To have a life purpose and live your everyday life in tune with your actions can make all the difference in the quality of your life, of your work and in the relation between them. Moreover, I believe the definition of personal and professional success is directly related to how much of your life you are able to live this way. If during most of the time you act according to your purpose, the more successful you will become; the less you do this, the emptier and more unsuccessful you’ll feel.
As we will see shortly, the implications of this in your professional life are direct. It isn’t by chance that you will see more and more people exchanging the opportunity of working in large organizations for pure and simple entrepreneurship, either at the beginning or throughout the career.
The reason? To live a life that is more in tune with your own purpose. The interesting thing is that it’s also not uncommon to find people who, after they retire, become involved in a professional activity much more closely connected with their life purpose than their previous career. Almost like a redemption.
In this article, I will approach a theme that is one of the most special to me, and in the next, “How to become aware of your life purpose”, I’ll provide a few tips on what you can do to start to discover and define your life purpose. I’ve already suffered a lot during my career for not listening to my heart and following paths that did not help to bring me closer to my purpose. On those occasions the feeling of emptiness was enormous, I was always feeling distressed and things only worked out partially.
Young man looking at himself in the mirror (Photo: Lighthousebay / iStock )
I remember as if it were yesterday a situation I experienced some time ago in the men’s room at a hypermarket. At the time I was the sales manager for a consumer goods multinational and responsible for negotiating national deals with the largest retailer in the country, another multinational.
In the middle of a negotiation, I went to one of the store’s toilets, and as I was washing my hands I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: “the difference that I can make now will define whether my company or the client will be better or worse off to the tune of 1 million”. A game of win or lose.
After becoming aware of this fact, I felt a great void and thought: “what is the value of this to my life? ” “nothing”, was the thought that came into my mind. The reflexion I subsequently made, regarding that moment was what led me to carry out my first significant career change.
That said, If you are feeling that same void that I felt, or even if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, I hope today’s article can open your mind, and who knows, give you ideas to live a fuller life and with more purpose.
According to Patrick E. Mc Knight and Todd B. Kashan from George Mason University, in their study on life purpose, “Purpose is a cognitive process which defines life objectives and provides personal meaning. It stimulates and organizes objectives, manages behaviour and provides directions for daily decisions, with guidance on the use of finite personal resources. Living according to your purpose offers you a sustainable source of meaning. ”
According to the same authors, purpose is not a binary condition, that someone possesses or doesn’t. On the contrary, it has three dimensions: scope, strength and awareness.
Scope is about how omnipresent purpose is in someone’s life. The bigger the scope, the more influence it will have on your behaviour, in a variety of contexts in your daily life.
Strength can be measured according to the tendency that purpose has to influence thoughts, emotions and actions within the limits of its scope. The stronger it is, the more influence it will have.
Awareness reflects exactly how aware the person is and is able to articulate their purpose. A person is aware of his/her purpose at the same rate that it is available and visible to him/her.
The more comprehensive the scope, the clearer and stronger a purpose is to you, the more decisive it will be in your life. To ignore this when making personal or professional decisions is what generates that empty feeling. On the other hand, to utilize this knowledge and let your purpose act like a compass showing the way for the thoughts you should nurture and the actions you should follow in your daily life can very well be the secret to being successful in your personal as well as your professional life.
Compass (Photo: / iStock)
The more your daily actions are in harmony with your purpose, the less painful your life will be and the more fulfilled you will feel.
If you are pursuing your purpose you will be better conditioned, resilient and better prepared emotionally to face the difficulties and surprises that life will throw at you.
If you live a life with purpose, your behaviour and decisions will flow in accordance with it, influencing your vocational choices.
The quest for purpose guides you towards a more productive life in a cognitive, behavioural and psychological sense, allowing you to more easily overcome difficult and traumatic moments.
A life with more purpose encourages you to want to take better care of yourself, in order to enjoy it more.
When you take better care of yourself, feel less stressed out and recover more quickly from traumatic events, you reduce the risk of ill health, improve the quality of your sleep and start to live a much healthier life.
All these factors together contribute towards a longer and healthier life. There are also studies that identify the important role that life purpose has when it comes to maintaining physical ability among seniors. Two factors evaluated are the handshake and walking pace. One of these surveys showed that people who live a life with more purpose were reported to have a 13% lower risk of developing a weaker handshake and to reduce the risk of a slower walk by 14% than those with a lower sense of purpose.
Friendly trekking (Photo: Swissmediavision / iStock)
Finally, try to remember the people you know who live their daily lives acting and making decisions based on their life purpose. How do they seem? More or less happy? More or less fulfilled? Is their health better or worse? Are they at peace or in conflict?
If, just as I did in the toilet at the hypermarket, you reach the conclusion that your choices, professional or personal, have nothing to do with your life purpose, it’s high time you had a good, long look to reflect and assess if you could maybe embark on a happier, more content, healthier life.
Courage is the ingredient you will need to make this change, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that it will be well worth it. Just go for it, what have you got to lose?
Cover photo credit – Surfer (Photo: AleksandarNakic / iStock)
