Why a pandemic is the perfect time to discover your Life Purpose

Why A Pendemic Is The Perfect Time To Discover Your Life Purpose

It's not often the world gets rocked on it's axis the way it has been during 2020. It's life changing for some, with jobs, loved ones and the future under threat, or maybe already lost. For others it's the death of a dream as their hopes of finding more meaningful work may be sacrificed on the alter of survival. Some may have to learn new marketable skills as their industry is decimated for years to come and others may use this time to retrain for higher skilled employment, or dip a toe in the water of self-employment.

Seldom as a community do we see death this close up. When death has become all our problem, rather than individual tragedies.

Now is a pivot point and the perfect time to look at your life, how you express your purpose and what more you want from your life in the future. Because threat to life and livelihood has a very useful way of focusing your attention on what you want your life to represent. Most people don't know their life purpose and even when they've got an idea it can be a bit vague ie making a contribution or sometimes they follow what they think their life purpose "should be" ie helping others, rather than what they were really meant to do.

Discovering your life purpose is not always easy: it can sometimes be confusing and frustrating and it can take a while - more like panning for gold that picking up a pebble. But it will be the biggest personal development journey of your life: you'll get to understand yourself, your real self; you'll see where your strongest influences have come from and how they have shaped you; you'll need to feel your way into the process, because too much thought can take you away from your real life purpose and you'll be able to identify your blocks to expressing the essential you.

And just because you know your life purpose doesn't mean you have to change your life overnight. But once you know your life purpose you can choose: you can choose to live your life purpose quickly, or move towards it more gradually according to your life circumstances.

Knowing your life purpose has many benefits:

• It will give you an increased chance of living longer (studies show this is the case)
• It will help you identify employers that are more aligned to your values and so able to provide you with more meaningful work
• It will help you to identify friendship groups who are more aligned with you and so offer more support
• It will help you be happier and less stressed because when you are living in alignment with who you really are, you can be more centred and relaxed
• It will allow you to live a wealthy life, because if your life and work reflects who you are, your contribution professionally, socially/within the family and in all areas of your life will be greater and that will reflect back to you financially, emotionally and in all other ways.

 
And you don't need to do it all at once, but if you don't get started now, when will you? Now is the only time to make significant change.

Now you can go online and ask how to discover your life purpose and find some useful questions that will lead you in the right direction, and for some people that will be sufficient. But I'd like to suggest (from painful personal experience) that asking the right questions is much more important than just asking questions. It's the nuances that often trip people up: not being specific enough; or being too specific; or following a passion only to discover it fizzles out after a couple of years and they are back to square one.

A Life Purpose Mentor can help you navigate the highs and lows of discovering your life purpose. They can help you:

• Be realistic about timescales
• Ask the right questions
• Overcome barriers and blocks
• Tease out your value priorities
• Expose limiting beliefs and help you overcome them
• Provide exercises to help expose and explore your life purpose
• Look at the nuances of life purpose - once you've found your what and why, the how, where and when may just as important

 
If you're not sure where you are in terms of whether you're living your life purpose today, check out this 10 minute quiz and discover how close you are to living a life of purpose and meaning.

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