060: Getting Clear on Your Personal Purpose

Having clarity of your personal purpose is a foundation to having strong self-awareness. Being clear about who you are and who you aren’t gives you the confidence you need to make hard decisions. But, unfortunately we are not all very clear about our purpose.

I don’t care how old you are, you likely have moments of “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” every once in a while. You have to reach a special level of enlightenment to not question yourself everyone once in a while.

I’m not trying to get you to Buddha under the Bodhi tree level of enlightenment, but I do what you to be confident enough in our purpose that you can make decisions – possibly life changing decisions – with confidence.

I also believe that your purpose changes over time. When you are early in your career, you are focused on establishing your career. As you start a family, your focus shifts, and as you near retirement, your focus shifts again. So, it isn’t necessarily a one-and-done situation. If you haven’t thought through your purpose recently, it may be time to take another look at it.
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So, as you are thinking about your purpose, think about:

• the experiences you’ve had that have helped shape you
• the unique skills that you have. How your experiences impact the way you deliver these skills are what make you unique.
• how your life experiences impact the way you approach your work. It is like 2 doctors with totally different bedside manner. One doctor may have grown up in a home with a chronically sick parent and saw firsthand how the information provided by their doctor profoundly influenced the stress level of their family. His bedside manner will be more comforting than the doctor who grew up in a family that forced him to become a doctor because it would provide a good living.

 
If you make decisions from a place where your purpose is the foundation, you can be certain that you will do it with confidence. And, when you operate with a sense of confidence and from a foundation of purpose, you will be more successful in your career.