Back in 1999, I read a book that walked me through a formula to create a purpose statement. When I was done with their process, I had a purpose statement, but I sure didn’t know what to do with it. Looking back, that first purpose statement wasn’t that far off from what I have now (which is “speaking life into humanity”). Sometimes it’s easy to arrive at our purpose through one means or another, but carrying it out is as clear as mud.
Not long after I had created that purpose statement, I was looking at what I had written down. It seemed right, but my next thought was, “Now what?” This is a pivotal question. I had no idea. So, I more or less put it on the shelf.
Fuzzy Purpose
The real problem lay in the middle of my views about what is possible and what my life should look like. My primary thought was that as I went about my regular day, I should do little things here and there to live out my purpose. The way I interacted with people would be different.
However, living my purpose was pretty short lived. My regular day activities didn’t lend themselves to living out my purpose. My purpose was more or less an appendage on my life that quickly fell off.
One side effect of trying to live our purpose as an appendage on our life is that we have this doubt that maybe we haven’t really discovered our purpose. We have a purpose statement and we’re attempting a few things, but it’s still pretty fuzzy. This was my experience, and it’s also what I hear from many others.
Clear Purpose
As I talk to people who feel like they’ve found their purpose, I see many of them going down that same path. They describe going about their regular day, but doing a few small things differently. While there may be a few exception cases, I want to warn against this approach.
When you are ready to live your purpose, you will need to change things in your life. For some of you, the changes may not be drastic. For others, your whole life may need to change, perhaps not all at once, though. This may sound intimidating, and I don’t want to scare you off. Yet, shifting from not living your purpose to living your purpose should result in differences in they way you live your life.
Here are some examples (certainly not an exhaustive list):
- If your purpose is about coaching, mentoring, counseling or teaching, you need to set up relationships (by asking permission) and create space to do this with people.
- If your purpose is about supporting, advocating, or helping the downtrodden, you need to create or get involved in support systems for these people, such as Habitat for Humanity.
- If your purpose is about financing a cause, you need to talk to people who are working on a cause and select a group to which to donate.
- If your purpose is help people in Uganda, to really be effective, you should visit or perhaps even move to Uganda.
- If your purpose is to connect other people together, you need to put yourself in places where you’ll encounter people who share their needs and are open to connecting.
- If your purpose is to be involved in creating medical devices for heart patients, you may need to change jobs or careers.
When we start making real change in our life and start living it out, that’s when it becomes clear that we’ve discovered our purpose. When we, for example, start mentoring people and we have this deep satisfaction that we are a part of someone transforming their life, then we know. Compare this to just sharing advice everywhere we go, where at the end of the day we’re not sure if we’ve done more than just annoy everyone.
If you want to get clear on your purpose, you have to make some real changes and try it out.
