Mark Twain famously told us that:
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
The Harvard Business Review recently 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 certainly can 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 part of who we are — and it could have been the same if we were born a thousand years in the past 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 can 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 more experience, you might then feel drawn to specialise in certain areas.
But if you’d been born a thousand years ago then your purpose could have been exactly the same but the options available for how you put it into practice, and even how 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 one 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 inspires you most, and move towards that. Then learn and adjust as you go.
Inner Leadership brings you the tools to do this: to find your best understanding of your purpose today, to find more options for how you might put that into practice, to choose the best way forward for now, and then to inspire yourself and other people to long to make it happen.
All this will bring you the energy and enthusiasm to begin. And then as you move forward, and your understanding deepens, so you can adjust your course.
Viktor Frankl said that our search for purpose and meaning is our “highest calling.” Scientists have since discovered that living a purposeful life actually changes our genes. And in this time of change, knowing our purpose will make us more motivated and more flexible.
All of this will make us more antifragile: able to use change to become stronger and more valuable.
Are you living your life 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