- Part 1 – Does finding your Life Purpose still have relevance in this day and age?
- Part 2 – About our Life Purpose
- Part 3 – 7 Steps to Identify your Personal Values
- Part 4 – To Craft Your Purpose First Find Your Passion
- Part 5 – Finding your Passion and Building your Purpose Statement
I think before we get into this next bit of work we should take a moment and reflect on what we are doing this for. We want to live our thriving life. That is why we are exploring all this.
We have discovered so far on this journey that:
- to live a thriving life we need fulfilment
- to gain fulfilment, we have to give of ourselves, because fulfilment is only achieved in the service of others.
“Keep in mind that you’ll have true happiness, true fulfilment, not living to get but living to give.” Joel Osteen
Fulfilment (giving or service), that is aligned with our values applied in the execution of our clear unshakable purpose is the path to our thriving life.
So how do we get to our purpose?
Before we launch into crafting our purpose lets work out exactly what we are talking about here. When we drill through all the hype and really reflect on what this thing called a purpose is, what are we really asking ourselves?
Well I think author Mark Manson said it best when he said,
“what can I do with my life that feels important to me”.
This “thing” will be very different for everyone because what is going to feel important to you may not be all that important to me.
However, think on this for a moment.
If everyone was doing what they felt was important, then pretty much everything on this spinning rock we call home would be getting taken care of wouldn’t it. Someone, somewhere would be dedicating their lives to each “thing” and they would be happy and content doing it.
Let me say that again.
If each of us had a clear purpose, a clear picture of what we feel is important to us and we were diligently working towards the achievement of that thing every minute of every day, then everything in the world would be receiving some attention and we, as individuals, would be happy and content knowing that we were working on or towards something that we felt really mattered.
That is the true wonder of being very clear on our purpose.
Well we have to get off our bums and get uncomfortable – yes we do!
Just as we discovered in the fable from my previous post, finding our purpose isn’t going to happen if we sit on our bums in our living rooms watching endless youtube videos or reruns of our favourite sitcoms.
We must do the work, get uncomfortable and ask some really difficult questions of ourselves to work out what feels really important to us, to light that fire under us and to find our purpose.
Purpose drives us; Values guide us
The reason for getting really clear on our values as a first step in this process is because we cannot have a purpose that is not aligned to our values.
If purpose is about doing what we feel is really important, then our values provides the parameters for the service we will provide in achieving that purpose.
Stick with me here.
Imagine you have a value that is “kindness to all things”.
With a value like that it is unlikely that you would be comfortable with any form of cruelty.
Now let’s say that you are crazy about donkeys. You have donkey pictures in your home, you watch youtube videos on donkeys, at fairs and show you always gravitate to the donkeys. You love their faces and those big brown eyes – seriously who wouldn’t. They are just catnip for you or maybe that’s donkeynip.
So:
- if you are not comfortable with cruelty,
- and you are over the top crazy about donkeys,
- then you may identify that rescuing donkeys who have been abused and neglected, and
- providing them with a loving home for the rest of their days,
is what you feel is the most important thing you can be doing with your life. So much so that even if you were only able to rescue and rehabilitate just one donkey it would all be worthwhile to you.
Therefore, your purpose might be:
“to provide a haven for abused and neglected donkeys so that they can rest, recover and engage in the life they deserve.”
Let’s try another one:
Powerful stuff don’t you think?
But I have 5 values I hear you saying. How do all of them inform my purpose?
Awesome question and so glad you asked. Remember, values provide the parameters for our service and so the equation is:
Values + Passion = Purpose
Let’s go back to our donkey example and imagine that your 5 values are:
- kindness to all things
- innovation
- calmness
- fearlessness
- trust
Using the same equation, your purpose statement might read something like this:
“to fearlessly rescue abused and neglected donkeys and provide a kind, calm haven for them using innovative techniques so that they can rest, recover and learn to trust again”
Yep I am down with that. Any donkey rescued by you would be in good hands and the world would be a better place because of it.
Or with our helping youth example, your 5 values might be:
- courage
- understanding
- loyalty
- dignity
- patience
Now your purpose statement might read something like this:
“to treat young people with dignity and understanding, demonstrating loyalty to them while patiently guiding them so that they have the courage to live their best life”
Again, think about the impact on the world a person with this purpose could have.
We can see in these examples how the service we are providing is informed by our values, and guess what, there is a huge benefit out of this as well – fulfilment and happiness.
Discovering our purpose pretty much means finding those things that we are so passionate about, that fire us up whenever we think about them, and that are bigger than us.
I am not talking grandiose achievement here, although that is worth striving for.
I am saying that we need to think about how best to spend the time we have so that when we are done the world is just that bit better because of our efforts. Not to mention the happiness and satisfaction we will feel at the end of our days when we are quietly sitting and reflecting on our lives.
But aren’t you just throwing a whole heaps of words together to make something fit?
No, not really. Notice that each of the example purpose statements I have written here are crafted in the same way; “to….. so that….”.
“to…” explains how and what we are willing to do; what service we are willing to provide, and how we are going to provide it.
While “so that…” explains the outcome we want to achieve or the thing/s that will demonstrate to us that we achieved our aim.
To look at it another way:
| to… | so that… |
| fearlessly rescue abused and neglected donkeys and provide a kind, calm haven for them using innovative techniques | they learn to trust again |
| treat young people with dignity and understanding, demonstrating loyalty to them while patiently guiding them | they have the courage to live their best life |
A well-crafted and meaningful purpose statement must have both elements:
- how will we serve, and
- what will we achieve in that service.
In my next post, which will be the last in this series, we will bring to flourishing completeness this journey by using a series of questions to help us identify that thing that we can do with our lives that feels important to each of us, which coupled with our values, will allow us to craft our purpose.
This is the forth part in this series. If you would like to know more about what a Life Purpose is and why we should have one, please read my previous posts.
Available below is a link to an eBook on this series.
Take care and talk soon.
Thrive; don’t just Survive with Janette