The best way to experience true happiness and fulfillment is to live a life of purpose.
By that, I mean, doing work that allows you to use your unique gifts and talents to do work that truly makes you happy while making a positive impact on the world around you. This is what allows you to create meaning in your daily life and feel fulfilled in everything you do.
But finding your purpose can be easier said than done.
Here’s what you need to know to create a life-purpose mission statement that will keep you focused on what’s important and moving in the direction of your dreams even when life gets chaotic.
I believe that we are put on this earth for a specific reason. We all have our unique skills and experiences and when we use them to make a positive impact and create the reality we want to see, that’s when we are living our purpose. This is the secret to creating a meaningful life for yourself.
Importance of Finding Your Purpose
Finding your purpose in life is the ultimate antidote to feeling lost and alone. When you are living your purpose, you have a greater sense of doing satisfying work that makes a difference and is valued by others and gives you a stronger sense of being connected to the world around you.
And because it’s work you love, you’ll be more willing to invest the time and energy required to go above and beyond and become really great at what you do. Which means you’ll be more successful at it!
Not only that – living your purpose requires you to set meaningful goals, achieve self-efficacy, and keep learning and growing throughout your life.
You’ll also be more likely to look out for your own well-being and lead a healthy life – because you know that you have to take care of yourself if you want to take care of others (including friends and family).
Life Purpose Statement Examples
Here are just a few life purpose examples that people have shared with me over the years:
- To empower small business owners to systematize for easier revenue generation and more freedom in their lives. (Small-business consultant and author)
- To inspire children to have faith in themselves and believe in their natural genius. (Educator)
- To create a world in which people are living ecologically sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just lives. (Environmentalist and social activist)
- To help women entrepreneurs find their voice and use it to grow successful businesses that give them happiness, meaning and abundance (Speaking coach)
Without a clear sense of purpose, it’s easy to get sidetracked on your journey through life. Some people spend their whole lives aimlessly going off in all directions because they have no guiding principle pointing them toward a life that will truly make them happy.
Once you know what your purpose in life is, you can use it as a compass to lead you in the right direction.
Find Your Purpose
What are you passionate about? What brings you joy in life?
The process starts with turning inwards and looking inside you. We are all born with an inner compass that tells us whether or not we’re on the path to finding our true purpose. That compass is our JOY.
If what you’re doing fulfills you and makes you happy, you’re on the right track. If not, it’s time to take a deep breath and readjust your course.
Put in simple language, you have a sequence of values which are intrinsic for the entirety of your life. When you align your belief system with your highest values, you will feel joy. Joy is that feeling of doing what you love and loving what you do no matter how hard it is. When your expectations do not match with your values, you get extremely disappointed with life. You may even find your life purpose, but if your belief systems do not align with that highest value, you will feel confronted by what is taking place because your expectations, created by your belief system, are wrong.
Understand Yourself
There are some important variables you will be wise to explore in your coaching. All of these lead to the path of joy and if you have the right answers, lead you away from that terrible state of inner conflict between your values and your beliefs.
- Values
- Principles
- Purpose
- Accomplishment
- Excitement
Living your life’s purpose requires you to live with full integrity with your values and principles. Otherwise, you won’t feel like your actions are helping make a positive impact in the world.
Living your purpose also forces you to move beyond your comfort zone, take risks, and achieve meaningful goals that grow your confidence and help you discover what you’re truly capable of achieving.
Finally, finding purpose in life helps you realize that the most satisfying lives are those spent in the service of others. It teaches you to be humble and helps you sense that we are all connected at the deepest possible level.
Speed Bumps that need to be overcome…
As you continue on your journey of finding and living on purpose and permanent fulfilment in life, challenges or obstacles will inevitably appear. You may find yourself:
- Being forced by outside influences to go down a life path you don’t enjoy and spending all your time and energy on things that don’t make you happy.
- Prioritizing money and prestige above doing work that fulfills you and increases your sense of community and belonging.
- Worrying that it’s too late to find your true purpose. But it’s never too late to start doing what makes you happy! I know people who found their life purpose in their 70s or even older and it has completely transformed their lives and made them happier than they have ever been.
- Living in a relationship in which your partner is not your #1 Fan. This is critical.
Just remember that your efforts are absolutely worth it! If you keep digging into the questions of your beliefs, what are you good at, what matters most to you, and how can you use your skills to create the world you want to live in, your path forward to a happy life will become crystal clear.
Here are two big obstacles to watch out for:
Uncertainty – Fear
The desire for stability and predictability is one of our deepest human needs. Routines help us conserve mental energy, and staying in our comfort zones can keep us from feeling anxious and getting hurt – emotionally and physically.
But it also prevents growth. It keeps us in unfulfilling jobs and unhealthy relationships with toxic friends and family. It can contribute to our inability to find purpose.
Limiting Beliefs – Negative Self Talk
The stories we tell ourselves about who we are will make a difference. They can either hold us back or help us discover fulfillment.
Limiting beliefs – that we’re not good enough, that we don’t deserve to be happy – contribute to limiting behaviors like fear of failure and self-sabotage
Learn how to achieve your goals using The Walker Daily Power Hour and The Walker Chi Process.
How to Find Your Purpose
For some of us, discovering the purpose of life is easy. We’re born with a set of obvious talents and through persistent practice, we develop our talents into skills.
For others, it’s not so obvious. Most people spend years trying to find answers to questions such as,
“What should I do with my life?”
“What is my passion?”
“What is my purpose in life?”
So, here are 10 steps to get a strong sense of what’s most important to you and find purpose in your own life:
1. Explore Your Value Chain
You can start discovering your passion or your purpose by exploring two things:
- What was most missing in your childhood (1-5 years old)
- What did you get too much of in your childhood (1-5 years old)
Excess and efficiency create values in the early years of our life. The thing that was most missing we want more of and the thing we had to much of we want less off, and these two alone develop what is called a sense of value chain and priorities, and ultimately the highest value, our purpose.
2. Ask Yourself What Qualities You Enjoy Giving the most
It is understandable that at first, we give what we most want to receive. For many years, I gave people generosity and kindness, and tried to help them reduce their stress. When I was trying to continually do was to calm people down, so their heart would open, and they would feel good about themselves and about others. I didn’t realise it until I asked myself. What is my purpose, and my purpose is to open heart, but the first heart I needed to be opened was my own. Instead of asking others to open my heart by opening theirs, I open my heart, now, every day, and from that place give unconditionally. This is the big shift that happens. When you find your purpose. You realise that there is something you really can’t live without, but you must give it to yourself first, rather than ask the world for it.
3. Do A Vision Quest
Take a moment to imagine your vision of a better future. Then combine your two qualities and how you enjoy expressing them with your vision of the reality you want to create.
For example, in my perfect world, everybody lives their highest vision and has everything they need to be happy.
That’s why my life purpose statement is, “Opening Hearts.”
I like to keep my purpose, very simple, because anything I can’t link to my purpose, I sabotage. Therefore, I prefer to have simply two words, rather than a long sentence that may need more elaborate analysis when I’m linking what I’m doing to what I’m loving.
4. Be Ready For Change
When you currently wake up in the morning, you might say to yourself what does my day have a head for me? You might then say what do I want to get out of my day and think what’s best for you. However, the major shift that takes place when you find purpose is the question you asked yourself when you wake up in the morning. You might wake up asking. How can I give my purpose to the world best today? You might also ask yourself how do the decisions I make today impact my purpose? And so the whole focus of your life goes from getting to giving. This might at first seem like an exciting change, but it really does make a huge difference in the way you feel and the priorities you have. So, looking for a purpose? Be ready for change.
5. Be Ready to Rise above the mundane
Many people sell the idea of having a life purpose on the basis that you will feel better. This is not actually the case. You will, for the entirety of your life, experience, support, and challenge. But what a purpose will do will make the mundane, feel incredibly time-consuming and time wasting. For example, a lot of people will stay stop gossiping about other people, but that’s really hard to do if the mundane is extraordinary to you. But when you come to purpose, you would not waste your energy talking about people or gossiping. You would also not try to win arguments with people by being righteous and instead, become more adaptive and flexible. So, many of the things are that you would be trained to do in isolation and compartmentalise come true when you start living on purpose.
6. Conduct a Reality Check
I have a loyalty commitment and motivation process. That asks the question about linking your purpose to everything on your goal list and everything in your day-to-day work list. This is such an important process because if you can’t link your purpose to what you do, then you’ll sabotage it. It also goes hand-in-hand with the VIP process that asks you to score yourself in each of the seven areas of life, and then evaluate where you rap. It’s too easy to start measuring your feelings rather than the reality of your progress in outcome toward your goal. So getting real is a very important part of having a purpose.
7. Conduct a Joy Review
When have you experienced your greatest moments of happiness in life?
For me, it was when I was a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts, an officer in my military high school, a summer camp counselor at a camp in Maine, a leader in my college fraternity, and a high school teacher.
I also experienced my greatest moments when I was conducting workshops and training, telling jokes or stories, and when I was traveling.
By analyzing the things I loved most about these experiences and other activities, I was able to realize what I needed most in my life to experience true fulfillment.
I wanted to teach, educate, inspire and lead people (and make them laugh!) in workshops and training events that would allow me to travel around the globe.
So that’s the life I created for myself!
You can do the same by creating a life goals list that will allow you to focus on bringing joy and fulfillment into your life.
8. Take Time for Yourself
A successful cardiologist I was working with had no idea what his purpose in life was. I asked him to look back over his life and answer the question, When have you felt most fulfilled?
He shared three periods when he felt the happiest and most fulfilled:
- Spending time with his grandfather
- Playing with his own grandchildren
- Vacationing on a sailboat
When I asked him what was common to these experiences, he told me that it was the sense of freedom that he felt – which is clearly something he wasn’t feeling in his professional life!
So I asked him what he would do in the following situation: “A patient comes to you for an operation. If you operate on this patient, you will die. If you don’t operate on him, he will die. It’s him or you. What would you do?”
He reflected quietly on this scenario for a long time, then finally said, “I would choose to live, rather than die myself. It doesn’t make sense to kill myself to save others.”
And he realized that’s exactly what he had been doing! He had denied his own happiness and fulfillment in order to save others – and the stress and unhappiness were leading him to an early grave.
This was a huge turning point in his life. These days he still focuses on serving people, but now he knows he has the right to take care of his needs first.
9. Align Your Goals With Your Life Purpose
The best way to live your purpose is to pursue goals that are entirely in alignment with that purpose.
This means personal as well as professional goals. You want to make sure that your words and actions – right down to your personal branding – are an expression of your purpose and are fully aligned with your values and the kind of world you want to create.
10. Lean Into Your True Life Purpose
The good news is, when it comes to discovering the purpose of life and living your life fully in alignment with it, you don’t need to overhaul your life all at once.
Instead, just lean into it.
Start living your purpose a little more each day, and pay attention to the feedback you’re receiving from others, the results you’re producing, and how you’re feeling.
You may be surprised at the results you get – and how good it feels to be showing up in a way that resonates with your values and passion!
Additional Reasons to Have a Purpose
Living your purpose makes it possible for you to:
- Connect with others on a deeper, more meaningful level—which boosts your health, happiness, and longevity
- Accomplish goals that boost your confidence and expand your understanding of what you’re capable of achieving
- Express your emotions, opinions, and ideas with greater clarity and passion
- Find more excitement, fun, and delight in what you do
- Expand your skills and knowledge in areas of study that are most important to you
- Receive acknowledgment for your achievements
- Make a positive impact on society
In short, living your purpose is what fills your existence with happiness, connection, and fulfillment!
INSPIRED THINKING 