PRINCIPLE 2: Be Clear Why You Are Here
This is one of the core Principles for success. Everything else stems from getting in touch with that which we are put on this earth to do, our Life Purpose. This lesson is designed to help you tap into what brings you the most joy and passion, which can give you clues to your life purpose. The lesson is grounded in the idea that we all have a life purpose and when we align our choices and actions with our life purpose, things become easier and we experience more success, fulfillment and joy.
With a purpose, everything in life seems to fall into place. To be “on purpose” means you’re doing what you love to do, doing what you’re good at and accomplishing what’s important to you. When you are on purpose, the people, resources and opportunities you need naturally gravitate toward you. The world benefits, too. “With a Life Purpose—carefully developed and clearly stated—you suddenly have a basis for making all your major life decisions, for setting a lifetime’s worth of goals and for pursuing one activity or goal versus another.
Not only will thinking about and pursuing your life purpose get you to where you want to be, it will make the journey more enjoyable!
Life Purpose
Your Life Purpose is about finding the ‘why’ behind everything you do. Your purpose can tell you what to accomplish, for whom, how to accomplish it and in what time frame. When you discover your purpose, life seems to flow effortlessly, opportunity seems to fall in your lap and resources and relationships find you easily. Small successes build upon one another to create unstoppable momentum.
You might be wondering how does purpose differ from goals or action plans? Purpose is the “why” — the reason you create your goals and pursue the activities you do. It’s the reason you strive to achieve the results you’re looking for. Goals are merely the “what” you’ll accomplish and action plans are simply the “how” you’ll accomplish those goals.
Without purpose as the compass, goals and action plans are meaningless
Discovering Your Life Purpose: 4 Steps
1. Start by listing two of your unique qualities e.g. enthusiasm, creativity, determination, perseverance. Sometimes you may not know your unique qualities but your friends or family may have already identified your unique qualities and may tell you. They may mention things like your kindness, your sense of humor, your helpfulness, charisma, your focus, your drive, love and joy. What are your unique qualities?
- Mention two ways you express your unique qualities when you are interacting with others. For example if your unique quality is your ‘sense of humor’, you may be expressing it through entertaining- e.g. Music and drama. If your unique quality is your ‘kindness’, you may be expressing it through supporting others or even counseling. Some other forms of expressing your qualities could be ‘inspiring’, ‘teaching’, ‘empowering’
- Close your eyes and assume that the world is perfect now. Focus on your vision of a perfect world and notice how that looks like. How are people interacting with each other in this world? How does this world feel like or look like. For example your perfect world may be full of people living in happiness and harmony with one another or people who love and care for others
- Combine all the three answers above into a single statement-Your Life purpose statement. For example: My two unique qualities are ‘love’ and ‘joy’. The way I want to express them is ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ people. My vision of a perfect world is a world where people are ‘living their highest vision’. So my life purpose can be summarized as: “Empowering and inspiring people to live their highest vision”
Identifying Your Unique Qualities or attributes
Some people find it difficult to determine their unique qualities. Such people may fail to establish their life purpose. They may not be able to get in touch with their life purpose. Never mind , you can still set goals and design for yourself life filled with more aliveness, passion and joy. In this table are a few examples of unique qualities or attributes that people may have. Reading them may help you remember your own unique qualities
Examples of Unique Qualities od Attributes people may have
Expressing Your Unique Qualities -Examples
There are several ways you express your unique qualities when you are interacting with others. For example if your unique quality is your sense of humor, you may be expressing it through entertaining- e.g. Music and drama. If your unique quality is your kindness, you may be expressing it through supporting others or even counseling. Some other forms of expressing your qualities could be by inspiring, teaching, empowering others. See examples below:
Your Vision of A Perfect World
Close your eyes and assume that the world is perfect now. Focus on your vision of a perfect world if your unique quality is fully expressed and notice how that looks like. How are people interacting with each other in this world? How does this world feel like or look like. For example you may see your perfect world full of people living in happiness and harmony with one another or people who love and care for others if the quality of kindness is fully expressed. Make a statement out of the three steps of discovering your life purpose to come up with your purpose in life.
Why Discovering Your Life Purpose Is important
Next to taking 100 percent responsibility for your life, I believe discovering your life purpose is one of the most important in life. If you have not uncovered your purpose in life it is easy to get side-tracked on your journey through life. It is easy to wonder and drift, put yourself in a reactive mode without a clear direction instead of being in a proactive mode with intention. A clear life purpose enables you to make a clear set of criteria for making life decisions. You will easily tell whether opportunities and resources are easily aligned with your purpose or not.
Clarifying and pursuing your life purpose will not only get you to where you want to go but will also make your journey more enjoyable. Once you are committed to your life purpose you can develop your talents and resources and put them to their highest use for yourself, for your family and for the rest of the world. .
Examples of Life Purpose statements
Here is a sample of life purpose statements that different people have created. Hope it inspires you to find your purpose in life.
- Create, nurture, and maintain an environment of growth, challenge, and unlimited potential for all those around me.
- My life purpose is to energize, connect, and inspire purpose in others
- Enliven, encourage, and re-inspire the love of music for children in public school
- My purpose in life is to be a mom: to empower independence, self-reliance and confidence in others through being a positive, supportive role model.
- My life purpose is to live and mentor an authentic, adventurous, spiritual life, while being a catalyst for positive change
- My purpose in life is to grow continually and use my wisdom to help others grow through teaching and encouraging them while making a difference in their lives and the lives of those around them
Passion
Passion is a powerful feeling of enthusiasm we have inside all of us. Our passions are those things that when we are surrounded by them or engaged in doing them, we feel alive, plugged in, we lose track of time and we often are willing to do whatever it takes to master that which we are passionate about. Passions are connected to our soul purpose; they are what makes our heart sing and can lead us to our purpose.
Living into our passions can make us feel alive and we move through our life with a sense of purpose. Although we all have passions, often times we don’t take the time to identify them and make a conscious effort to live into them in our day to day lives. We can get stuck surviving in our day to day challenges and obligations, there is a great deal of value in investing time to discover your deeply held passions and begin to make choices in favor of living into our most passionate life.
Discovering what you are most passionate about begins with a reflection on the things you want to do, be or have. A remembering of the things you were doing when you felt a sense of aliveness and presence. People who are clear on their passions and make a conscious decision to direct their efforts to doing these things, report higher levels of happiness, and who doesn’t want more happiness?!
When we are enthusiastic and proud of what we are doing, we are better equipped to overcome any obstacles that will arise in the process of pursuing our passion. If our goals are aligned with our passions, our selfdiscipline increases and we are more willing to work through difficulties and stress
Choosing Your Top 10 Passions
We are going to choose ten of our passions. The choice will be best on the seven areas of life namely:
Health, nature, financial abundance, careers, spiritual breakthrough, loving relationship, and in-service. Write down ten things that you want to do, want to be or want to have . This could be anything e.g. a beautiful house on the beach, a boat, or anything you want to be or have. Write them in a positive way e.g. do not say I want to be out of debt, instead say I want financial freedom; Don’t say I want to get out of a bad relationship, say instead that “you want a loving relationship”
Do not bundle passions. Make each passion distinct. For example don’t say I want to have a loving relationship with my partner, my children and my colleagues. Pick one and say for example “I want a loving relationship with my partner”. In writing your passion start with the statement: My life is at its best when I am—- e.g.
1.Having fun everyday
2.Spending time with my kids
3.Creating a sustainable family business
4.A global resource for creating value-driven organizations
You will find it useful if in writing your passions you are guided by the seven areas of life mentioned above (Health, nature, finances etc. You may want to get passions from each of the areas or a few of them
It is not important that you have a passion in all the seven areas of life. Just choose what really lights you up and the rest will follow
Passion Test instructions
Make a list of 10 things you love that are most important to you. Consider career, finances, health relationships, nature, spiritual, fun. Just about anything “you want to be”, “you want to have”, “you want to do”. Write the passions starting with the phrase: “My life is at its best when I am—–”. See the examples below:
1. My life is at its best when I am- having fun every day
2. My life is at its best when I am- spending time with my kids
3. My life is at its best when I am-creating a sustainable family business
Write in the positive. If there are things you ‘passionately’ do not like, turn them around and write about them in the positive. Write the statements in the present tense. Do this by just adding ‘..ing’ to the verb e.g. ‘spend’ becomes ‘spending’
Please note that passions are person-to-holder. You cannot have a passion where other people are participating. Your passion is yours and yours alone. Other people can benefit from your passion but they cannot participate in it. For example you cannot have a passion like: “My life is at its best when everyone in the family is happy”. In this example the rest of the family are participants in their own happiness and cannot be part of your passion. Your passion cannot be dependent on another person to make it real
Your Passion: The 10 things that will make your personal or work life feel at its best.
We are going to identify those things that are most important, the 10 things that will make your personal or work life feel at its best. These are also called Your Passions. If you were fully living these things, you would feel happy, fulfilled and complete. Please complete the sentence, “My life is at its Best when I am …..e.g. having dinner with my family or “My life is at its Best when I am …..e.g. watching a love movie with my wife. Start…
This exercise will help you understand YOUR key elements to living a happy, fulfilled life. The goal here is to be able to recognize your top 5 passions, identify them and commit to living them in your life. The main purpose with this exercise is to get you in touch with the things that bring you joy and these things will give you clues as to what your unique life purpose may be
Prioritizing Passions-1: Your Top 5 Passions
You are now going to determine which of the 10 passions you have listed makes it to the top 5 passions in your life. To illustrate this we are going to list 10 examples of passions and then prioritize them by using A pairsway matching tool. In this exercise two passions are matched at a time and you make a decision on which of the two is more important. The code of the more important passion to you is written in the appropriate square in the matrix. This is done across all the 10 passions until the squares are all filled with codes of the passions. The codes are them counted. The most frequently occurring code is put on the top of the list followed by the second, third , fourth and fifth most frequent codes.
First list the 10 passions you have selected. An example is given below:
Prioritizing Passions-2: Your Top 5 Passions
Next you are going to give each of your passions an identification number or code. This code begins with the digit zero (0) to differentiate it from any other numbers in the list. So you will have 01, 02, 03—010 as codes. See the codes given to the passions in the example shown in the table below
Prioritizing Passions-3: Your Top 5 Passions
Now you are going to compare pairs of passions to determine the more important code for you of the pair. This is called matching the codes. The code of the more important passion of the two matched is placed in the corresponding square in the matrix. (See green arrows). For example 01X02 will have 02 in the appropriate square if 02 is more important to you than 01. similarly 04 X 05 will have 05 in the square if 05 is more important to you than 04
Pairways Matching
The Table below shows that “Spending time with my kids (code 02)”, is the most important passion, followed by “owning a beautiful house on the beach (code 05), having a loving relationship with my wife (code 06), Teaching young people a new skill (code 08) and organizing my office space (code 010). Please note that there were several ‘ties’ in the positions. These five top passions show where you are going to put your attention or focus. It does not mean the rest are not important
Scoring Your Passions:
After finding your top 5 passions you are going to rate each one on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means this passion is not present in your life at all, and 10 means you are fully living this passion. The result of your rating may look like is shown in the table below
In this example you are fully living your passion of “Teaching young people a new skill” and your passion of “Having a loving relationship with your wife. They both scored highly on the scale. On the other hand “owning a beautiful house on the beach” does not seem to be that much present in your life
Identifying Markers- The milestones Towards success
In this exercise we are going to choose one passion and identify the markers of living the passion. These are milestones that show that you are living that passion. The Table below shows the selected passion and the examples of markers that show you are actively living the passion
An important take home ‘Secret’ on living your passions is that; Whenever you are faced with a decision, choice or opportunity always choose in favor of your passion. If you do this it will be the right track for you . Go with that feeling.
Write a story about your passion
For each of your top 5 passions write a story or a paragraph for each passion. Describe what your life would look like if you were fully living that passion. “What does having a passion like this that look like? Give it as much detail as possible.
Example
My passion is to be in great physical shape and look after my physical and mental health. I am really excited about being, having and doing this. So I chose to work with a personal trainer called Picy, every time that I am home. I am eating what we have decided as my best choice , doing so in moderation, running 5 km a week, getting good sleep and not feeling guilty about sleeping. I listen to 30 minutes of comedy a day. This is how I know I am track with my passion and I really feel good about it
Expand on each of the passions and write a story. The more juice you can give your passion, the more description you can give it and the more life you can give it the more the passion shows up in your life. The more energy you put into the passion the more reality manifests with your passion.
Using Your Passion To Discover Your Life Purpose: 4 Steps
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1. Start by listing two of your passions e.g. Teaching young people a new skill or, Having a loving relationship. Choose these two from the top 5 passions your identified at the beginning of this lesson. How can you use your passion to find your purpose in life?
- Mention two ways you express your passion when you are interacting with others. For example if your passion is “Teaching young people” you may be expressing it through participating in young people’s clubs, mentoring and coaching young people or you may be involved in ‘inspiring’, ‘teaching’, and ‘empowering’ them
- Close your eyes and assume that the world is perfect now. Focus on your vision of a perfect world and notice how that looks like. How are people interacting with each other in this world? How does this world feel like or look like. For example your perfect world may be full of young people who are active, living in happiness and harmony with one another, healthy and productive.
- Combine all the three answers above into a single statement-Your Life purpose statement. For example: My passion is “Teaching young people”. The way I want to express is coaching, mentoring, ‘inspiring’ and ‘empowering’ theme. My vision of a perfect world is a world where young people are ‘living their highest vision’. So my life purpose can be summarized as: “Empowering and inspiring young people to live their highest vision”
Identifying Your Passion
Some people find it difficult to determine their passions. Such people may fail to establish their life purpose. They may not be able to get in touch with their life purpose. Never mind , you can still set goals and design for yourself life filled with more aliveness, happiness and joy. In this table are a few examples of passions that people may have. Reading them may help you remember your own passion
Expressing Your Passions-Examples
There are several ways you express your passions when you are interacting with others. For example if your passion is ‘spending time with the kids’ you may be expressing it through running a ‘Sunday school program for kids’. See examples below:
Your Vision of A Perfect World
Close your eyes and assume that the world is perfect now. Focus on your vision of a perfect world if your passion is fully expressed and notice how that looks like. How are people interacting with each other in this world? How does this world feel like or look like. For example you may see your perfect world full of people living in happiness and harmony with one another or people who love and care for others if the passion of empowering and supporting others is fully expressed. Make a statement out of the three steps of discovering your life purpose to come up with your purpose in life.
The Keys For Living A Passionate Life
Here are a few keys to help you live a passionate life
- Commitment- Dedicate yourself to that which you are passionate about. When you have decided that this is where you are going you must stay committed. You must stay on your path. If we can’t say “No”, our “Yes” means nothing
- Be comfortable in ambiguity- we must learn how to rest without resolution. Just relax into it. You may not exactly know what is ahead but if you follow your path opportunities will show up. If you know where you are going then you are just repeating the past. The only way to create something new is to live something old behind
- What you want in your life will only show up to the extent that you are clear. We need to strive to get clarity
- Practice patience- It is a balancing act to determine when to step back and when to take action
- If you want to do what you love, you must find what you love. Find your passion and the rest will follow