5 Ways to Find Your Purpose

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“Knowing what you value will help you build the most meaningful life possible. Values are chosen qualities of being and doing, such as being a caring parent, being a dependable friend, being loving, loyal, honest, and courageous. They can be expressed with verbs and adverbs, like teaching compassionately and giving gratefully. However, they are not goals. Goals are finite; they are achievements, and once you reach them, you are finished with them. Values, on the other hand, are enduring, eternal guides to living. You cannot achieve a value; you can only manifest it by acting in accordance with it.

Finding meaning makes us healthier and more fulfilled. How do you find meaning in a world that offers no shortage of stress, in a life that is filled with the worries of getting through the responsibilities of the day? Unfortunately, many people struggle to connect with that deeper sense of meaning. If you want to begin to think more deeply about this, there are some simple questions to ask yourself.

1. When are you in flow? When you are in flow, you are so fully engaged and immersed in an activity that you feel relaxed but also challenged, interested but not stressed. It is doing something where you lose your sense of time, and you focus only on the task at hand, in a positive way. What types of activities bring you to this state? Are there people you spend time with who help you forget your worries, get rid of past baggage and future concerns? These clues can help fine-tune what resonates with you most deeply.

2. Whose faces do you see when you think about love? Not everyone’s sense of meaning or purpose is intrinsically tied to other people, but for many, relationships with others are the foundation of it. Or perhaps it’s not necessarily people but certain animals with which you have the most profound connection. What does love mean to you? Love can mean many things to many people, but when you imagine what it means to you, it can often point you in the right direction of your purpose—thinking about the reason that you are on this Earth and the legacy you want to leave behind.

3. What are you most willing to put effort into? We all have different levels of motivation for different tasks, and some activities feel almost effortless because we like doing them so much. Think about when you actually enjoy hard work. This old saying is true: “Find something you love to do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Many of us will never truly love our jobs. However, if you can examine your patterns about what you have worked hard for—and have wanted to work hard for—this will help you determine what types of pursuit are most worthy of your time and of your heart and soul.

4. If you were to write your own obituary, what would it say? As much as this can feel like a morbid exercise, or even a silly one, imagining what you want your life’s legacy to be can help in the search for purpose. Looking back on your life as it nears its end can truly be useful in determining what you want to devote your most precious time to. Those who work with people who are at the end of their lives say that they tend to see the same regrets over and over again, often involving too much worry about the things that shouldn’t have mattered at the expense of those who have come to matter most of all. What do you want to leave behind—tangibly, emotionally, and socially?

5. If you had a day free of responsibilities and commitments, what would you do? Try, for a moment, to picture a completely blank slate, free of concerns about what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. What would you devote time to? Remove the to-do checklist that weighs you down and get a better sense of what you would choose to do in life, rather than what you feel you have no choice but to do.”

Read the whole article at The Psychology Today

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💬 What are some of your values?