F5 Purpose: Part One

So often, we get it all wrong when it comes to our purpose and leading an uncommon life.

We ask, “What do I want?” versus asking, “What is it that I was made to fricken’ do?”

?The truth is that sometimes we need to F5 (refresh) our purpose and bigger why in this life. First, this comes by identifying our core strengths, then revisiting how our early life events might tell us more than we think and where we get it twisted.

In this part one edition, we will cover those things, and in part two, we’ll touch on how to pay attention to the signs that indicate your purpose and how we can lean into and live it out with intention.

Identifying your strengths

We are all naturally gifted at certain things, but how many of you have taken the time to assess your own unique strengths? This is the very first step in identifying your unique purpose. And honest? As our careers progress and life happens, we all stay fairly rooted in our core values and don’t tend to stray in that arena, yet as life events occur (kids, marriage, promotions, death in the family, etc.), our focus shifts and our “purpose” comes into and out of focus in different ways. I recommend if you haven’t invested in honing in on your strengths, you pay to take the Gallup Strengths Finder Test https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx or you take a quicker FREE glance using the High 5 Test (it takes about 15 minutes) and you can pay a one-time fee to get a deeper dive report if it’s helpful and insightful to you.

This is square one, and as I mentioned, life shifts and changes, but we can look to early life events to queue us to our purpose.

?How our early life events queue us into our purpose

Listed below in references, I mention a podcast called the Huberman Lab, and the thoughts/information in this section were gathered from the conversation in the interview with Robert Greene, New York Times best-selling author and expert on human psychology and behavior.? I’m recapping parts of this powerful 3-hour conversation to give you a Cliff Notes version (but I take zero credit just sharing the goodness).

“You are unique and have a DNA that will never occur again. You are one of a kind. To waste that is the worst thing. So, you have to harness your uniqueness,” Greene says.

He goes on to walk through our childhoods. From birth to the age of five years old, delight and resistance are not contaminated. We express our likes and dislikes boldly without much being tainted.

As you get older, by the age of seven, you stop hearing your voice as much. You now hear the voices of your parents (and their ambitions for you) and teachers who begin to guide your direction.

As a teen, your thoughts and directions are impacted dramatically by your peers. You go to college and choose a “practical” major based on the previous guidance and “sway” you’ve gotten from others. You then enter the workforce and often choose a career path based on necessity. And often, you aren’t connected emotionally.

I say all of this to ask you to think back to your earlier years in life. What types of activities or things did you naturally gravitate towards? Did you like to take things apart and put them together? Were you a social butterfly, were you naturally an encourager, or the raise your hand first type?

Take, for example, Bill Gates:

“Known as Trey to his family, Bill was a bright and competitive child who loved math and reading. At age 8, he began reading encyclopedias for fun. But in grade school, he was bored. His parents decided to send him to Lakeside, a private middle and high school.

At Lakeside, Bill became an excellent student. He also discovered computers. When he was 13, he wrote his first software program: a tic-tac-toe game. Bill and some friends later wrote programs for their school and companies.” 3

Bill Gates’s early inclinations became his future as he followed his natural and early passions, and it was very telling of his future success.

So, I ask you to consider your own childhood a bit (before you were too swayed) and ask if you are using your earliest tendencies to your benefit today.

?Where we get it skewed along the way

We’re all about instant formulas and your purpose is different- there is a process involved.?

We often think that discovering our purpose should be “instant.” As mentioned above, we enter the workforce often to meet our needs and financial demands, and the decision is not in any way based on an emotional connection.

Greene states:

“We pay too much attention to the immediate pleasures. It's deeper than that. ‘I like this’ or ‘I don't like that.’ It's more macro. Pay attention to yourself because so many voices are outside. You become attuned to what OTHER PEOPLE like.

?Some signals to look out for are continual frustration and feelings of anxiety. And you have to begin to pay attention to why you are frustrated or don’t like your career.

Frustration and anxiety are signals to pay attention to. Why are you frustrated? Why don't you like your career?

?We hear it most often referred to as self-awareness, yet I feel that we’ve become slightly numb to the statement thrown out there, “You must be self-aware” Well, no shit Sherlock we know this!

The point here isn’t so much “self-awareness” but rather emotional awareness and the signal to yourself when you feel anxious or frustrated in the work you’re doing to ask if it’s possible that it’s happening because you aren’t living into your early inclinations and truest purpose.

When we are living into our purpose and true callings (what you’re made for, we mentioned at the beginning), we start living in a state of activation, allowing us to be disciplined to withstand the moments of boredom and mundane tasks. You become connected and emotionally engaged; in that state, our brains learn up to four times faster.

In part two of this purpose-reset conversation, we will dive deeper into how to get to that visceral and emotional state and engage emotionally in your truest purpose and callings. I couldn’t fit all this goodness into one newsletter without losing y’all. As we continue to Unravel, we must dive deep into the emotional work and take a good hard look at our purpose and what it is we were created to do. It’s never too late to reset and refine our ultimate callings and start.

Until next time, my friends- keep working on you and be awesome!

Inspirations & Resources:

1. Last Sunday’s Sermon ya’ll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAVV1DuuXNs
2. Huberman Lab Podcast-Robert Greene: A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose (It’s long as all get out but LOADED) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50BZQRT1dA
3. https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Bill-Gates/353168#:~:text=Early%20Life&text=Known%20as%20Trey%20to%20his,grade%20school%2C%20he%20was%20bored .