Many of my clients come to me wanting to discover their life’s purpose. They’re feeling a lack of direction or clarity about what they’re doing and are desperate to know that they’re on the right track. They don’t want to come to the end of their lives and realize they were chasing the wrong dream, or worse yet, no dream.
If you do a quick search on the internet, you’ll discover many articles about how to find your purpose. The recommendations include lots of things like: ask what really gives you joy, listen to your intuition, discover your strengths, examine your values, visualize yourself in five years and see what you’re doing. All fine exercises. But they rarely result in clarity about what direction you should move. There are so many possibilities out there, how can you know the path you choose is the right one? It can be overwhelming and confusing.
What makes us worthy?
There are two things I’ve found nearly always result in clarity for my clients. The first is to get really clear on what gives someone worth. When we begin exploring this idea, my clients generally start talking about things like being of value to others, helping their fellow humans, creating something useful to the world. The idea of worth quickly becomes tied to accomplishment and actions. In this way it becomes fairly easy to put a measuring stick on worth and see if we measure up.
Then I ask them whether an infant has worth. Babies aren’t really contributing to our world in a very tangible way which makes it difficult to use that measuring stick. Or how about someone in their nineties who has dementia, can no longer remember their family members and needs help eating? Do they have worth? I’ve not yet met anyone who says either of these people are without worth.
Fairly quickly my clients separate the idea of worth from value. They realize they’re worthy simply by definition. Worth is not something to be measured and compared.
We’re worthy because we exist. This realization relieves a lot of the pressure around finding the “right” purpose in life.
I believe intuition plays an important role in discovering our purpose, but when there’s pressure on intuition, it is either silent or tells us what our ego wants to hear. Either way it’s not very helpful. Relieving the pressure to measure up is the first step in gaining clarity around our own life’s purpose.
Look toward the past
The second thing that really helps my clients is to turn the focus of their search for meaning and purpose toward the past rather than the future. This seems counterintuitive, but here’s why it works. Our lives seem to have an energy and trajectory of their own. We’re born into the families we’re born into, we have the experiences life brings and all of this shapes who we become. We are the person we are today because of the unpredictable, inexplicable circumstances that have been our life, and those circumstances have created a trajectory in our life.
As we go through life from one day to the next, it can feel quite chaotic. We do this today, that tomorrow, who knows what next month. It can seem like there’s neither rhyme nor reason to what we’re doing. But looking back over our life so far, regardless of how long that life has been, will reveal themes and patterns. In my case the themes that arose were the search for meaning, experience and acceptance. For one client it was healing, healing his own wounds as well as playing a role in helping his family to heal generational wounds. This rearward looking view brought clarity and meaning to what our lives had been about.
Then getting quiet and allowing your intuition to guide, ask yourself what is the next step on this journey of becoming? Or you could ask, what do the themes of my life so far seek to become? When we remove the pressure from our intuition to “produce,” we allow it to point us in a direction that will reveal the next step. Sometimes the direction that’s revealed has a clear goal or destination, other times it’s merely a hint of the direction. Either is sufficient. We don’t need to know the final outcome. If we did, we’d likely be putting limits on what’s possible for our purpose. All we really need is to know in what direction the next step lies. That step will lead us to the next and the next. Sometimes the path toward our purpose seems unfocused, chaotic and unpredictable. That’s OK. It’s the way the universe has of moving us in the direction that’s most valuable in the long run.
It’s my belief that we can’t help but live our life purpose, that we are always living it.
It’s just that sometimes that purpose is clear and other times cloudy. When it’s cloudy, it’s time to reflect on the path and themes that have been our life and to allow a time of quiet to allow the patterns we discover to point us toward what’s next. It’s been my experience that the purpose of your future life is revealed by allowing the trajectory of your past inform (though not dictate) the trajectory of your future.
If you’re interested in help discerning the patterns and themes of your life and what they may mean for your future, request a free consultation. We’ll discuss how I might be able to assist you in gaining the clarity of purpose you seek.
© 2021, Paul Boehnke
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