Mark Twain said 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 you can ‘find out 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 our purpose can change. But we also think that the underlying purpose of our life is probably fixed — it’s the core of who we are. It simply becomes clearer to us over time. 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 the way we think about our purpose, the way we understand it, and the ways we put it into practice. For example, if your purpose was to heal people then today you might choose to become a doctor, a dentist, a nurse, a surgeon, a chiropractor, a therapist, 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 then you could have been exactly the same person with exactly the same purpose but the options available for how you put that purpose into practice, and even the ways you thought about putting it into practice, would have been very different. Similarly, who knows what options might be available to you a thousand years from now — or even a year from now?
What all this means is that the best way for you to find your life purpose is to start from where you are now, find what most inspires you, and then move towards that. Then learn from what happens and adjust as you go.
Inner Leadership brings you tools to help you do 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 that happen.
This will bring 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 not only make us more motivated but also more flexible.
And all of this will make us more antifragile: able to use change to become stronger and more valuable.
Are you living your life’s purpose? Would you like to begin?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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(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