4 insights to clarify your purpose

We can quit our jobs or our degrees, but we can’t quit our life purpose. So our real task in life is to discover our unique life purpose. The challenge in finding our purpose is that we are programmed to continually look for the linear and simple answer. But often the answer lies somewhere on the winding road of small and seemingly insignificant choices we’ve made along the way. Here’s the other thing, we may not have known where those choices, hobbies and fascinations were leading, but our soul did.

In the thousands of client sessions I have done as a mentor, these are the insights I have gained to help you know your life purpose. 

1. We have multiple life purposes
   Not all of us have a single purpose, so stop looking for one single thing. It is more likely that you have multiple purposes all connecting and overlapping so that one purpose leads to the next. Sometimes the journey of our life is the purpose and we must follow the tracks. We also do not have to choose one purpose over another. Choices can cripple us. We get stuck when it appears that there are two life paths running alongside each other.

   There was a point many years ago when I was standing at what felt was a life purpose crossroad. On the same day that I was offered a job as the Finance Director at a major publishing house, I was also offered a regular segment on a mainstream television network show called Psychic TV to do live readings on air. My career and my calling had apparently collided, and I felt like I had to choose. I also felt like I had to hide! Could a corporate C-Suite executive, be publicly seen to be working as a psychic medium on television?

   ‘Choosing’ did not feel like the right step for me to take. Truthfully, working full time as medium made no career sense to me, but my life didn’t make sense if I didn’t pursue that path either. Then I realised I did not have to reconcile the paradigms of my corporate and my spiritual passions – it was all me! I was asking myself the wrong question in needing to choose. This wasn’t a fork in the road. I realised that there was still so much to learn and experience on both paths. My life purpose was to bring the different paths together – corporate and spiritual.

   By the end of the week, I had said ‘yes’ to both offers. I didn’t know how I would make it work – a Finance Director by day and on Psychic TV at night – but knew I would. You can’t quit your life purpose.

2. Our life purpose sometimes only makes sense later in life
   Perhaps it is not you that chooses your purpose. Maybe your purpose chooses you? Whatever the case, for many of us it’s more likely to make sense in the second act of our life.

   

   Two halves of our lives can come together to make a whole – or sometimes our lives are lived in thirds or quarters. The survivor becomes the inspirational speaker. The alcoholic becomes the sponsor. The breathless becomes the one to show people how to breathe and be in stillness. We may have to heal and save ourselves first, or be saved, to then have the strength and capacity to hold the torch for others. Only years later did I realise that my paths had converged to equip me to mentor women in executive and senior management roles in using spiritual tools and their intuition in their corporate jobs and life.

3. Your childhood passions
   Our childhood and teenage years contain so much significant information about what authentically makes us happy. We must be willing to admit that in our younger years we already knew the answers to our dreams and ultimately fulfilling our purpose.
   We have a tendency to lose touch with what we loved as a child. Can you stop and reflect on what your 8 year old self loved to do? How did you play during those years? What did you love doing?

As a child I loved reading about astrology. As a teenager I was obsessed with dream analysis. I started meditating in my late twenties. At the same time as doing an MBA, I was also studying the mystical modality of tarot. Our passions follow us, and in time, we must admit that our passions are at the core of our purpose.

You do not fulfil your purpose alone. Part of the joy of finding your life purpose is to discover how that purpose works in with the passions and purpose of others.  The ripple effect of our being on purpose, is nothing short of magical. And let’s be honest, the world could do with more magic right now.

Written by Sheila Vijeyarasa.