Discovering Your Life Purpose

What is the purpose of life? It’s arguably the biggest, most profound question a person can ask. For centuries, philosophers, religious leaders, artists, and thinkers of all kinds have grappled with pinning down an answer. Yet with all that debate, the question remains difficult to definitively answer in a way that resonates universally.

Perhaps it would be better to make this big question more personal: What is your purpose in life? Defining a purpose unique to who you are and what truly matters most can provide direction, motivation, and meaning. It’s a compass to guide major life decisions and overcome challenges. Basically, having a sense of purpose offers clarity in an otherwise confusing world.

The Foundation

Before attempting to identify a singular life purpose, it’s essential to build a foundation of self-awareness. You can’t deeply know what purpose you want to dedicate your limited time to without knowing who you are at a fundamental level first. 

This initial chapter focuses on peeling away the superficial aspects of identity you’ve accumulated over your lifetime to reveal the raw, basic truths of what makes you you.

Step 1: Define Your Strengths and Values

Start by making a list of strengths and another of your top values. Strengths are what you naturally excel at or pick up quickly, while values dictate what’s important to you in how you live.

To prompt your memory, think of what earned you praise growing up, when you feel most confident, and times when you quickly grasped a new skill. As for values, reflect on what principles or causes spark your passion and the moments when you felt fulfilled. 

If you need inspiration, common strengths include creativity, leadership, persistence, empathy, communication, etc. Usual values are integrity, growth, community, achievement, influence, family, freedom, and adventure.

Step 2: Outline Your Personality Traits

Next, describe your core personality traits. These help explain why you interact with the world the way you do. For example, are you introverted or extroverted? Optimistic or realistic? Disciplined or flexible? Adventurous or cautious?

Step back and imagine how close friends and family might describe you and your characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Think of this outline as a basic snapshot of your hardwiring.

Step 3: Identify Past Life Patterns

Now, reflect on key themes, choices, and experiences you see running through your life so far. This bird’s eye view of the major arcs can illuminate influential patterns.

For example, maybe you moved a lot growing up and change always feels natural and exciting. Or perhaps a childhood health issue sparked continuous interest in nutrition and fitness. There’s power in noticing the dominant currents that have unconsciously shaped your path thus far.

By completing these three introspective steps, you’ve dug down to establish the bedrock that is essential for purpose to take root. With self-awareness comes self-understanding. And self-understanding is the fertile soil that gives purpose the room to grow into its full expression.

Before moving onto the next chapter though, thoroughly process your thoughts from working through these foundation exercises. How do you feel seeing these core aspects of identity? Surprised? Affirmed? Uncertain? Make note of whatever comes up as that also holds insight about you and what purpose may ultimately resonate.

The Soul Search

Now that you’ve reflected on persistent truths of who you are, it’s time to shift attention to the inner terrain of desire and longing that points toward purpose. Call it a soul search – an intentional exploration into your deepest needs and motivations.

This chapter guides you to tune out the world’s noise in order to tune into the quiet wisdom within. By identifying what gives you meaning apart from outside standards or expectations, you edge closer to discovering purpose.

Step 1: Define What Gives You Meaning

What specifically gives your life meaning? Make a list of the moments and activities that spark that feeling of purposeful vitality, no matter how small or seemingly trivial. Maybe it’s working in the garden, volunteering at an animal shelter, having a deep conversation with a close friend, learning a new skill, or expressing your creativity.

Step back and notice the through lines between each meaningful endeavor. For instance, do they generally involve using your hands, positively impacting others, intellectual stimulation, building connection, unlocking creative flow, or contributing beauty to the world in some way? Highlight reoccurring themes to reveal your specific triggers for meaning.

Step 2: Outline Peak Experiences

 
Next, reflect on the peak moments that brought awe, joy, connection, flow, or profound gratitude. These transcendent experiences often happen in nature, during travel adventures, through spiritual practice, while immersed in creativity, during bonding moments with others, etc.

What specifically made these memorable highs so magical? Was it the challenge, beauty, heightened senses, achievement, absence of worry, feeling of expansion, or the surrender of ego? Outline the ingredients and themes connecting each.

Step 3: Articulate Core Needs & Longings

Get quiet enough to clarify what your soul truly needs and longs for. These aren’t superficial wants like a physical object, trophy, or accolade. Rather, core needs and heartfelt longings reflect intrinsic yearnings for things like creativity, freedom, understanding, belonging, self-expression, adventure, love, contribution, movement, truth, beauty, challenge.

Tune your journaling focus to articulate the core needs actively stirring within plus the longings calling to you from that quiet inner chamber of wisdom. Give them detail and texture through descriptive writing.

By earnestly answering these soul searching prompts, you further align with the magnetic North of purpose. But don’t just rush ahead. Make time to meditate on the exercises in this section and listen for any guidance that comes as you process the experience.

The Sweet Spot

Now comes the fun part - identifying the connections between what gives you meaning and what your unique strengths, values and personality traits are. It’s the overlap between what you’re good at and what feels good to you that reveals life’s purpose sweet spot.

Think of strengths, values and passions like overlapping circles. Purpose sits bright and centered smack in the middle of those connections. This chapter will guide you to uncover and describe that illuminating life purpose bullseye.

Step 1: Connect Meaning Makers to Strengths/Values

Refer back to the lists you made of meaning-making moments and activities vs strengths and values. Draw literal lines connecting any related items between the two lists.

For example, if you value integrity and meaningful moments involve positively impacting others, connect those with a line. Or maybe you strength in leadership and listed peak moments of challenge and achievement, so draw a line between those correlations.

Step 2: Link Longings to Personality Traits

Now relate core needs and longings to personality traits using connecting lines, as you did with strengths, values and meaning makers. If your longing to deeply connect aligns with the extroverted part of your personality, that’s a purpose-pointing connection worth noting. 

Step 3: Describe Your Sweet Spot

Finally, articulate a concise purpose statement encapsulating your special sweet spot where strengths, values, personality traits, meaning makers, needs and longings all intersect into one centralized vision.

For example: “My purpose is to empower inner courage and interconnection through wilderness adventure guiding.”
Or: “Using my creativity, empathy and communication skills to craft stories that inspire compassion and add more beauty to the world is my purpose.”

Keep descriptive sentences focused and heartfelt. They should feel exciting, affirming and like an inner homecoming. This is you stepping into your purpose sweet spot – that central convergence of all aspects of identity and desire incubating as your special offering to the world.

The Impact Blueprint

With your purpose sweet spot identified, the final step is creating an impact blueprint describing how you’ll activate this purpose daily. Having clarity on the why propelling your life is useless unless it also translates into practical action.

Use the momentum of all your introspective work thus far to outline just that: how, where and when you’ll apply your purpose in the real world rather than just as inspirational theory.

Step 1: Define Priority Impact Areas 

Identify the few key impact areas where focusing your purpose will be most fulfilling and effective. For instance, if your purpose involves creativity and connecting communities, clarify if applying that looks like writing books, producing films, volunteering at youth programs, or something else specific. 

Choose just 1-3 optimized channels where you’ll direct the majority of your purpose-fueled energy and time investment. Overarching purpose statements still leave a lot of diffused options on the table without narrowing to defined avenues of application. So get clear on priorities.

Step 2: Outline Next Right Steps

The most proven way to put purpose into dedicated action is by breaking down big-picture goals into manageable next step chunks. Outline just 3-5 concrete, specific to-do’s you can accomplish in the next 1-3 months to move forward in activating your purpose through the priority impact area(s) you just defined.

Making a map of incremental yet achievable tasks generates momentum as you check off each milestone. It may feel like you’re moving slowly at first, but compound progress builds in power over time. Before you know it, you’ll have built something purposeful far beyond just abstract theory. 

Step 3: Schedule Routines & Reminders

Finally, purpose shows up through consistency, not intensity. Outline a reasonable routine schedule that realistically suits your current lifestyle and responsibilities. Predictability breeds follow through.

Then set reminders to keep your routine on track, especially when motivation dips. Purpose is maintained through small, simple actions adding up over time. From quick daily actions to bigger weekly goals, use organization tools to embed your purpose into regular rhythms. 

For example, you might schedule 15 minutes of journaling in the morning as part of your creativity and connection purpose paired with an hour volunteering on Wednesday nights. Whatever routine you outline, prioritize consistency in order to cultivate slowly blossoming breakthrough.

This is your life. Make it purposeful.

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