Mark Twain told us that,
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Recently, the Harvard Business Review published an article about how to find that ‘why’.
It says that the purpose of your life isn’t something you find but rather something you build: it might not be just one thing and it might change during your lifetime.
The Churning, Inner Leadership agrees — partly.
We believe that the way we put our purpose into practice can certainly change over time, just as our understanding of that purpose can change. But we also think that the underlying purpose itself is probably fixed — it’s the core of who we are — and it could have been the same if we were born a thousand years ago or a thousand years in the future.
What changes is that the way we think about our purpose: the way we understand it, and the ways we put it into practice) simply become clearer to us over time. If your purpose, for example, was to heal people then today you might choose to become a doctor, a dentist, a nurse, a surgeon, a therapist, a chiropractor, and so on. And as your career progressed and you gained experience, so you might then feel drawn to specialise in certain areas. But if you’d been born a thousand years ago, as exactly the same person with exactly the same purpose, then the options available to you for how you put that purpose into practice (and even the ways you thought about putting it into practice) would have been extremely different. Similarly, who knows what options might be available to you a thousand years from now — or even one year from now?
What all this means is that the best way to find your life’s purpose is to start from where you are now: find what most inspires you, then take action to move towards that, and then learn from what happens and adjust as you go.
The Churning, Inner Leadership brings you a structured set of tools to help you achieve this: to find your best understanding of your purpose today, find more options for how you might put that into practice, choose the best next step, and inspire yourself and other people to long to make it happen. This then brings you the energy and enthusiasm to begin. And as you move forward, and your understanding deepens, so you can adjust your course.
Viktor Frankl called our search for purpose and meaning our “highest calling.” Scientists have discovered that living a purpose-driven life actually changes our genes. And in this time of change, knowing our purpose will make us not only more motivated but also more flexible.
All this then makes us more antifragile: able to use change to become stronger and more inspired.
Are you living your life’s purpose? Would you like to begin?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
You can sign up to daily posts here.
You can buy the book here and the workbook here.
(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)
Photo By Jolene Bertoldi via StockPholio.net