Discovering Your Purpose and Values

Discovering your purpose, passion, or meaning in life is similar to a company creating its mission, vision, and values statements. However, as a leadership and life coach when I guide a client through this process it seems different. Somehow more personal, more important, and often more elusive. Sometimes it's best to start with reflecting on the past even if the eventual focus will be on the future.

When a person reflects on the past with an eye to creating a future filled with purpose, passion, and meaning it is important to reflect on past successes, not failures.  Questions to guide this type of reflecting might be: Think about a time when you had your best day ever.  How did you feel? What made you feel that way? What led up to this day of success? How might you replicate these types of feelings with other experiences and in other situations? The reflection can then expand to multiple positive interactions and situations.  Then the analysis kicks in as the participants in the exercise compare the positive situations and stories in their life to find any common threads that can point to specific things the individual is passionate about or values most highly in life.

Once the underlying values are uncovered most people gain a great deal of clarity about how they would like to spend their time and resources in order to fill their lives with more days they can feel positive about, more days filled with passion or joy, and more days that are meaningful because they are based on important values.  Meaning is derived from what a person values, and purpose is tied to living intentionally and aligned with your own values. This is why the first step to envisioning your ideal life filled with purpose, passion, and meaning is to discovery what it is you most value. Recently, I started working on content for a new webinar that walks through the process of discovering the values that are most important in a person's life. I can't wait to launch the webinar as soon as it is ready, so I can bring this important clarity to more people even if they don't get the opportunity to work with me one-on-one.