you read them again.
Discovering your purpose is perhaps the easier part. The hard part is keeping your focus on it on a daily basis and reflecting and directing yourself with integrity towards that purpose that is uniquely yours.
If you’re curious why this simple process works, you’ll just have to wait until you’ve successfully completed it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably know for yourself why it works. Most likely if you ask 10 people why it works (10 people who’ve actually completed it), you’ll most likely get 10 different answers, each one colored by their individual belief systems, and each one reflection their own truth.
Obviously, this process won’t work for you if you quit before convergence. I’d estimate that 75% of you will achieve convergence in less than ninety minutes. If you’re really entrenched in your beliefs and resistant to the process, maybe it will take you several sessions over several hours, but I suspect that most people like that will quit early (like within the first 30 minutes) or they won’t even attempt it at all. But if you’re drawn to read this blog, then it’s doubtful that you will fall into this group.
So give it a shot! Find the space and time and just do it. Now. Why wait. Take back your life.
The answer you get from this process, however, depends largely on your ability to generate good input. Basically what you are doing is exploring your mind space for possible purposes, and you’re using the gauge of your emotional reaction to each idea to evaluate how close you are.
You may notice certain patterns in this purpose statement that link up with my overall concept of reality:
a) Need to live consciously = awareness, required for conscious personal growth
b) And live courageously = courage, a virtue required to pursue conscious growth
c) To resonate with love = unconditional love, which isn’t an emotion but rather a sense of connectedness with everything that exists, implying that working on my own growth and helping others to grow are compatible
d) And compassion = another virtue, one which helps temper courage
e) To awaken the great spirit (the big heart) within others = to help others lock in at a higher level of consciousness/awareness, which will give them the means to pursue personal growth consciously
f) And to leave this world in peace = a double meaning here:
1) – world in .. peace = to do no harm, to work to improve life instead of destroy it, to leave a legacy; and
2) – leave … in peace = no regrets, knowing that I did my best and could have expected no more of myself, like refusing to die with my music still in me, inner peace
And now for the second method you can use to sneak up on your purpose to expose it to yourself. Read it at Intelligently Define Your Life Purpose 2
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